longing without the shadow of an 'object '-against the very vault of absolute un-objectivity. (Bliss, unconditioned bliss,-to gain in widest, most unbounded measure the height of bliss, and yet to stay completely wrapt in self: this was the unallayable desire of Christian passion.') So reared the sea from out its deepest depth to heaven, so sank it ever back again to its own depths; ever its unmixed self, and therefore ever unappeased,-like the all-usurping, measureless desire of the heart that ne'er will give itself and dare to be consumed in an external object, but damns itself to everlasting selfish solitude.
Yet in Nature each immensity strives after Measure; the unconfined draws bounds around itself; the elements condense at last to definite show; and even the boundless sea of Christian yearning found the new shore on which its turbid waves might break. Where on the farthest horizon we thought to find the ever made-for, never happed-on gateway into the realms of Heaven unlimited, there did the boldest of all seafarers discover land at last,-man- tenanted, real, and blissful land. Through his discovery the wide ocean is now not only meted out, but made for men an inland sea, round which the coasts are merely broadened out in unimaginably ampler circle. Did Columbus teach us to take ship across the ocean, and thus to bind in one each continent of Earth; did his world-historical discovery convert the narrow-seeing national-man into a universal and all-seeing Man: so, by the hero who explored the broad and seeming shoreless sea of absolute Music unto its very bounds, are won the new and never dreamt-of coasts which this sea no longer now divorces from the old and primal continent of man, but binds together with it for the new-born, happy art-life of the Manhood of the Future. And this hero is none other than-Beet hoven.-
When Tone unloosed her from the chain of sisters, she took as her unrehinquishable, her foremost life's- condition-just as light-minded sister Dance had filched from her her rhythmic measure-from thoughtful sister Poetry her Word; yet not the human-breathing spirit of the musing ('dichtende') word, but only its bare corporeal condensation ('verdichtete') into tones. As she had abandoned her rhythmic beat to parting Dance's use and pleasure, she thenceforth built upon the Word alone; the word of Christian Creed, that toneless, fluid, scattering word which, un-withstanding and right gladly, soon gave to her complete dominion over it. But the more this word evaporated into the mere stammer of humility, the mere babbling of implicit, childlike love, so much the more imperatively did Tone see herself impelled to shape herself from out the exhaustless depths of her own liquid nature. The struggle for such shaping is the building up of Harmony.
Harmony grows from below upwards as a perpendicular pillar, by the joining-together and overlaying of correlated tone-stuffs. Unceasing alternation of such columns, each freshly risen member taking rank beside its fellows, constitutes the only possibility of absolute harmonic movement 'in breadth,' The feeling of needful care for the beauty of this motion 'in breadth' is foreign to the nature of absolute Harmony; she knows but the beauty of her columns' changing play of colour, but not the grace of their marshalling in point of 'time,'-for that is the work of Rhythm. On the other hand, the inexhaustible variety of this play of colours is the ever-fruitful source on which she draws, with immoderate self-satisfaction, to show herself in constant change of garb; while the life-breath which en-souls and sets in motion this restless, capricious, and self-conditioning change, is the essence of elemental tone itself, the outbreathing of an unfathomable, all-dominating heart's-desire. In the kingdom of Harmony there is therefore no beginning and no end; just as the objectless and self-devouring fervour of the soul, all ignorant of its source, is nothing but itself; nothing but longing, yearning, tossing, pining-and dying out, i.e. dying without having assuaged itself in any 'object'; thus dying without death, (11) and therefore everlasting falling back upon itself.
So long as the Word was in power, it commanded both beginning and ending; but when it was engulfed in the bottomless depths of Harmony, when it became naught but 'groanings and sighings of the soul,' (12)-as on the ardent summit of the music of the Catholic Church,-then was the word capriciously hoisted to the capitals of those harmonic columns, of that unrhythmic melody, and cast as though from wave to wave; while the measureless harmonic possibilities must draw from out themselves the laws for their own finite manifestment. There is no other artistic faculty of man that answers to the character of Harmony: it cannot find its mirror in the physical precision of the movements of the body, nor in the logical induction of the thinking brain,-it cannot set up for itself its standard in the recognised necessity of the material world of show, like Thought, nor like corporeal Motion in the periodic calculation of its instinctive, physically governed properties: it is like a nature-force which men perceive but cannot comprehend. Summoned by outer-not by inner-necessity to resolve on surer and more finite manifestment, Harmony must mould from out its own immensurate depths the laws for its own following. These laws of harmonic sequence, based on the nature of Affinity,-just as those harmonic columns, the chords, were formed by the affinity of tone-stuffs,-unite themselves into one standard, which sets up salutary bounds around the giant playground of capricious possibilities. They allow the most varied choice from amid the kingdom of harmonic families, and extend the possibility of union by elective-affinity ('Wahlverwandschaftliche Verbindungen') with the members of neighbouring families, almost to free liking ; they demand, however, before all a strict observance of the house-laws of affinity of the family once chosen, and a faithful tarrying with it, for sake of a happy end. But this end itself, and thus the measure of the composition's extension in time, the countless laws of harmonic decorum can neither give nor govern. As the scientifically teachable or learnable department of the art of Tone, they can cleave the fluid tonal masses of Harmony asunder, and part them into fenced-off bodies; but they cannot assign the periodic measure of these fenced-off masses.
