on. He saw that the weaknesses of many of
the romantic composers, his kin, of Schumann his spiritual father in
particular, were due their want of organizing power, their helplessness
in the larger forms. And eager to achieve large, solid, resisting form
in his own work, he went to the great masters of musical science, to
Beethoven and Haydn and in particular to Bach, to learn of them, that he
might do for his day something of what they had done for theirs. And he
was able to assimilate vast quantities of his learning, and make it part
of his flesh and bone. At times, no doubt, one is painfully aware of his
erudition, painfully aware that he is applying principles learned from
Beethoven and Bach, manipulating his music out of no inner necessity. At
times, his music does smell of the lamp. And yet, how completely those
juiceless moments are outbalanced by the mass of his living, fragrant,
robust song! With what rareness the pedant in Brahms emerges! Behind
this music there is almost always visible the great, grave, passionate,
resigned creature that was Brahms, the man who sought with all his might
to hold himself firm and erect and unyielding before the hideous
onslaughts of life, the man who lived without hope of fulfilment, loved
without hope of consummation, and yet knew that it was enough
fulfilment, enough consummation to have loved, to have been touched with
a radiant dream; the man who prayed only that his heart might not
wither, and that he might never cease to long and dream and feel the
hurt and solace of beauty and have the power to sing. And in his music
there is almost always the consolation of the great forests, the healing
of the trees and silences, the cooling hands of the earth, the
everlasting yea-saying to love and beauty, the manly resignation, the
leave-taking from dreams and life. All this music says, "Song is
enough."

But no such goodly presence glimmers through the music of Max Reger. No
sturdy bardic spirit vibrates in it. This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish
fellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, a
strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogre
of composition. He has little delicacy, little finesse of spirit. In
listening to these works with their clumsy blocks of tone, their eternal
sunless complaining, their lack of humor where they would be humorous,
their lack of passion where they would be profound, their sardonic and
monotonous bour