ed 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