This is unjust. His pianoforte music is such an easy mark for epigrams that truth has been sacrificed to wit. There is much in it that is admirable. Some of it will probably come to life again. Indeed, it has not all the appearance of death now, choked as it may seem to be in its own honey. A few of the ‘Songs Without Words,’ the Prelude and Fugue in E minor, opus 35, some of the short capriccios and the _Variations sérieuses_ still hold a high place in pianoforte literature. The mass of his music, however, has fallen into disgrace. This is not wholly because the world ate too much of it and sickened. One does not look askance at it as one looks at sweets once immoderately devoured and henceforth distressful even to the eye. One sees weakness and defects to which its fate may be attributed. At the basis lies a monotony. His melodies and harmonies are too unvaryingly alike. He is a slave to milky mannerisms. The curves of his melodies are endlessly alike; there is a profusion of feminine endings, dwellings in commonplaceness, suspensions that have no weight. His harmonies are seldom poignant. His agitation leads no further in most cases than the diminished seventh. To this he comes again and again, as regularly or as inevitably as most Romanticists went to tombstones for their heroics. The sameness of melody, the threadbare scheme of his harmonies, these mark a composer with little great creative force. In the pianoforte music one finds even a lack of ingenuity. He has nothing to add to the resources of the instrument. He knew himself to be sterile in pianoforte figures. The ‘Songs without Words’ show but two or three types of accompaniment, and these are flat and monotonous. There are the unbroken chords, usually without a trace of subtlety in line, such as we find in the first, the fifteenth, the twenty-first, the thirty-seventh, and numerous others. There are plain chords, usually triads, monotonously repeated, as in the tenth, twentieth, twenty-second, and thirty-ninth, flat with the melody, or in syncopation as in the fourteenth and seventeenth. There are the rocking figures such as one finds in all the ‘Gondola’ songs, in the so-called ‘Spring Song,’ and in the thirty-sixth. Only rarely does he give to these figures some contrapuntal flexibility, as in the fifth and in the thirty-fourth, known as the ‘Spinning Song,’ and in the eleventh. There are many songs which have no running accompaniment, which are in the simple harmonic style of the hymn tune. These are usually extremely saccharine. The few measures of preludizing with which they begin are monotonously alike--an arpeggio or two, as if he were sweeping the strings of his harp, as in the ninth and the sixteenth. Some, however, are vigorous and exciting, like the ‘Hunting Song’ (the third), and the twenty-third, in style of a folk-song.