After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms. Wagner, the high priest of the music-drama; a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms, a wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold of the Infinite; a musical philosopher, but ever a poet. "Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms," cried Von Bülow; but he forgot Schumann. The molten tide of passion and extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe threescore years ago bore on its foaming crest Robert Schumann. He was first cousin to the prince of romancists, Heinrich Heine; Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered and wept in the same couplet. In the tangled, rich underwood of Schumann the young Brahms wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery, and the leaves rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. All German romance, fantasy, passion was in Schumann, the Schumann of the Papillons and the Carneval. Brahms walked as did Dante, with the Shades. Bach guided his footsteps; Beethoven bade him glance aloft at the stars. And Brahms had for his legacy polyphony, form, and masterful harmonies. In his music the formulist finds perfect things. Structurally he is as great as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His architectonic is superb. His melodic content is his own as he strides in stately pomp in the fugued Alexandrines of Bach. Brahms and Browning. Brahms and Freedom. Brahms and Now. The romantic infant of 1832 died of intellectual anæmia, leaving the world as a legacy one of the most marvellous groupings of genius since Athens's sky carolled azure glances to Pericles. Then came the revolution of 1848, and later a race of sewermen sprang up from the mud. Flaubert, his face turned to the past, his feet to the future, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the bourgeois. Zola and his gang delved into moral cesspools, and the world grew aweary of the malodor. Chopin and Schumann, faint, fading flowers of romanticism, were put in albums where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Even Berlioz, whose orchestral ozone revivified the scores of Wagner and Liszt; even mad Hector, with the flaming locks, sounded garishly empty, brilliantly superficial. The New Man had arrived. A short, stocky youth played his sonata in C, his Opus I, for Liszt, and the Magyar of Weimar returned the compliment by singing in archangelic tones his own fantasy in B minor, which he fondly and futilely believed a sonata. Brahms fell asleep, and Liszt was enraged. But how symbolical of Brahms to fall asleep at the very onset of his career, fall asleep before Liszt's music. It is the new wearied of the old, the young fatigued by the garrulities of age. It is sad. It is wonderful. Brahms is of to-day. He is the scientist turned philosopher, the philosopher turned musician. If he were not a great composer he would be a great biologist, a great metaphysician. There are passages in his music in which I detect the philosopher in omphalic meditation.