the last embrace.
And yet these happy dancers were merely shadowed forth in tones, mere sounds that imitated men! Like a second Prometheus who fashioned men of clay ('Thon') Beethoven had sought to fashion them of tone. Yet not from 'Thon' or Tone, but from both substances together, must Man, the image of live-giving Zeus, be made. Were Prometheus' mouldings only offered to the eye, so were those of Beethoven only offered to the ear. But only where eye and ear confirm each other's sentience of him, is the whole artistic Man at hand.
But where could Beethoven find those men, to whom to stretch out hands across the element of his music? Those men with hearts so broad that he could pour into them the mighty torrent of his harmonic tones? With frames so stoutly fair that his melodic rhythms should bear them and not crush them ?-Alas, from nowhere came to him the brotherly Prometheus who could show to him these men! He needs must gird his loins about, and start to find out for himself the country of the Manhood of the Future.
From the shore of Dance he cast himself once more upon that endless sea, from which he had erstwhile found a refuge on this shore; the sea of unallayable heart-yearning. But 'twas in a stoutly-built and giant-bolted ship that he embarked upon the stormy voyage; with firm-clenched fist he grasped the mighty helm: he knew the journey's goal, and was determined to attain it. No imaginary triumphs would he prepare himself, nor after boldly overcome privations tack back once more to the lazy haven of his home; for he desired to measure out the ocean's bounds, and find the land which needs must lie beyond the waste of waters.
Thus did the Master urge his course through unheard-of possibilities of absolute tone-speech-not by fleetly slipping past them, but by speaking out their utmost syllable from the deepest chambers of his heart-forward to where the mariner begins to sound the sea-depth with his plumb; where, above the broadly stretched-forth shingles of the new continent, he touches on the heightening crests of solid ground; where he has now to decide him whether he shall face about towards the bottomless ocean, or cast his anchor on the new-found shore. But it was no madcap love of sea-adventure, that had spurred the Master to so far a journey; with might and main he willed to land on this new world, for toward it alone had he set sail. Staunchly he threw his anchor out; and this anchor was the Word. Yet this Word was not that arbitrary and senseless cud which the modish singer chews from side to side, as the gristle of his vocal tone; but the necessary, all-powerful, and all-uniting word into which the full torrent of the heart's emotions may pour its stream; the steadfast haven for the restless wanderer; the light that lightens up the night of endless yearning: the word that the redeemed world-man cries out aloud from the fulness of the world- heart. This was the word which Beethoven set as crown upon the forehead of his tone-creation; and this word was:-' Freude !' ('Rejoice!') With this word he cries to men: 'Breast to breast; ye mortal millions! This one kiss to all the world! -And this Word will be the language of the Art-work of the Future.-
The Last Symphony of Beethoven is the redemption of Music from out her own peculiar element into the realm of universal Art. It is the human Evangel of the art of the Future. Beyond it no forward step is possible; for upon it the perfect Art-work of the Future alone can follow, the universal Drama to which Beethoven has forged for us the key.
Thus has Music of herself fulfilled what neither of the other severed arts had skill to do. Each of these arts but eked out her own self-centred emptiness by taking, and egoistic borrowing; neither, therefore, had the skill to be herself, and of herself to weave the girdle wherewith to link the whole. But Tone, in that she was herself completely, and moved amid her own unsullied element, attained the force of the most heroic, most loveworthy self-sacrifice,-of mastering, nay of renouncing 'her own self; to reach out to her sisters the hand of rescue. She thus has kept herself as heart that binds both head and limbs in one; and it is not without significance, that it is precisely the art of Tone which has gained so wide extension through all the branches of our modern public life.
