Part 25

Another great factor in modern European thought with which I would attempt to correlate music is the factor of religion. No one will deny that the last generation has seen profoundly important changes in religious thought: whatever may have been the eddies and backwaters, the main stream has run, and still runs, like a cataract. These changes may be very differently judged by different types of men, all of them equally firm believers in the supremacy of spiritual ideals: some may definitely regret, some may, with the help of such conceptions as that of progressive revelation, steer a middle course, some (among whom I would number myself) may definitely welcome. But in whatever light we may regard these radical refusals of the old allegiances, we shall naturally expect to find their influence in music, which has had in many ways so intimate a connexion with religion. Indeed, the conception of music as in some special way the handmaid of religion dies very hard. It is still possible, in April 1919, for distinguished musicians, when appealing for funds for the foundation of a professorship of ecclesiastical music, to put their names to the statement that 'the church will always be the chief home and school of music for the people': and this when the facts about attendances at places of worship have long been familiar. We must rate the influence of church music more modestly; it has a great influence in its own sphere, but its sphere is only one among many.

We may, I think, envisage this religious development on its practical side as a process of differentiation by which the sincere standers in the old and the middle and the new paths have little by little drawn apart intellectually--but not, in societies that are happily able to take broad views of human nature, otherwise than intellectually--not only from each other but still more from those who, whatever their ostensible labels, are in reality followers of Gallio and routine. And something like the same process is observable in the religious music of the past generation. Many of its old conventions have silently dropped away, unregarded and unregretted: whatever the outlooks, and they are many and various, they are more clear-sighted, more sincere. Here in England we have somewhat lagged behind: we have had, not perhaps altogether fairly but indubitably, a reputation for national hypocrisy to sustain, and our religious music has only with difficulty shaken itself loose. Not very long ago, Saint-Saëns's Samson and Delilah, now one of the most popular of operas, could only be performed as an oratorio: it dealt with biblical incidents and characters, therefore it was religious music, therefore it could not be given stage presentation. Of course this kind of attitude is never logical: for a long time we closed Covent Garden to Strauss's Salome for the same reason, but no one, so far as I know, ever proposed to endow it with a religious halo. Now, when Sunday secular music is everywhere, its origins seem lost in antiquity; but the chamber-music concerts at South Place in London and Balliol College in Oxford, which are, I think I am right in saying, the twin pioneers, are both little over thirty years old. In most other countries, however, music has suffered far fewer checks of this kind; and it is of more importance to correlate musical and religious development on more general lines. Particularly interesting, I think, is the history of the decline of the oratorio, which I should myself be inclined to date from the production of the German Requiem of Brahms about half a century ago, though the real impetus has become apparent only during the last generation.

Brahms's Requiem was indeed something of a portent: it was a definite herald of revolt. The mere title, 'A German Requiem', involving the commandeering of the name hitherto associated exclusively with the ritual of the Roman Church and the practice of prayers for the dead, and its adaptation to entirely different words, was in itself of the utmost significance; and the significance was enhanced by the character of the words themselves. In the first place, they were self-selected on purely personal lines; in the second place, they were, theologically, hardly so much as Unitarian. Brahms claimed the right to express his own individual view of the problem, and at a length which involved the corollary that the problem was regarded in its completeness. The 'German Requiem' cannot be considered, as an anthem might be, as an expression of a mere portion of a complete conception of the particular religious problem: in an organic work of this length, what it does not assert it implicitly denies or at any rate disregards. And this was at once recognized, both by Brahms's opponents and by himself: he categorically refused to add any dogmatically Christian element to his scheme. Similarly with his Ernste Gesänge, written some thirty years later, at the end of his life: he balances the reflections on death taken from Ecclesiastes and similar sources with the Pauline chapter on faith, hope, and charity--not with any more definite consolation. And again, with the choral works, the settings of Hölderlin's Schicksalslied, Schiller's Nänie, Goethe's Gesang der Parzen (the first-fruits of the essentially modern spirit which has impelled so many composers to choral settings of great poetry)--they deal with the ultimate things, but the expression is never, so to speak, orthodox: it is imaginative, sometimes perhaps ironical, but never anything but intensely non-ecclesiastical.

