Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
weiss, was ich leide,
allein und abgetrennt
von aller Freude.
But presently true intensity of life appeared to lie rather in being a victorious general, or an ironmaster, or a commercial traveller, or a reveller in the Friedrich-strasse, or a spy and conspirator anywhere in the world.
All these turbid and nondescript ambitions are in a sense artificial; the Germans accept them now as a thousand years ago they accepted Christianity, because such things are suddenly thrust upon them. By nature they are simple, honest, kindly, easily pleased. There is no latent irony or disbelief in their souls. The pleasures of sense, plain and copious, they enjoy hugely, long labour does not exasperate them, science fills them with satisfaction, music entrances them. There ought to be no happier or more innocent nation in this world. Unfortunately their very goodness and simplicity render them helpless; they are what they are dragooned to be. There is no social or intellectual disease to which, in spots, they do not succumb, as to an epidemic: their philosophy itself is an example of this. They have the defects of the newly prosperous; they are far too proud of their possessions, esteeming them for being theirs, without knowing whether they are good of their kind. Culture is a thing seldom mentioned by those who have it. The real strength of the Germans lies not in those external achievements of which at this moment they make so much—for they may outgrow this new materialism of theirs—it lies rather in what they have always prized, their Gemüth and their music.
Perhaps these two things have a common root. Emotion is inarticulate, yet there is a mighty movement in it, and a great complexity of transitions and shades. This intrinsic movement of the feelings is ordinarily little noticed because people are too wide awake, or too imaginative. Everything is a fact or a picture to them, and their emotions seem to them little but obvious qualities of things. They roundly call things beautiful, painful, holy, or ridiculous; they do not speak of their Gemüth, although, of course, it is by virtue of their emotions that they pass such judgments. But when the occasions of our emotions, the objects that call them forth, are not so instantly focussed, when we know better what we feel than why we feel it, then we seem to have a richer and more massive sensibility. Our feelings absorb our attention because they remain a thing apart: they seem to us wonderfully deep because we do not ground them in things external.
Now music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings without attaching them to events or objects in the world. Music is articulate, but articulate in a language which avoids, or at least veils the articulation of the world we live in; it is, therefore, the chosen art of a mind to whom the world is still foreign. If this seems in one way an incapacity, it is also a privilege. Not to be at home in the world, to prize it chiefly for echoes which it may have in the soul, to have a soul that can give forth echoes, or that can generate internal dramas of sound out of its own resources—may this not be a more enviable endowment than that of a mind all surface, a sensitive plate only able to photograph this not too beautiful earth? In any case, for better or for worse, inward sensibility, unabsorbed in worldly affairs, exists in some people; a life, as it were, still in the womb and not yet in contact with the air. But let these inspired musicians, masters in their own infinite realms, beware of the touch of matter. Let them not compose a system of the universe out of their Gemüth, as they might a symphony. Let them not raise their baton in the face of the stars or of the nations, and think to lead them like an orchestra.
[CHAPTER XVI]
EGOTISM IN PRACTICE
Theories in their own ethereal essence can have no influence on events. But the men who conceive and adopt a theory form, in doing so, certain habits of discrimination and of reaction to things. In fact, they have conceived and adopted their theory because their habits of apprehension and action suggested it to them, or could be brought to suggest it: the explicit theory is a symbol and omen of their practical attitude, of their way, as the phrase has it, of grasping the situation.