He once observed in a lecture that “Bach differed in almost everything from Handel, except that he was born the same year and was killed by the same doctor.”

He was often sarcastic; but his was a sarcasm without sting or rancour.  Bitterness, indeed, was one of the few normal attributes which he did not possess.  Mr. Humiston tells of lunching with him unexpectedly at a restaurant one day, just after his resignation from Columbia had been accepted.  “We sat over our coffee and cigars until nearly four o’clock, and among other things he talked of that [the Columbia matter].  There was not a word of bitterness or reproach toward anyone, but rather a deep feeling of disappointment that his plans and ideals for the training and welfare of young artists should have been so completely defeated.”

In his methods of work he was, like most composers of first-rate quality, at the mercy of his inspiration.  He never composed at the piano, in the ordinary meaning of the phrase.  That is to say, he never sat down to the piano with the idea that he wanted to compose a song or a piano piece.  But sometime, when he might be improvising, as he was fond of doing when alone, a theme, an idea, might come to him, and almost before he knew it he had sketched something in a rudimentary form.  He had a fancy that the technique of composition suffered as much as that of the piano if it was allowed to go for weeks and months without exercise.  The constant work and excitement that his winters in Boston and New York involved, made it necessary for him to let days and weeks slip by with no creative work accomplished.  Yet he always tried to write each day a few bars of music.  Often in this way he evolved a theme for which he afterward found a use.  In looking over a sketch-book in the summer he would run across something he liked, and the idea would expand into a matured work.

His sketch-books are full of all kinds of random and fugitive material—­half-finished fugues, canons, piano pieces, songs, single themes.  Undoubtedly this habit of work had its value when he came to the leisurely months of summer; for he did not then have to go through a period of technical “warming up.”  There were many days when he did not write a note, but he always intended to, and usually did.  When he was absorbed in a particular composition he kept at it, almost night and day, save for the hours he always tried to spend in the open air, and two hours in the evening when, no matter how late it might be, he sat quietly with his wife, reading or talking, smoking, and, in earlier days, enjoying a glass of beer and some food.  His love of reading was a godsend to him when the waters were more than usually troubled and his brain was in a whirl.