It is not difficult to see why Grieg's later works should decline rather than advance. In the first place, his interest had been from the first concentrated on personal expression. His impulse was individual, not universal. He never sought to widen or deepen the forms of musical beauty, to extend the range of resources at the command of musicians; he merely used what he found ready-made to voice his own poetic feeling. In this he succeeded admirably. In the second place, charmed by the exotic quality of Norwegian music, a quality that he found also in his own nature, he adopted the native idiom with eagerness, and spent the years most composers devote to learning the musical language in acquiring--a dialect. Thirdly, his mind was of the type which cares much for beauty of ornament--even more, perhaps, than for a highly wrought harmony of line and form. It was the inevitable result of these three circumstances that, first, he should reach his highest activity in early youth, when romantic feeling is at its acme and thought habitually subjective, and thereafter decline; second, that the dialect which at first was so charming, with its unfamiliar words and its bewitching accent, should eventually reveal its paucity and its provincialism; and finally, that a mind naturally fond of rich detail, neglectful of large shapeliness, should have recourse, in the ebb of inner impulse, to transcription, paraphrase, and all the other devices for securing superficial ornament and luxury of effect. With opus 41 Grieg began transcribing his own songs for the piano, dressing up the simple melodies in all sorts of arpeggios, curious harmonies, and other musical decorations; and between his fiftieth and seventieth opus-numbers there is little but representation of Norwegian tunes, now in one guise and now in another, but seldom indeed with any of the old novel charm. (A trace of it there is, perhaps, in opus 62, No. 2, and again in opus 80, No. 4.) The extraordinary pyrotechnical display that the transcription, opus 41, No. 5, makes out of so simple a song as «The Princess» is branded by M. Closson as «un crime de lèse-art.» And to one who has felt the magic of the Kuhreigen, opus 17, No. 22, it is saddening to turn to the same melody as it appears in opus 63, No. 2, with all its maiden grace brushed and laced and furbelowed into an _à la mode_ elegance and vacuity. Thus Grieg has not, like the more cosmopolitan, objective, and universal composers, advanced in his work up to the very end. As years have progressed, the accidental in it, the inessential, has become more prominent, has tended to obscure what is vital and beautiful. As the spirit waned, the letter has become more rigidly insistent. Idiosyncrasy has supplanted originality. To find the true Grieg, supple, spontaneous, and unaffected, we must go back to the early works.