Contemporaneous with Brahms stands Tschaikovsky to reveal how varied are the sources of musical expression. No two great men could be farther apart than these--one an eclectic, calm, thoughtful, and impersonal, restraining his utterances in order to understate and be believed; the other pouring out the very last bitter drop of his unhappiness and dissatisfaction entirely unmindful of a world that distrusts overstatement and has only a limited capacity for reaction from a colossal passion. Of Tschaikovsky’s sincerity there is no doubt whatever. He so believed; life was to him what we hear it to be in his symphonies. But life is not like that. If it were we should all have been destroyed long since by our own uncontrollable inner fires. So, aside from any technical considerations,--and he contributed nothing of importance to the development of the symphony,--Tschaikovsky represents a phase of life rather than life itself. Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony adds a new and interesting element to symphonic evolution. Dvořák was like Haydn and Burns, a son of the people, and the themes he employs in this symphony are essentially folk-melodies. But where Haydn merely tells his simple story with complete unconsciousness of its possible connection with life in general, Dvořák sees all his themes in their deeper significance. The “New World” Symphony is a saga retold. A new phase in the development of the symphony appears in César Franck, whose musical lineage reaches back over the whole range of symphonic development and beyond. His spirit is mediæval. In his one symphony rhythm plays a lesser part, and one feels the music to be quite withdrawn from the vivid movement of life, and to live in a realm of its own. Franck was one of those rare spirits who remain untainted by the world. His symphony is a spiritual adventure; other symphonies are full of the actions and reactions of the real world in which their composers lived. This action and reaction always depends for its expression in music on the play and inter-play of rhythmic figures. Franck’s symphony broods over the world of the spirit; his least successful themes are those based on action. III. CHAMBER MUSIC AS AN INTRODUCTION TO SYMPHONIES