Of his lengthiness, his discursiveness, Schubert might possibly have been cured, but not of his melancholy:  it is the very essence of his music, as it was of his being.  “The Wanderer” is his typical song:  he was himself the wanderer, straying disconsolately, helplessly, hopelessly through a strange, chilly, unreal world, singing the saddest and sometimes the sweetest songs that ever entered the ears of men.  That his home and his happiness lay close at hand counts for nothing; for he did not and could not know that he was the voice of the eighteenth century, worn out and keenly sensible of the futility of the purely intellectual life.  Even had he arrived at a consciousness of the truth that the cure for his despair lay in throwing over the antiquated forms, modes, and ideas of the eighteenth century and living a nineteenth century life, free and conscienceless in nature’s way, he would have been little better off; for the tendencies of many generations remained strong in him; and besides, had he the physical energy for a free, buoyant, joyous existence, was he not physiologically unfit for happiness?  He lived with an ever-present consciousness of his impotence to satisfy his deepest needs.  He was even destitute of that sense of the immeasurable good to come which of old time found expression in the fiction of a personal immortality, and in the nineteenth century in the complacent acceptance of full and vigorous life, with death as a noble and fitting close.  Life and death alike were tragic, because hopeless, to Schubert.  His career, if career it can be called, is infinitely touching.  His helplessness moves one to pity, odd though it seems that one in some ways so strong should also in so many ways be so weak; and his death was as touching as his life.  Of all the composers he met death with least heroism.  Mozart, it is true, shrieked hysterically; but death to his diseased mind was merely an indescribable horror; and the fact of his hysteria proves his revolt against fate.  Beethoven, during a surgical operation shortly before the end, saw the stream of water and blood flowing from him, and found courage to say, “Better from the belly than the pen;” and as he lay dying and a thunderstorm broke above the house, he threatened it with his clenched fist.  Schubert learnt that he was to die, and turned his face to the wall and did not speak again.  It is hard to say whether his music was sadder when he sang of death than when he sang of life.  Even in his rare moments of good spirits one catches stray echoes of his prevailing note, and realises how completely his despair dominated him.  He could not sing of love or fighting or of the splendours of nature without betraying his deep conviction of the futility of all created things.  It is characteristic that his major melodies should often be as sad and wailing as his minor, and that his scherzos and other movements, in which he has deliberately set out to be light-hearted, should often be ponderous and without the nervous energy he manifests when he gives his familiar feelings free play.