religion, conventional art, and Republican enthusiasm.
Goethe in 1809, from the overthrow of dynasties and the crash of
thrones, turned to the East and found peace. What were the armies of
Napoleon and the ruin of Europe's dream to Hafiz and Sadi, and to the
calm of the trackless centuries far behind? The mood of Goethe has
become the characteristic of the art, the poetry, the speculation of
the century's end. The _bizarre_ genius of Nietzsche, whose whole
position is implicit in Goethe's _Divan_, popularized it in Germany.
The youngest of literatures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as
vividly as the oldest, Italy and France. It controls the meditative
depth of Leopardi, the melancholy of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's
dramas, and the cadenced prose of Flaubert. It informs the teaching of
Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschaikowsky. Goethe, at the beginning
of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of
Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in _Tristan_ and in _Parsifal_, has
woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the
Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the _Upanishads_ into a
rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of
Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the
Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of
painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.

What a vision of the new age thus opens before the gaze! The ideal of
Liberty and all its hopes have turned to ashes; but out of the ruins
Europe, tireless in the pursuit of the Ideal, ponders even now some
profounder mystery, some mightier destiny. More than any race known to
history the Teuton has the power of making other religions, other
thoughts, other arts his own, and sealing them with the impress of his
own spirit. The poetry of Shakespeare, of Goethe, the tone-dramas of
Wagner attest this. Out of the thought and faith of Judaea and Hellas,
of Egypt and Rome, the Teutonic imagination has carved the present.
Their ideals have passed into his life imperishably. But the purple
fringe of another dawn is on the horizon. Teutonic heroism and
resolution in action, transformed by the centuries behind and the
ideals of the elder races, confront now, creative, the East, its mighty
calm, its resignation, its scorn of action and the familiar aims of
men, its inward vision, its deep disdain of realized ends. What vistas
arise before t