Perhaps it is not too much to hope that the foregoing analysis, incomplete and tentative as it is, affords us something like a rational basis for our instinctive attitudes toward the various types of music. Though its intention is to suggest rather than to dogmatize, it may by this time have fixed clearly in our minds certain fundamental principles of artistic effect; and by constant reference to these it may have established in us a measure of judicial impartiality and poise. Especially, it may have clarified our notions, likely to remain confused so long as they are unconscious, of the essential achievements of the romantic school, both in its lyrical and in its realistic phases, as well as of the peculiar drawbacks and limitations to which it is subject.
The abiding charm of the lyrical work of the romantic composers, typical of which are Schubert's songs, Schumann's novelettes and _phantasiestücke_, and Chopin's nocturnes and preludes, lies in its intimateness, its strong personal flavor. It fascinates us by its impulsive self-revelation, its frankness, spontaneity, and enthusiasm. Its subjectivity and introspection, even when they are troubled or touched with sadness, stir a sympathetic chord in the self-conscious modern breast. To those moods which the classic reticence chills and repels, romantic music speaks with tender, caressing humanity. Even its limitations are then an added appeal; for when we are too weary or dull to brace ourselves to the perception of impersonal beauty, the accent of private grief, aspiration, struggle, and disappointment seems better pitched to our capacity, and has a pathos we can understand. Schumann and Chopin are the best companions for hours of reverie and self-communion. On the other hand, when those hours overtake us in which we realize the pathetic incompleteness of all merely personal life, in which we discern what fragmentary creatures we are, and how little of truth we can ever see, then all living to ourselves alone is touched with the sense of vanity. Then every utterance of our petty private griefs, and even of our nobler but still private joys, seems like a breath dissipated in a universe; we find true existence, solid reality, only in an identification of our interests with those of all mankind. As morals finds its escape from this sense of the vanity of individual living in social devotion, æsthetics finds it in the impersonality of classic art. Romanticism is sometimes silent, or speaks to unattending ears. We turn from all special expressions, touched as they are with human mortality and evanescence, to the eternal abstract beauty.