thought it did. The Ninth Symphony is a hymn of humanity and democracy. Let us not forget how Beethoven upbraided Goethe, the Olympian of Weimar, for bowing low before the seats of the mighty. And “Fidelio” is unique. Shakespeare alone has expressed the love of man and wife with equal strength; nor in the whole literature of the world is there another instance of conjugal love, so pure and strong, for even the greatest poets have taken as their theme the romantic state of pre-nuptial love. In the “Missa Solemnis,” too, Beethoven pours out his passionate religious faith, the faith of the modern man rising above traditional ecclesiastical forms to heights undreamed of save by the maturest spirits of our time! Yet Haydn taxed Beethoven, albeit in friendly fashion, with disbelief in God!
And with Beethoven I couple his great teacher, Bach, and Bach’s religious music; and, in philosophy, Leibnitz, whose yearning to melt the Churches into one is the natural outcome of his doctrine of the Monads and of his fundamental conception of universal harmony. Pan-German chauvinists see in Leibnitz’s humanitarian aspirations an effect of his Slavonic blood. I, however, look upon his philosophy as a continuation of Platonism, albeit with strong traces of the subjectivism which Kant and his followers were presently to overdo.
I regret that my musical education is not sufficient to permit me to detect the workings of the German spirit in the brilliant line of great musicians—Bach, Handel, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann; but the Prussian spirit certainly found a musical exponent in Richard Wagner, a genius whose work is a synthesis of decadence and Prussianism. Alas! the splendid, noble and beauteous music of Germany took too light a hold on the hearts of peoples; the effects of Prussification were stronger.
The Decline of German Thought.
After Kant, and in large measure through his influence, German thought took the wrong road. He strove against the one-sidedness of English empiricism, and particularly the scepticism of Hume, by means of the equally one-sided intellectualism of an ostensibly pure creative reason. He built up a whole system of a priori eternal truths, and thus opened the door to all the fantastications of German subjectivism, or “Idealism,” which necessarily led to egomaniac isolation, or