To get a clearer insight into the contradictory spirit of this public life, however, we must first bear in mind that it was by no means a mutual coöperation between art-hood and publicity, nay, not even a mutual coöperation of tone-artists themselves, that carried through the titanic process we have here reviewed: but simply a richly-gifted individual, who took up into his solitary self the spirit of community that was absent from our public life; nay, from the fulness of his being, united with the fulness of musical resource, evolved within himself this spirit of community which his artist soul had been the first to yearn for. We see this wonderful creative process, which breathes the fashioning breath of Life through all the symphonies of Beethoven, not only completed by the Master in the most secluded loneliness, but not so much as comprehended by his artistic fellows; the rather, shamefully misunderstood by them. The forms in which the Master brought to light his world-historical wrestling after Art, remained but forms in the eyes of contemporaneous and succeeding music-makers, and passed through Mannerism across to Mode; and despite the fact that no other instrumental composer could, even within these forms, divulge the smallest shred of original inventiveness, yet none lost courage to write symphonies and suchlike pieces by the ream, without a moment happening on the thought that the last symphony had already been written. (14)
Thus have we lived to see Beethoven's great world-voyage of discovery-that unique and throughly unrepeatable feat whose consummation we have witnessed in his ' Freude '-symphony, as the last and boldest venture of his genius - once more superfluously attempted in foohishest simplicity, and happily got over without one hardship. A new genre, a 'Symphony with Choruses '-was all the dullards saw therein! Why should not X or Y be also able to write a 'Symphony with Choruses'? Why should not 'God the Lord' be praised from swelling throat in the Finale, after three preceding instrumental sections had paved the way as featly as might be ? (15) Thus has Columbus only discovered America for the sugary hucksters of our times!
The ground of this repugnant phenomenon, however, lies deep within the very nature of our modern music. The art of Tone, set free from those of Dance and Poetry, is no longer an art instinctively necessary to man. It has been forced to construct itself by laws which, taken from its own peculiar nature, find no affinity and no elucidation in any purely human manifestment. Each of the other arts held fast by the measure of the outer human figure, of the outward human life, or of Nature itself,-howsoever capriciously it might disfigure this unconditional first principle. Tone,-which found alone in timid Hearing, susceptible to every cheat and fancy, her outward, human measure,-must frame herself more abstract laws, perforce, and bind these laws into a compact scientific system. This system has been the basis of all modern music: founded on this system, tower was heaped on tower; and the higher soared the edifice, the more inalienable grew the fixed foundation,- this founding which was nowise that of Nature. To the sculptor, the painter, and the poet, their laws of Art explain the course of Nature; without an inner understanding of Nature they can make no thing of beauty. To the musician are explained the laws of Harmony, of Counterpoint; his learning, without which he can build no musical structure, is an abstract, scientific system. By attained dexterity in its application, he becomes a craftsman; and from this craftsmanlike standpoint he looks out upon the outer world, which must needs appear to him a different thing from what it does to the unadmitted worldling,the layman. The uninitiate layman thus stands abashed before this artificial product of art-music, and very rightly can grasp no whit of it but what appeals directly to the heart; from all the built-up prodigy, however, this only meets him in the unconditioned ear-delight of Melody. All else but leaves him cold, or baffles him with its disquiet; for the simple reason that he does not, and cannot, understand it. Our modern concert-public, which feigns a warmth and satisfaction in presence of the art-symphonya merely lies and plays the hypocrite; and the proof of this hypocrisy is evident enough so soon as, after such a symphony, a modern and melodious operatic 'number' is performed, as often happens even in our most renowned concert-institutes,-when we may hear the genuine musical pulse of the audience beat high at once in unfeigned joy.
A vital coherence between our art-music and our public taste, must be emphatically denied: where it would fain proclaim its existence, it is affected and untrue; or, with a certain section of our Folk which may from time to time be unaffectedly moved by the drastic power of a Beethovenian symphony, it is-to say the least-unclear and the impression produced by these tone-works is at bottom but imperfect and fragmentary. But where this coherence is not to hand, the guild-like federation of our art-professors can only be an outward one; while the growth and fashioning of art from within outwards cannot depend upon a fellowship which is nothing but an artificial system,- but only in the separate unit, from the individuality of its specific nature, can a natural formative and evolutionary impulse take operation by its own instinctive inner laws. Only on the fulness of the special gifts of an individual artist-nature, can that art-creative impulse feed itself which nowhere finds its nourishment in outer Nature; for this individuality alone can find in its particularity, in its personal intuition, in its distinctive longing, craving, and willing, the stuff wherewith to give the art-mass form, the stuff for which it looks in vain in outer Nature. In the individuality of this one and separate human being does Music first become a purely human art; she devours up this individuality,- from the dissolution of its elements to gain her own condensement, her own individualisation.
Thus we see in Music as in the other arts, though from totally different causes, mannerisms and so-called
