In all these ways and degrees we see exemplified the inclination of the nineteenth-century composers to seek a more and more definite, particular, and concrete type of expression. Subjective shades and nuances take the place of the ground-colors of classicism; music comes to have so personal a flavor that it is as impossible to confound a piece of Chopin with one of Schumann as it is difficult, by internal evidence alone, to say whether Mozart or Haydn is the author of an unfamiliar symphony; ultimately, insistence upon special emotions opens the way to absorption in what is even more special--individual characters, events, and situations,--and on the heels of the lyrical treads the realistic. The artistic stream thus reverses the habit of natural streams: as it gets farther and farther from its source it subdivides and subdivides itself again, until it is no longer a single large body, but a multitude of isolated brooks and rivulets. Our contemporary music, unlike the classical, is not the expression of a single social consciousness, but rather a heterogeneous aggregate of the utterances of many individuals. What is most captivating about it is the sensitive fidelity with which it reflects its composers' idiosyncrasies.
All things human, however, have their price, and romanticism is no exception to the rule. The composers of the romantic period, in becoming more particular, grew in the same proportion less universal; in bowing to the inexorable evolutionary force that makes each modern man a specialist, they inevitably sacrificed something of the breadth, the catholicity, the magnanimity, of the old time. It is doubtless a sense of some such loss as this, dogging like a shadow all our gains, that takes us back periodically to a new appreciation of the classics. There is often a feeling of relief, of freer breathing and ampler leisure, as when we leave the confusion of the city for the large peace of the country, in turning from the modern complexities to the old simplicities, and forgetting that there is any music but Bach's. The reasons for this contrast between the two schools must of course lie deeply hidden in the psychology of æsthetics, but a clew to them at least may be found near at hand, in the conditions of life, the everyday environments, of the two groups of artists.