of invention almost as great as Wagner’s or Mozart’s.  His power of evolving new decorative patterns of a fantastic beauty seemed quite inexhaustible; and the same may be said of his schemes and combinations and shades of colour, and the architectural plans and forms of his larger works.  It is true that his forms frequently enough approach formlessness; that his colours—­and especially in his earlier music—­are violent and inharmonious; and that in his ceaseless invention of new patterns his Slav naivete and lack of humour led him more than a hundred times to write unintentionally comic passages.  He is discursive—­I might say voluble.  Again, he had little or no real strength—­none of the massive, healthy strength of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner:  his force is sheer hysteria.  He is wanting in the deepest and tenderest human feeling.  He is plausible to a degree that leads one to suspect his sincerity, and certainly leaves it an open question how long a great deal of his music will stand after this generation, to which it appeals so strongly, has passed away.  But when all that may fairly be said against him has been said and given due weight, the truth remains that he is one of the few great composers of this century.  I myself, in all humility, allowing fully that I may be altogether wrong, while convinced that I am absolutely right, deliberately set him far above Brahms, above Gounod, above Schumann—­above all save Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, and Wagner.  His accomplishment as a sheer musician was greater than either Gounod’s or Schumann’s, though far from being equal to Brahms’—­for Brahms as a master of the management of notes stands with the highest, with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner; while as a voice and a new force in music neither Brahms nor Schumann nor Gounod can be compared with him other than unfavourably.  All that are sensitive to music can feel, as I have said, the new throb, the new thrill; and that decides the matter.

It is now a long time since Mr. Henry Wood, one winter’s afternoon, the only Englishman who may be ranked with the great continental conductors, gave a Tschaikowsky concert, with a programme that included some of the earlier as well as one or two of the later works.  It served to show how hard and how long Tschaikowsky laboured to attain to lucidity of expression, and why the “Pathetic” symphony is popular while the other compositions are not.  In all of them we find infinite invention and blazes of Eastern magnificence and splendour; but in the earlier things there is little of the order and clarity of the later ones.  Another and a more notable point is that in not one thing played at this concert might the human note be heard.  The suite (Op. 55) and the symphony (Op. 36) are full of novel and dazzling effects—­for example, the scherzo of the symphony played mainly by the strings pizzicato, and the scherzo of the suite, with the short, sharp notes of the brass and the rattle of the side-drum; the melodies also are new, and in