We are now in a position to grasp the full significance of that severe training to which Brahms subjected himself in his youth. Without it he would have gone on doing brilliant work of the romantic order, like his first compositions, but he would never have attained the grasp and self-control that raised him above all his contemporaries and that made possible his peculiar service to music. That period of training was the artistic counterpart of what many men undergo when they discover how many sacrifices and how long a labor are necessary to him who would find a spiritual dwelling-place on earth. Many pleasures must be renounced before happiness will abide; evil and suffering are opaque save to the steadfast eye. So, in music, effects and eloquences and crises must be the handmaids of orderly beauty, and tones are stubborn material until one has learned by hard work to make them transmit thoughts. Technic is in the musician what character is in the man. It is the power to stamp matter with spirit. Brahms's long apprenticeship was therefore needed in the first place to make him master of his materials; in the second place to teach him the deeper lesson that the part must be subordinated to the whole, or, in musical language, expression to beauty. He achieved this subordination, however, not by the negative process of suppression, but by conquest and co-ordination. In his music emotion is not excluded, it is regulated; his work is not a reversion to an earlier and simpler type, it is the gathering and fusing together of fragmentary new elements, resulting in a more complex organism. Thus it is a very superficial view to say that he «went back» to Beethoven. He drew guidance from the same natural laws that had guided Beethoven, but he applied these laws to a material of novel thought and emotion that had come into being after Beethoven. Had he repudiated the new material, even for the reason that he considered it incapable of organization, he would have been a pedant, which is to say a musical Pharisee. One masters by recognizing and using, not by repudiating. And just as a wise man will not become ascetical merely because his passions give him trouble, but will study to find out their true relation to _him_ and then keep them in it, so Brahms recognized the wayward beauties of romanticism, and studied how to make them ancillary to that order and fair proportion which is the soul of music.