For it was not a Brahms the world had gotten again. Indeed, it was a personality of just the sort that Brahms was not. The resemblance was of the most superficial. Both men went to school to Bach and the polyphonic masters. Both were traditionalists. There the kinship ends. For the one was a poet, a sturdily living, rich and powerful person. The other was essentially a harsh and ugly being, eminently wanting the divine flame. For Brahms, erudition was only a means to his end, a fortification of his personal mode of expression. He saw that the weaknesses of many of the romantic composers, his kin, of Schumann his spiritual father in particular, were due their want of organizing power, their helplessness in the larger forms. And eager to achieve large, solid, resisting form in his own work, he went to the great masters of musical science, to Beethoven and Haydn and in particular to Bach, to learn of them, that he might do for his day something of what they had done for theirs. And he was able to assimilate vast quantities of his learning, and make it part of his flesh and bone. At times, no doubt, one is painfully aware of his erudition, painfully aware that he is applying principles learned from Beethoven and Bach, manipulating his music out of no inner necessity. At times, his music does smell of the lamp. And yet, how completely those juiceless moments are outbalanced by the mass of his living, fragrant, robust song! With what rareness the pedant in Brahms emerges! Behind this music there is almost always visible the great, grave, passionate, resigned creature that was Brahms, the man who sought with all his might to hold himself firm and erect and unyielding before the hideous onslaughts of life, the man who lived without hope of fulfilment, loved without hope of consummation, and yet knew that it was enough fulfilment, enough consummation to have loved, to have been touched with a radiant dream; the man who prayed only that his heart might not wither, and that he might never cease to long and dream and feel the hurt and solace of beauty and have the power to sing. And in his music there is almost always the consolation of the great forests, the healing of the trees and silences, the cooling hands of the earth, the everlasting yea-saying to love and beauty, the manly resignation, the leave-taking from dreams and life. All this music says, "Song is enough."