Brahms's Requiem represents, as I have said, the beginning of the change in the conception of concert-room religious music, of the abandonment of the old type of oratorio in favour of something much more conscious and individual; and in refusing to take things for granted, religious music has been altogether in line with general religious development. The change can perhaps be observed in English music more markedly than elsewhere. Oratorio, in the sense in which we ordinarily use the term, is to all intents and purposes an invention of the genius of Handel reacting on his English environment: the form was of course older, but he gave it a specific shape that set the fashion for future times. It had its birth in a business speculation; it was a novelty designed to occupy the Lenten season when the theatres were not available for opera. Like the opera, it supplied narrative and incident and characterization though without scenery or action, and it dealt with biblical history. The history of the oratorio is the history of this loose compromise; it has afforded an attractive flavour of the theatre even to those to whom drama may in itself have seemed disreputable, and it has had the advantage of possessing subjects which combined unquestioningly accepted literal truth with unlimited possibilities for wholesale edification, and at the same time made no intimately personal claims. The libretto of Mendelssohn's Elijah is perhaps at once the most familiar and the most skilfully compiled example of the type; but it is now, so far as great music is concerned, extinct. Here in England--where, for something like a century and a half, the demand was so large that composers, when tired of writing oratorios themselves, still went on producing them out of the mangled fragments of other music--Parry's Judith of 1888 is the last of the old type from the pen of a great composer; and his subsequent works show, in striking fashion, the direction of the newer paths. There is no longer the assumption that everything in the Bible or the Apocrypha is at one and the same time literally true and somehow or other edifying. Job and King Saul are great literature and vivid drama; they stand on their own merits. And the long succession of smaller choral works, in which Parry mingled in curious but intensely personal fusion his own earnest but somewhat pedestrian poetry with fragments of the Old Testament prophets, represent a still further abandonment of the old routine; they form a connected exposition of his philosophy of life, on the whole theistic rather than specifically Christian, and always transparently individual. Individual--that is the real issue. According to their differing temperaments, different composers may swing towards either the right or the left wing of thought in these non-ecclesiastical expressions of ultimate things: Stanford may join with Whitman or Robert Bridges, Vaughan-Williams with Whitman or George Herbert, Frank Bridge with Thomas à Kempis, Walford Davies with a mediaeval morality-play, Gustav Hoist with the Rig-Veda, Bantock with Omar Khayyam. But the essentials, for any composer worth the name, are that his theme shall have its birth in personal vision and shall appeal to personal intelligence. The routine oratorio fulfilled neither of these conditions; and it is dead beyond recall. It was a curious illustration of foreign ignorance of British musical life that Saint-Saëns, when asked to write a choral work for the Gloucester Festival of 1913, should have imagined that he was meeting our national tastes with an oratorio on the most prehistoric lines. However, the unanimous chilliness with which The Promised Land was received must have effectually disillusioned him.

But the liberalisers, though the more numerous force, have no monopoly of sincerity: among the genuine conservatives also we can find, I think, signs of the correlation of musical with religious development. We have had, during the last generation, many works that are in the legitimate line of descent from the great classical settings of ritual words or (as with the Passions and Cantatas of Bach) words that are intended anyhow to appeal not as literature but as dogma. When Elgar prints on the title-pages of his oratorios the letters A.M.D.G.--ad majorem Dei gloriam--the personal note is, in these days, obvious. His own libretti to The Apostles and its sequel The Kingdom (and to the further sequels which had been sketched out twelve years ago, though none has as yet seen the light) resemble those of the older type of oratorio in so far as they include narrative and dramatic incident and religious moralizing; but there is not a trace of the old lethargic taking things for granted, it is all a ringing sacramental challenge to the individual soul. Elgar's work is indeed the typical musical expression of recent Roman Catholic developments; but there are others also. There was Perosi, the Benedictine priest, whose oratorios, tentative, childishly sincere mixtures of Palestrina and Wagner, were forced upon Europe in the late 'nineties with the full driving power of his Church, and who, when his musical insufficiency became palpable, was dropped in favour of Elgar himself, whose sudden rise into deserved fame coincides in time. There was again the allocution of Pius X, known as the Motu proprio, which sought to reform ecclesiastical music and has, however fruitless it may have been elsewhere, made the services in Westminster Cathedral, under Dr. Terry's direction, a Mecca for musicians of all faiths who are interested in the great sixteenth-century masterpieces. There are also the aristocratically Catholic composers of latter-day France, centring round Vincent d'Indy and the Schola Cantorum and looking back for inspiration to César Franck. And again, in the English communion, there is the marked High-Church movement for the encouragement of dignified music, a movement that has had great influence in the purification of popular taste. And the pivot round which all this turns is the dogmatic faith that definitely Christian expression in music is the property, the exclusive property, of those who by temperament and conviction are Christians. The attitude, like the conditions which have brought it about, is, I think, new: but some of its adherents go surely too far when they urge that those whose minds work otherwise cannot really appreciate this music at its due worth. César Franck, that simple-minded childlike genius, once pronounced Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft 'very amusing'--a surely unique criticism--simply, it would seem, because it was eccentric enough not to take Catholicism as a primary postulate: I do not myself happen to have any information about Kant's musicianship--perhaps, like too many great thinkers, he knew little about music and cared less--but I think we may venture to say, in the abstract, that his philosophy would have made him fairer to Franck than Franck was to him.

