Despite its incessant plaintive accent, his music is saved by the endless flow of melody, often lovely, generally characteristic, though sometimes common, in which Schubert continually expressed anew his one mood; and he was placed among the great ones by the miraculous facility he possessed of extemporising frequent passages of extraordinary power and bigness.  At least half of his songs are poor—­for a composer capable of rising to such heights; but of the remainder at least half are nearly equal to any songs in the world for sweetness, strength, and accurate expressiveness, while a few approach so close to Handel’s and Mozart’s that affection for the composer presses one hard to put them on the same level.  But, compared with those high standards, Schubert, even at his best, is unmistakably felt to be second-rate, while his average—­always comparing it with the highest—­cannot truly be said to be more than fourth-rate.  That he stands far above Mendelssohn and Schumann, and perhaps a little above Weber, almost goes without saying; for those composers have no more of the great style, the style of Handel and Mozart, and Bach and Beethoven at their finest, than Schubert, and they lack the lovely irresistibly moving melody and the bigness.  But it must be recognised that Schubert never rose to a style of sustained grandeur and dignity; he was always colloquial, paying in this the penalty for the extreme facility with which he composed ("I compose every morning, and when I have finished one thing I commence something fresh").  Compose is scarcely the word to use:  he never composed in the ordinary sense of the word; he extemporised on paper.  Even when he re-wrote a song, it meant little more than that, dissatisfied with his treatment of a theme, he tried again.  He never built as, for instance, Bach and Beethoven built, carefully working out this detail, lengthening this portion, shearing away that, evolving part from part so that in the end the whole composition became a complete organism.  There is none of the logic in his work that we find in the works of the tip-top men, none of the perfect finish; but, on the contrary, a very considerable degree of looseness, if not of actual incoherence, and many marks of the tool and a good deal of the scaffolding.  But, in spite of it all, the greatness of many of his movements seems to me indisputable.  In a notice of “The Valkyrie,” Mr. Hichens once very happily spoke of the “earth-bigness” of some of the music, and this is the bigness I find in Schubert at his best and strongest.  When he depicts the workings of nature—­the wind roaring through the woods, the storm above the convent roof, the flash of the lightning, the thunderbolt—­he does not accomplish it with the wonderful point and accuracy of Weber, nor with the ethereal delicacy of Purcell, but with a breadth, a sympathy with the passion of nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever attained to.  He views natural phenomena through a human temperament, and so infuses human emotion