Brahms using something of this romantic idiom, but having a broad feeling for construction, and firmly grounded on that one stable element of style, counterpoint, produced four symphonies worthy to stand alongside the best. They are restrained in style, for Brahms has something of that impersonality which is needed in music as much as in other forms of art (and one may say, in passing, that the greatest of all composers, Bach, is the most impersonal). The flexibility of the language of music increased rapidly during the nineteenth century aided by Wagner and the Romanticists, and in Brahms the symphony becomes less didactic and more introspective. I may, perhaps, make the comparison between music like his and that later stage of the English novel wherein the author desires the action to appear solely as the result of the psychology of the characters, and wherein, also, words are made to answer new demands and serve new purposes. Brahms could not have said what he did say had he been limited to the style of Mozart; nor could Meredith had he been limited to the style of Thackeray. Brahms’s symphonies, in consequence of the complicated nature of his style, are not easily apprehended by the casual listener. Let a confirmed lover of Longfellow, or even of Tennyson, take up for the first time “Love in the Valley” and he will have the same experience. Every word will convey its usual meaning to him, but the exquisite beauty of the poem will elude him. He will go back to “My Lost Youth,” or to “Blow, Bugles, Blow,” for healing from his bruises. Any one of my readers who has access to Brahms’s First Symphony should examine the passage which begins twenty measures before the _poco sostenuto_ near the end of the first movement if he wished to understand something of Brahms’s powers of re-creating his material. Here is a melody of great beauty which is derived from the opening phrase of the symphony, and which has a bass derived from the first theme of the first movement. As it originally appeared it was full of stress as though yearning for an impossible fulfillment. Here its destiny is at last attained, and the law of its being fulfilled. Music progresses from one point of time to another.