And thus perhaps we may conclude that recent musical development has kept pace with religious development in concentrating more and more on individual sincerity, whether on the one side or the other, and abandoning the old easy-going haphazard routine. But, in reaction from the extreme right and the extreme left of the movement, we have also the sincere dislikers of stark thinking, whom their opponents call by dignified names of abuse, such as pragmatists or undenominationalists: and here again music keeps pace with religion. It is not the old routine again (though perhaps in practice it may at times come rather perilously near it); it is the more or less conscious adoption of a compromise. We can see its musical working best of all in the recent history of church music in England; it is true that the great mass of the younger musicians, here as in all other countries, stand outside these developments, and look both for ideals and practice elsewhere, but the developments have none the less been very significant. There have been three stages. A couple of generations ago there was no conflict and no call for compromise. The ecclesiastical musician of the time was expected, whether as composer, as organist, or as administrator, to do his best according to his lights: it was his accepted business, as presumably knowing more about the matter than the artistic laity, to lead their taste, not to follow. Then came the reign of men like Dykes and Stainer and Gounod, whose normal attitude involved the sacrifice by the musician of some of his musicianship in the supposed interests of religion. The supposed interests, I say; for the whole point of the third stage of development, the conflict in which English church music is now involved, is the denial by one of the opposing parties that the interests of religion are in any way served by such a sacrifice. It is a very keen conflict, in which the sympathies of the musician qua musician naturally lean towards those who uphold the inalienable dignity of his art: and even if he feels that ecclesiastical music, qua ecclesiastical, is outside his personal concern, influences from it are bound to radiate into the secular departments. But what I would more especially point out is that the religious and the musical developments proceed side by side. Just as the stricter purists in the one field are, in the other, generally inclined, even if themselves unmusical, to uphold plain-song and the Elizabethans and only such modern work as is inspired by something like a similar spirit, aloof and strong, so those whose religious mentality is of a more pliable type are, if musically indifferent, generally inclined to uphold the practical accommodation afforded by the inclusion of at any rate a certain quantity of music that is consciously adapted to the more immediately obvious emotions of the average worshipper.

And, even if there is no question of a lowered artistic standard, we see, I think, the same spirit of compromise, of ready acceptance of the more immediately obvious as the average and proper norm for all people, elsewhere on the boundaries of musical and religious life. It is so easy to turn a blind eye to logic and minorities, or even to majorities if they have little pressure, social or other, to back them up. To illustrate from one or two English examples, the transformations of cathedrals into secular concert-rooms are as open to blame from the one side as are, from the other, such assumptions as that of the 'Union of Graduates in Music' to take rank as a definitely ecclesiastical, indeed an Anglican society. Again, it so happens that a somewhat exceptional proportion of English musicians hold, or have held, as conditions of livelihood, posts to which not all of them would have aspired had other channels, open to their foreign fellow-artists, been open to them also; and, as a necessary consequence, there is more probability here than elsewhere of the musical profession presenting practical problems for the intellectual conscience to solve. So far as the musician is a personal non-conformer and also a teacher (even if not a church organist), he is often compelled into a tacit agreement with the Cowper-Temple clause, at the least: and so far as he is a convinced conformer, he is often compelled to strain, far beyond the meaning of the parable, the principle of letting the wheat and the tares grow together. This is called a practical age: and the compromisers, in religion and in religious music, are a powerful force. But I would venture to think that the future lies, in the long run, in other hands than theirs.

