Brahms is an inexorable form maker. His four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music—are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a great colorist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile Gautier are unsought. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon an enormous rhythmic versatility and a strenuousness of ideation. Ideas—noble, profundity-embracing ideas—he has. They are not in the smart, epigrammatic, flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He is a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms’s melodies are world typical, not cabined and confined to his native soil. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard for the politeness of his art do not endear him to the unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his intermezzi! There he catches the tender sigh of childhood, or the faint intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as is no woman; virile, as few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies,—true Brahmsodies,—how they pierce to the core the pessimism of our age! He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is sometimes dramatic, not theatric—modes of analysis, the relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives, are Browning’s; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrene depths; Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed in the company of these giants.