In England and America, in later times, Graham Moore and Macdowell may claim notice as lesser Romantics. The former is not free from triviality; the latter invents with more delicate genius, and has written a very respectable piano-concerto. But Germany may still boast that she retains the supremacy. From the group of German post-Romantics, which found in Franz Brendel a very fertile composer of programme tone-pictures, two great personalities drew apart. Adolf Jensen was the inheritor of Schumann’s emotion, Johannes Brahms of Schumann’s musical character. Jensen, whose character is the mean between Chopin and Schumann, has left behind him music which will not die, in his clear-cut and splendidly worked-out Suites, in his emotional “Wanderbilder” and Idylls, in the unique Eroticon, which characterises the different forms of love in separate movements, and in the four-handed wedding music, which is lovely and full of power. But Brahms inherited from his patron Schumann, not youth, not this simple thinking and inventing, but manhood, in which music became an absolute self-supported world. He worked in the world of tone, with no trace of virtuosity, with not a suspicion of a concession to the understanding of the mere amateur. His Sonatas and Concertos, the sparkling Scherzo Op. 4, the Variations, the Études, even the four-handed waltzes and the unique “Liebes-lieder” waltzes--for four hands with voices--there has, in our time, been no music written so free from the slightest condescension. Stubborn, at times repellent, even in her smiles not very gracious, this music seeks to make no proselytes; but whomsoever she wins as a friend, she holds fast and allows that rarest of pleasures--the pursuit of lofty aims, and the quiet rapture of a student. [Illustration: Johannes Brahms. Photograph from life by Marie Fellinger, Vienna.] [Illustration] Over against these two originals stands Joachim Raff, the eclectic. We have grown accustomed to count his eclecticism no reproach, for never did man more bitterly experience the sorrow of art. His great legacy of piano-pieces will at least give a good picture of the time. In them the most commonplace demands of art are mingled with the most heart-felt lamentations--as they never mingled except in our age. They are a long catalogue of virtues and vices, from the hapless Polka de la Reine to the Sonatas, in which, whether for piano alone, or more especially for piano and violin, he attained astonishing heights; from the ravishingly graceful suite-movements to the romanticism of his lyrical songs. And over all broods the unrest of the time.