To the mediaeval musician, religion and science were the twin foundations of his art. But while the influence of religious development can without difficulty be traced in musical history, the influence of scientific development is much more contestable. It may indeed, I think, be said that post-mediaeval music has gone its own way without considering science at all. Theorists of course there have been, and still are, who try to discover scientific foundations for the art of music as we moderns know it: they do their best to correlate mathematical physics with practical composition. But during the past generation these attempts, never very hopeful, have become much less so. It is only too easy to play scientific havoc with the foundations of modern music: but, arbitrary and scientifically indefensible though they may be, they are our inheritance. Music has come to be what it is by methods that will not bear accurate investigation: our tonal systems are mere makeshifts, and no composer can completely express his thoughts in our clumsy notation. I doubt if, throughout all this last generation that has seen such overwhelming scientific advance, music has really been scientifically affected (in the strict sense of the word) in the slightest degree, if we exclude some interesting experiments in sympathetic resonances, primary and secondary, at which some recent composers for the piano have, at present rather tentatively, tried their hands. And whole-tone and duodecuple scales and modern harmony in general are taking us farther and farther away from those natural laws of the vibrating string upon which arm-chair theorists have sought to build a very top-heavy edifice. Of course, the vibrating string ultimately gives--mostly out of tune--all the notes of the chromatic scale, but composers employ them on principles the reverse of mathematical.

The growth of music has not been scientific; but growth of some kind is evident enough, though it is none too easy to define it at all adequately. Some might say, with Romain Rolland in his Musiciens d'autrefois, that 'the efforts of the centuries have not advanced us a step nearer beauty since the days of St. Gregory and Palestrina'; but this is surely a narrow outlook. Beauty combines the many with the one: and plain-song and the Missa Papae Marcelli show us only a few, a very few, of its manifestations. But artistic progress is, anyhow, very subtle and evasive; and musical progress, in particular, is hardly correctable with any other. Above all, we must recollect that, to us Europeans, music--which, in the only sense worth our present consideration, is an exclusively European product--is incalculably the youngest of the great arts; if we exclude some monophonic conceptions that have still their value for us, it is barely five hundred years old at the most.

During the last generation an advance in material complexity is obvious, even though the complexity may often enough be one of accidentals rather than essentials. An orchestral score of Wagner is relatively simple in comparison with one of Delius or Ravel or Scriabin or Stravinsky or Schönberg; and the demands on performers' technique and also on their intelligence have steadily increased to heights altogether unknown before. The composer has at his present disposal a vastly enlarged medium; the possibilities of sound have developed incalculably more than those of paint or stone or marble. Pheidias could, we may imagine, have appreciated Rodin across a gulf of over two thousand years; but it is difficult to see the points of contact, after little over three hundred years, between Palestrina and any twentieth-century work that would claim to be 'in the movement'. And it is not only in complexity that we have advanced. We have extended the limits of musical style. We have adopted in sober earnest methods forecasted at rare intervals in the past by adventurous explorers, and employ musical notes not as elements in any harmonic scheme but purely as points of colour, exactly as if the definite notes were mere clangs of indefinite instruments like cymbals or triangles. Wordless vocal tone, moreover, of several different types, is pressed into the same service. Varied tonal and harmonic colour, and structural freedom: those are the two battle-cries of the young generation. Little by little the old tonalities, based as they were on fixed centres, are slipping away; all the notes of the chromatic scale are acquiring even status; the principles of structure are newborn with every new work. And advance of this kind has been extraordinarily accelerated during the last twenty years. At no time in musical history have there been such express-speed modifications of manner as those which divide, let us say, the latest piano pieces of Brahms (1893) and the latest of Scriabin (1914). It is possible, indeed, that our standard system of keyboard tuning may require modification in the not very distant future. Once again, as three hundred years ago, music seems to be in the throes of a new birth. On the former occasion, the process of convalescence lasted rather more than a century, from Monteverde through Carissimi and Schütz and Purcell to Bach; and it may perhaps take as long now.

