it should be to be in keeping with the musical conception. And if his piano style is novel it is not really unidiomatic or without its own peculiar effects. However extreme we may consider the weakness of sensuous perception, which on the whole cannot be denied in Brahms, it is the only serious flaw in a man equally great on the emotional and the intellectual sides. Very remarkable is the richness and at the same time the balance of Brahms's nature. He recognized early in life that feelings were valuable, not for their mere poignancy, but by their effect on the central spirit; and he labored incessantly to express them with eloquence and yet with control. It is only little men who estimate an emotion by its intensity, and who try to express everything, the hysterical as well as the deliberate, the trivial and mischievous as well as the weighty and the inspiring. They imagine that success in art depends on the number of things they say, that to voice a temperament is to build a character. But great men, though they reject no sincere human feeling, care more to give the right impression than to be exhaustive; and the greatest feel instinctively that the last word of their art must be constructive, positive, upbuilding. Thoreau remarks that the singer can easily move us to tears or laughter, but asks, «Where is he who can communicate a pure morning joy?» It is Brahms's unique greatness among modern composers that he was able to infuse his music, in which all personal passion is made accessory to beauty, with this «pure morning joy.» His aim in writing is something more than to chronicle subjective feelings, however various or intense. And that is why we have to consider him the greatest composer of his time, even though in particular departments he must take a place second to others. Steadily avoiding all fragmentary, wayward, and distortive expression, using always his consummate mastery of his medium and his synthetic power of thought to subserve a large and universal utterance, he points the way for a healthy and fruitful development of music in the future.