But no such goodly presence glimmers through the music of Max Reger. No sturdy bardic spirit vibrates in it. This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish fellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, a strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogre of composition. He has little delicacy, little finesse of spirit. In listening to these works with their clumsy blocks of tone, their eternal sunless complaining, their lack of humor where they would be humorous, their lack of passion where they would be profound, their sardonic and monotonous bourdon, one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger which his publishers place on the cover of their catalogue of his works, the photograph that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic beetle with thick lips and sullen expression crouching on an organ-bench. There is something repulsive as well as pedantic in this art. The poetry, the nobility, the moderation and cleanness of line of Brahms is absent. Instead, there is a sort of brutal coldness, the coldness of the born pedant, a prevalence of bad humor, a poverty of invention and organizing power that conceals itself under an elaborate and complex and erudite surface. The strong, calm, classic beauty of Brahms is wanting. For all its air of subtlety and severity and profundity, its learned and classicizing manner, the music of Reger is really superficial. The man only seldom achieves form. Generally, for all the complex and convulsive activity of his music, nothing really progresses, develops, happens in it. Above all, the stylistic severity of Brahms in Reger has become a confusion of styles; an absence of style. The classic has become the baroque.