But it is plain enough that mere novelty does not involve progress; if it were so, the music of the casually strumming baby would demand high recognition. Nor is progress to be found in merely quantitative, Brobdingnagian expansion. And when we have taken our stand on what seems a sufficiently sound definition of musical progress in its material aspect--the combination of novelty with expansion, the new thought with its appropriately enlarged medium--we have yet to remember that many very fine composers still can, and do, express their natural and full selves in older idioms, and that progress of this kind, however widespread it may become, is not necessarily advance in the scale of values. There is, somewhere or other, a limit to the cubic capacity of things: they cannot increase indefinitely in depth and breadth at once. We may confidently hope that we have not yet musically come within hailing distance of the limit: but nevertheless it is becoming more and more difficult to see music steadily and see it whole, and it is useful to take stock of our position. Our musical minds are very much broader than they were: in that sense we can well, like the heroes of Homer, boast that we are much better than our fathers. But are they also deeper? We have gained access to many new rooms in the house of art, rooms full of strange and beautiful things, for the knowledge of which we must needs be profoundly and lastingly grateful; but some of the rooms seem rather small and their windows do not seem to have been opened very often, while others seem liable to be swept by hurricanes which upset the furniture right and left. Veterans there are, musicians not to be named except with high honour, who fall back for nutriment on the great classics and pessimism; but our notions of beauty cannot stand still, and in all ages of music one of the most vital tasks of criticism has been to distinguish between the relatively non-beautiful which has character and truth and its superficial imitation which has neither. All musicians very well recollect their first bewilderment at what has afterwards become as clear as daylight. But we must retain our standards of judgement. We have no right to criticize without familiarity, but we must remember that over-familiarity, mere dulled habitual acceptance, means equal incapacity for criticism. If, after trying our utmost, we still cannot see any sense in some of these modernist pages, there is no reason why we should not say so; it is quite possible that there really is no sense in them, and that the composer is perfectly aware of the fact. Odd stories float about the artistic world. And if the anarchists call us philistines and the philistines call us anarchists, it is fairly likely that we are seeing things pretty much as they are.

Moreover, it is worth remembering that a good deal of what is loosely called modernism is in reality very much the reverse. There is nothing progressive in the confusion of processes with principles, in the breathless disregard of the larger issues. Take the ideal of 'direct expression of emotion', the attempt to give, as Pater said half a century ago, 'the highest quality to our moments as they pass and simply for those moments' sake'. Musically, it is a return to the childhood of our race, to the natural savage. If a musical composition is to consist of anything more than one isolated noise, it must inevitably have a form of some kind, its component parts must look backward and forward. The latter-day composers who speak of Form as a kind of bogey that they have at last exorcized remind us of those latter-day thinkers who boast that they have abolished metaphysics. We cannot leap off our shadows; if we try, we shall only find that we are left with a residuum of bad metaphysics or bad musical form--as thoroughly bad as the metaphysics and the musical form that have resulted from the confusion of the one with empty word-spinning and of the other with hide-bound pedantry. Again, much of the modern rhythmical complexity strongly resembles, in essence, the machine-made experiments of mediaeval times; and the peculiarly fashionable trick of shifting identical chords up and down the scale--the clothes'-peg conception of harmony, so to speak--is a mere throw-back still farther, to Hucbald and the diaphony of a thousand years ago. And the insistence, now so common, on the decorative side of music, the conscious preference of the sensuous to the intellectual or emotional elements, brings us back to our own infancy, with its unreflecting delight in things that sparkle prettily or are soft to the touch or sweet to the taste. It is a reaction from sentimentality, no doubt, but is a reaction to an equal extreme, a perversion of the truth that great art never wholly gives itself away. As Vincent d'Indy has justly pointed out, the 'sensualist formula'--'all for and by harmony'--is as much an aberration of good sense as the parallel formula of the ultra-melodic schools of Rossini and Donizetti: in either case it means the sacrifice of spaciousness to immediate effect, the supremacy of sensation over the equilibrium of the heart and the intelligence. Not of course that any music lacks the sensuous element; but it is a matter of proportion. And very distinguished as are many of the modern exponents of this side of things, history tells us, I think, that they are working in a blind alley. They have their supporters, no doubt. M. Jean-Aubry, in his very suggestive and valuable book on modern French musicians, has used a phrase that seems to me worth remembering; he speaks of the 'obsession of intellectual chastity' which, to his mind, disfigures the work of César Franck and other great composers whom he therefore rejects from his latter-day Pantheon. I am glad to think that Franck would have gloried in this shame. He, and a very goodly company with him, knew that music was, at its highest, something better than an entertainment, however thrilling or however refined.