When the limit-setting might of Speech was swallowed up, and yet the art of Tone, now turned to Harmony, could never find her time-assigning law within herself: then was she forced to face towards the remnant of the rhythmic beat that Dance had left for her to garner. Rhythmic figures must now enliven harmony; their change, their recurrence, their parting and uniting, must condense the fluid breadths of Harmony-as Word had earlier done with Tone-and bring their periods to more sure conclusion. But no inner necessity, striving after purely human exposition, lay at the bottom of this rhythmic livening; not the feeling, thinking, will-ing Man, such as proclaims himself by speech and bodily motion, was its motive power; nothing but an outer necessity, which Harmony, in struggle for her selfish close, had taken up into herself. This rhythmic interchange and shaping, which moved not of its inner, own necessity, could therefore only borrow life from arbitrary laws and canons. These laws and canons are those of Counterpoint.
Counterpoint, with its multiple births and offshoots, is Art's artificial playing-with-itself, the mathematics of Feeling, the mechanical rhythm of egoistic Harmony. In its invention, abstract Tone indulged her whim to pass as the sole and only self-supporting Art ;-as that art which owes its being, its absolute and godlike nature, to no human Need soever, but purely to itself. The wilful quite naturally believes itself the absolute and right monopolist; and it is certain that to her own caprice alone could Music thank her self-sufficient airs, for that mechanical, contrapunctal artifice was quite incapable of answering any soul-need. Music therefore, in her pride, had become her own direct antithesis: from a heart's concern, a matter of the intellect, from the utterance unshacjled of Christian soul's-desire, the cashbook of a modern market-speculation.
The living breath of fair, immortal, nobly-feeling Human Voice, streaming ever fresh and young from the bosom of the Folk, blew this contrapunctal house of cards, too, of a heap. The Folk-tune, that had rested faithful to its own untarnished grace; the simple, surely outlined Song, close-woven with the poem, soared-up on its elastic pinions to the regions of the beauty-lacking, scientifically-musical artworld, with news of joyous ransom. This world was longing to paint men again, to set men to sing-not pipes; so it seized the folk-tune for its purpose, and constructed out of it the opera-air. But just as Dance had seized the folk-dance, to freshen herself therewith when needed, and to convert it to an artificial compost according to the dictates of her modish taste,-so did this genteel Operatic tone-art behave to the folk-tune. She had not grasped the entire man, to show him in his whole artistic stature and nature-bidden necessity, but only the singing man; and in his song she had not seized the Ballad of the Folk, with all its innate generative force, but merely the melodic Tune, abstracted from the poem, to which she set conventional and purposely insipid sentences, according to her pleasure; it was not the beating heart of the nightingale, but only its warbling throat that men could fathom, and practised themselves to imitate. Just as the art-dancer had set his legs, with their manifold but still monotonous bendings, flingings, and gyrations, to vary the natural folk-dance which he could not of himself develop further,-so did the art-singer set his throat to paraphrase with countless ornaments, to alter by a host of flourishes, those tunes which he had stolen from the People's mouth, but whose nature he could never fertilise afresh; and thus another species of mechanical dexterity filled up the place which contrapunctal ingenuity had left forlorn. We need not further characterise the repugnant, ineffably repulsive disfigurement and rending of the folk-tune, such as cries out from the modern operatic Aria - for truly it is nothing but a mutilated folk-tune, and in no wise a specific fresh invention - such as, in entire contempt of Nature and all human feeling, and severed from all basis of poetic speech, now tickles the imbecile ears of our opera-frequenters with its lifeless, soul-less toy of fashion. We must content ourselves with candidly, though mournfully, avowing that
