erman, and whose seriousness is a charming and golden seriousness
and not by any means that of a German clodhopper.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Not to speak of the
earnestness of the "marble statue".{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} But you seem to think that all music
is the music of the "marble statue"?--that all music should, so to speak,
spring out of the wall and shake the listener to his very bowels?{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Only
thus could music have any effect! But on whom would the effect be made?
Upon something on which a noble artist ought never to deign to act,--upon
the mob, upon the immature! upon the blases! upon the diseased! upon
idiots! upon _Wagnerites_!{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

A Music Without A Future.

Of all the arts which succeed in growing on the soil of a particular
culture, music is the last plant to appear; maybe because it is the one
most dependent upon our innermost feelings, and therefore the last to come
to the surface--at a time when the culture to which it belongs is in its
autumn season and beginning to fade. It was only in the art of the Dutch
masters that the spirit of mediaeval Christianity found its expression--,
its architecture of sound is the youngest, but genuine and legitimate,
sister of the Gothic. It was only in Handel's music that the best in
Luther and in those like him found its voice, the Judeo-heroic trait which
gave the Reformation a touch of greatness-the Old Testament, _not_ the
New, become music. It was left to Mozart, to pour out the epoch of Louis
XIV., and of the art of Racine and Claude Lorrain, in _ringing_ gold; only
in Beethoven's and Rossini's music did the Eighteenth Century sing itself
out--the century of enthusiasm, broken ideals, and _fleeting joy_. All real
and original music is a swan song--Even our last form of music, despite its
prevalence and its will to prevail, has perhaps only a short time to live,
for it sprouted from a soil which was in the throes of a rapid
subsidence,--of a culture which will soon be _submerged_. A certain
catholicism of feeling, and a predilection for some ancient indigenous
(so-called national) ideals and eccentricities, was its first condition.
Wagner's appropriation of old sagas and songs, in which scholarly
prejudice taught us to see something German _par excellence_--now we laugh
at it all, the resurrection of these Scandinavian monsters with a thirst
for ecstatic sensuality and spiritualisation--the whole of this taking and
giving