But, whatever critics and composers may feel about musical progress, it is, as Wagner said, in the home of the amateur that music is really kept alive, and the amateur's music depends very largely on the schools. A generation ago music was certainly sociologically selfish. Musicians had not realized that all classes of the community were open to the influences of fine music, if only they had the opportunities for knowing it. But since then there have been very great advances, both quantitative and qualitative, in musical education. We have spread it broadcast, in the increasing faith that appreciation depends, not on technical knowledge or executive skill, but on the responsive temperament and the will to understand. Familiarity, familiarity at home if possible, is the key to this understanding; and in this connexion there is, I believe, an enormous educational future before pianolas and gramophones, if only the preparation of their records can be taken in hand on artistic rather than narrowly commercial lines. And our standards of judgement have risen: we do not worship quite so blindly mere names, whether of the past or of the present, nor exalt the performer quite so dizzily above what is performed. Nor do we quite so glibly disguise our indifference to vital distinctions by talking about differences of taste: we know that, however catholic we may rightly be within the limits of the good, whether grave or gay, there comes sooner or later, in our judgement of musical as of all other spiritual values, a point where we must put our foot down. We are going on, and our theories are sound enough: but the path of a democratically widened, and rightly so widened, art is by no means easy. The principle of levelling up slides so readily into the practice of levelling down: and the book of music is closed once for all if we are to accept the plenary inspiration of majorities.

But here in England the greatest danger to musical progress is, I venture to think, the self-styled practical Englishman--fortified as he is by the consciousness that, for at any rate a couple of centuries or more, we have as a nation taken a low view of the arts and have been rather proud of it than otherwise. It is so obvious that no profession is economically more unsound than that of the serious composer: it is not so obvious that we owe all the great things of the spirit by which we chiefly live to those whom the world calls dreamers, among whom the great musicians have had, and, I hope and believe, will always have, no mean place. Against the 'practical Englishman', and all that his attitude to music involves, we can all of us fight in our respective spheres: and I would commend to you for useful weapons three very different books by very different men--Sir Hubert Parry's great book on Style in Musical Art, Mr. C.T. Smith's account of his artistic work in an elementary school in the East End of London which he calls The Music of Life, and a pamphlet Starved Arts mean Low Pleasures recently written by Mr. Bernard Shaw for the British Music Society. And one particular line of indirect attack, easily open to all of us, is, I am inclined to think, specially promising. In the third and fourth verses of the thirty-fifth chapter of the book of Ecclesiasticus we shall find these injunctions, which I translate as literally as Greek epigrams can be translated: 'Do not hinder music: do not pour out chatter during any artistic performance: and do not argue unseasonably.' In other words, conversation, however valuable, prevents complete listening to music; and music that is not meant to be listened to in its completeness is not worth calling music, and had much better not be there at all. Musical progress will be spiritually well on its way when we all realize this axiomatic truth as firmly as this Hebrew sage of two thousand years and more ago.

FOOTNOTES:

XII

THE MODERN RENASCENCE

F. MELIAN STAWELL

To understand in any degree the modern outlook on life it seems necessary to go back to the time of the French Revolution. For at that stirring epoch there flamed up in the minds of enthusiasts an ideal of man's life larger than had ever yet been known, and one that has dominated us all ever since. If we give, as I think we should give, a wide sense to the word 'Liberty' and make it mean all that stands for self-development, then one may say that this ideal was fairly well summed-up in the famous Revolutionary watchword, 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity'. It is impossible at any rate to read the idealists of that time and its sequel--say from 1793 to 1848--whether in France, Germany, England, or Italy, whether inside or outside the Revolutionary ranks, without feeling their buoyant hope that a fresh era was opening in which man, casting aside old shackles and prejudices, could advance at once towards knowledge, joy, splendour, both for himself and all his fellows. Shelley, perhaps, is most typical of what I mean. Hogg laughed at him for his belief in the 'perfectibility' of the race, but Hogg knew the belief was vital to the poet. To Shelley it was a damnable doctrine that the many should ever be sacrificed to the few: yet neither was the ultimate vision that inspired him the vision of the few being sacrificed for the many. He was anything but an ascetic seeking martyrdom. The martyrdom of his Prometheus is a prelude to the Unbinding when happiness shall flood the world:--

'The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness! The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness, The vaporous exultation not to be confined!'

