urope was bathed when it
dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced round the Tree of Liberty of the
Revolution, and finally almost fell down in adoration before Napoleon.
But how rapidly does THIS very sentiment now pale, how difficult
nowadays is even the APPREHENSION of this sentiment, how strangely does
the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron sound to our ear,
in whom COLLECTIVELY the same fate of Europe was able to SPEAK, which
knew how to SING in Beethoven!--Whatever German music came afterwards,
belongs to Romanticism, that is to say, to a movement which,
historically considered, was still shorter, more fleeting, and more
superficial than that great interlude, the transition of Europe from
Rousseau to Napoleon, and to the rise of democracy. Weber--but what do
WE care nowadays for "Freischutz" and "Oberon"! Or Marschner's "Hans
Heiling" and "Vampyre"! Or even Wagner's "Tannhauser"! That is extinct,
although not yet forgotten music. This whole music of Romanticism,
besides, was not noble enough, was not musical enough, to maintain its
position anywhere but in the theatre and before the masses; from the
beginning it was second-rate music, which was little thought of by
genuine musicians. It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon
master, who, on account of his lighter, purer, happier soul, quickly
acquired admiration, and was equally quickly forgotten: as the beautiful
EPISODE of German music. But with regard to Robert Schumann, who took
things seriously, and has been taken seriously from the first--he
was the last that founded a school,--do we not now regard it as a
satisfaction, a relief, a deliverance, that this very Romanticism
of Schumann's has been surmounted? Schumann, fleeing into the "Saxon
Switzerland" of his soul, with a half Werther-like, half Jean-Paul-like
nature (assuredly not like Beethoven! assuredly not like Byron!)--his
MANFRED music is a mistake and a misunderstanding to the extent of
injustice; Schumann, with his taste, which was fundamentally a PETTY
taste (that is to say, a dangerous propensity--doubly dangerous among
Germans--for quiet lyricism and intoxication of the feelings), going
constantly apart, timidly withdrawing and retiring, a noble weakling who
revelled in nothing but anonymous joy and sorrow, from the beginning
a sort of girl and NOLI ME TANGERE--this Schumann was already merely a
GERMAN event in music, and no longer a European event, as Beethoven had
been, as