by storm with the supernatural fascinations and
"flattering" melodies (as Mendelssohn called
them) of his Freischütz. The rich sedateness
of Spohr still passed for something as profound
as it was individual. People clambered on the
roof of St. Andrew's Hall at Norwich to hear
his oratorio through the windows, unable to find
a place within the building. Prescient amateurs,
who do not wait till originality is crowned by
success, were looking out for the prodigious boy,
Mendelssohn, whose Midsummer Night's Dream
overture is possibly the most extraordinary piece
of early promise existing in music. The day of
the disinterment of Bach had not come, but our
passion for Mozart was then, as now, in its way,
as much of a religion as our reverence for
Handel. In short, we lived and listened, and
gave a blank credit to everything, past and
present, that came from a certain land, without
any closer wish to discriminate than belongs to
implicit hero-worship. And had any one, then,
whispered a prophecy of downfal or decay, or
suggested that the germs of these might even
then be traced in the midst of musical productions
tempting to the enterprising by their
originality, and to the vain, because of their
difficulty of comprehension, as compared with
the more fluent and spontaneous music of Italy
—he would have been hooted down by all the
"elect and precious" as a flimsy trifler,
incapable and unworthy of understanding and
receiving the highest and most profound
pleasures which Poetry can give.

England's faith in German music, at that time,
if excessive, was sincere, and justified by the
state of matters at home. What have been the
facts of the case since those days? The great
school of instrumental writing has received no
healthy development in Germany, while the art
of singing, which largely includes the culture of
melody, lias been allowed to fall into a state of
dilapidation which could only have a bad result,
as lowering the standard of one material used in
musical composition.

In the early days of German art—when Bach,
by way of holiday, used to go to Dresden to
hear " the pretty songs "—when Handel passed
into Italy, to smoothe himself without laying
down a whit of his northern manliness, by
making acquaintance with the treasures of
Beauty in the south—when Haydn (pupil of
another Italian, the rugged Porpora) professedly
ripened and refined every theme he
treated—when Mozart exhibited the most
completely-balanced combination of charm, invention,
and learning, we have ever seen,—there
was no thought of antagonism, no dream of
such a folly as that form could only be
vindicated by neglect of colour, still less that,
without having form or colour, a vaporous and
confused concoction should, because of its scale
or its singularity, pass as a great poem only to
be relished by the profound and the far sighted.
Yet these follies have been adopted and preached
and fanatically pushed to their extreme
consequences in the world of modern German music.

The stirrings of this folly—taking the form
of a spurious nationality—the introduction,
into an art which has an universal language,
of contradictions, defiances, renunciations, as
so many precepts and principles,—in Germany
originated with Beethoven, and were largely
shaped and forwarded by the personality and
the misfortunes of that sublime poet. He fell
"on the thorns of life," if ever artist did.
He had little, if any, home training; he was
born with a spirit at once colossally generous,
and rugged, and jealous; he hardly became
aware of the privileges as a ruler and a
discoverer, which his good genius had given him,
before he was touched by palsy—to such a man
more terrible than violent death. He had
hardly wakened to his consciousness, that
immense and unknown combinations were at
his command, when it was also made clear
to him that the power of testing these by
experience (invaluable to a musician beyond
every other artist) was steadily decaying. A
thoroughly disciplined mind might have mastered
even this calamity; but Beethoven's was not
a thoroughly disciplined mind, and no help was
ministered to him by the by-standers—his
patrons of quality—his rapacious kinsfolk. He
was in advance of his time, he was in advance of
his patrons, and he only followed the law of weak
human nature—apt to mistake suffering for
injustice, and to fancy inevitable neglect
persecution—in finding relief for his unhappiness in
the defiance of fashion and precedent and protest,
and in pushing advance too far and too lawlessly
towards chaos.

The mischief which such an example, left
by such a man, can do to idle dreamers and
theorists (showing, nevertheless, the most
wondrous patience for collecting details), can hardly
be estimated in this practical shop-keeping
England of ours. It might be hard to the
verge of impossibility, to emulate the vigour
and spirit of idea to be found in every one
of Beethoven's compositions, be they as full
of diffuseness, confusion, and crudity, as his
Posthumous Quartets and his Second Mass,
but it was easy, because he broke bounds, for
his idolaters to defend such licences as so many
bold and beautiful enlargements of a domain
narrowed by Pedantry. Yet to adhere to
established forms without becoming tiresome,
demands as much cultivated intelligence as
reverence—to break proportion and harmony in
pieces—to represent ugliness and discord as new
oracles, from whose sayings those superior to
common superstitions could alone derive real
inspiration—requires no thought, no training,
no power of really appreciating what is beautiful
and holy. Then it was found in Germany new
and noble to represent music as something which
music neverwas and never will be—an expression
of political feelings—of metaphysical definitions
—of the yearning anguish of the present—of
enlightened contempt for the past—of a defiant
and exclusive nationality, frowning at one
country, scowling at another, sneering at a third,
ignoring a fourth. It was held as divine of an
artist to be morose, uncomplying, unkempt,—not