And not only happiness and love, but knowledge also: the Earth calls to the Sky: 'Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.' Soberer spirits shared this poet's ecstasy. Wordsworth sang

'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.'

And that heaven was exactly this foretaste of the Spirit of Man entering undisturbed into his full inheritance at last: Science welcomed as a dear and honoured guest, Poetry known as 'the breath and finer spirit that is in the countenance of all knowledge'.

It is scarcely necessary even to mention the high hopes of the French themselves, the confident anticipation of an Age of Reason when all men should be brothers and the earth bring forth all her treasures, but it is well worth noting the attitude of Goethe, an attitude the more significant because, in a sense, Goethe always stood outside the French Revolution. But he, like the best of its votaries--and this is less known than it should be--desired the development of all men every whit as much as he desired the high culture of a few. It was for the double goal that he worked. 'Only through all men,' he writes in a notable passage, 'only through all men, can mankind be made.' All good lies in Man, he tells us again, and must be developed, 'only not in one man, but in many'. Goethe, the so-called aristocrat, has given us here as true a formula for the democratic faith as could well be found. And to him, as to Shelley and to Wordsworth, Poetry and Science were not enemies but friends dearer than sisters. Those three, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Goethe, foreshadowed a new poetry of science that has never yet been achieved, though fine work has been done by Tennyson, Whitman, Sully Prudhomme, and Meredith.

Goethe, moreover, again like Shelley and the French, broke with all ideals of mere self-abnegation. In his poem, 'General Confession', he makes his disciples repent of ever having missed an opportunity for enjoyment and resolve never so to offend again. Here, as often, Goethe comes into the closest touch with our modern feeling. We, too, can never return to the Franciscan ideal of poverty, celibacy, and obedience as the highest life for man on earth. We have done with self-denial except as the means to a human end. We are still in the tide of what I would call the Modern Renascence; we claim the whole garden of the world for our own, the tree with the knowledge of good and evil included, reacting even from Christian ideals if they can make no room for that. But, after all, the characteristic of the belief dominant a century ago was exactly that such room could be made, that Hellenism could be combined with Christianity, and self-development with self-denial.

And this belief is, I think, reflected in the music of the time. Schubert, that sweetest soul of tears and laughter, understands every shade of wistfulness, and yet again and again in his music it seems as though the universe had become, to quote a lover of his, one immense and glorious blackbird. Mozart, in 'The Magic Flute', as Goethe seems to have recognized, sings the very song of union between the unreflecting joy of the natural man and the strenuous self-devotion of the awakened spirit. Beethoven, greatest of them all, plumbs the lowest depths of suffering and then astounds and comforts us by ineffable vistas of happiness. After years of personal misery he crowns the glorious series of his symphonies by the one that ends in a hymn of joy, freedom, and faith, embracing the whole world--'Diese Kuss der ganzen Welt'--that majestic open melody, clear as the morning, fresh as though it came from far oversea, greater even than any of the great harmonies that have gone before, larger than the tortured human heart, steadier than the sudden ecstasy of the spirits set free, stronger than the swansong of the dying, a melody content with earth because it is conscious of heaven. I offer no apology for weaving my own fairy-tales round such music: I see no harm in the practice, but only good, so long as we understand what we are about. Music, it is true, is something other than, in a sense more than, either thought or feeling or even poetry, and cannot be reduced to any of them (nor any of them to it). The universe would be poor indeed if it could be so. But none the less the truth may be, as Spinoza thought, that the universe is at once a unity and a unity with many facets, so that any one facet, while for ever unique, can bring to our minds all the mysteries of the rest.

In any case, the high confidence that breathes in the music of a hundred years ago meets us again in the philosophers.

Hegel, born in the same year as Beethoven and Wordsworth (1770), is sure that nothing can resist the onslaught of man's spirit. 'Stronger than the gates of Hell are the gates of Thought.' Fichte is convinced that there waits in man, only to be developed, a power that will unite him with all other men and at the same time develop his own personality to the full. In a sense, the deepest, each man is his fellow-men, and they are he.