good reason for their lack of enthusiasm for Schubert.  The very fact of there being such wide disagreement about the value of music that is now so familiar to us all, points to some weakness in it which some of us feel less than others; and I, poor unhappy mortal, who in my unexcited moments neither place Schubert among the highest gods, like Liszt and Sir George Grove, nor damn him cordially, like Wagner and Mr. Shaw, cannot help perceiving that along with much that is magnificently strong, distinguished, and beautiful in his music, there is much that is pitiably weak, and worse than commonplace.  The music is like the man—­the oddest combination of greatness and smallness that the world has seen.  Like Wagner and Beethoven, Schubert was strong enough to refuse to earn an honest living; yet he yielded miserably to publishers when discussing the number of halfpence he should receive for a dozen songs.  He had energy enough to go on writing operas, but apparently not intelligence to see that his librettos were worth setting, or to ensure that anything should come of them when they were set.  He thought, rightly or wrongly, that he needed more counterpoint, yet continued to compose symphonies and masses without it, vaguely intending to the very end to take lessons from a sound teacher.  He had spirit enough to fall in love (so far as stories may be relied on), but not to make the lady promise to marry him, nor yet resolutely to cure himself of his affliction.  He had courage to face the truth, as he saw it, and he found life bitter, and not worth enduring; yet he could not renounce it, like Beethoven, nor end it as others have done.  As in actual life, so in his music; having once started anything, he seemed quite unable to make up his mind to fetch it to a conclusion.  He was like a man who lets himself roll down a hill because it is easier to keep on rolling than to stop.  He repeats his melodies interminably, and then draws a double bar and sets down the two fatal dots which mean that all has to be played again.  If the repeat had not been a favourite resort of lazy composers before his time he would have invented it, not because he was lazy, but because he wanted to go on and could not afford infinite music-paper.  Hence his music at its worst is the merest drivel ever set down by a great composer; hence at anything but its best it lacks concentrated passion and dramatic intensity; more than any other composer’s it has one prevailing note, a note of deepest melancholy; and therefore, when a few pieces are known, most of the rest seem barren of what is wanted by those who seek chiefly in music the expression of all the human passions.