pitch, but there are dozens of different
German concert-pitches--a Viennese, a Berlin, a Dresden, a Frankfurt
pitch, etc., so that in the light of such distinctions even the
above-mentioned division into northern and southern tone appears like a
very general hypothesis. The Parisian pitch and the French pitch, on the
contrary, are accepted without caviling as synonymous.[16] Italy, on the
other hand, is also without a uniform pitch; as early as a hundred years
ago a distinction was made there between the Roman, the Venetian, the
Lombard pitch, ascending from the lower to the higher. It may therefore
be said that in Rome they play approximately in the Parisian pitch, in
upper Italy in the Viennese and St. Petersburg pitch. I am not indulging
in any political metaphors, but in sober musical truth.

Is it possible, however, that this variety of musical tone, the
historical roots of which extend back so far, may be something arbitrary
and accidental? The very usage of the German language lends a
significant double meaning to the word _Stimmung_ (pitch, tone, mood).
It stamps with the same name, on the one hand, the given basis upon
which are built up the harmonies of music and, on the other, the
harmonies of emotional life.

It is one of the most fascinating, but at the same time most difficult
tasks of the history of culture to catch, as it were, the personal
emotions, the pitch upon which each generation is based, in distinction
from the perception of the outspoken deeds and thoughts of the age.

This task would be incapable of solution if the history of art did not
furnish us a key to it. I have already shown in the preceding essay on
the _Eye for Natural Scenery_, that the question does not concern the
historical appreciation of the work of art as such, so much as the
investigation of the special manner in which a generation has perceived
and enjoyed the beautiful. And indeed this is more easily discerned in
the case of the most fluid, subjective species of the beautiful, in
natural beauty, than in the more objective artistic beauty.

In art, however, musical beauty comes closest to natural beauty, since
it is in its turn the most subjective, the most general in its
expression, and the most versatile in its forms. The phenomenon, so
important from the point of the history of culture, namely, that each
age sees with its own eyes and hears with its own ears, can therefore
nowhere be more sharply observed than i