CHAP. productions of the fine arts alone to produce this epheXXVIII. meral reverie, and when it is awakened it is the same 1800-48. in all. The emotion produced by the Holy Families of 83. Haydn. Raphael is identical with that awakened by the symphonies of Mozart, and akin to that which springs from the contemplation of the Parthenon of Athens, or reflection on the Penseroso of Milton. Mozart had the very highest powers; but though gifted with the faculty of producing the sublime, he inclined, like Schiller, to the tender or pathetic, and never moved the heart so profoundly as when his lyre rung responsive to the wail of affection or the notes of love. HAYDN was a very great composer, but his character was different as a whole from either Beethoven or Mozart. His conceptions were in the highest degree sublime; human imagination never conceived anything more lofty than some bursts in the "Creation." They have rendered into sound with magic force the idea, "Let there be light; and there was light." If a continued comparison is permitted to the great masters of the pencil, he was the Anibale Caracci of music. Like him, his powers were great and various, but he aimed rather at their display than the expression of genuine heartfelt feeling. Not that he was without sentiment, and could not, when he so inclined, give it the most charming expression; no great master in any of the fine arts ever was without it. But it was not the native bent of his mind; that led him rather to the exhibition of his great and varied powers. His reputation with the world in general is perhaps greater than that of Beethoven, because there is more simplicity in his compositions; one key-note is more uniformly sounded, and a single emotion which can be shared by all is more effectively produced. But for that very reason he is less the object of impassioned admiration to the gifted few to whom the highest powers and deepest mysteries of the art are familiar, and who know how that great master could wield the former and CHAP. penetrate the latter. XXVIII. 1800-48. No Englishman need be told that HANDEL was a very 84. great composer. In the composition of warlike music- Handel. of those strains which are to animate the soldier in the field of battle, and cause danger and wounds and death to be forgotten-he never was surpassed. It was not merely, however, in the composition of these animating and heart-stirring pieces that Handel was great; his powers were as various as they were transcendant, and no one has ever expressed the feelings of piety, the glow of adoration, with greater effect by the wordless but allpowerful eloquence of the ear. No musical festival can ever take place without his works occupying a prominent place, and from age to age they will continue, like the poems of Homer, to enchant successive generations, and perpetuate, in the most aerial of the fine arts, the glory of the Fatherland. It has been the extraordinary lot of Germany to have 85. produced almost in a single generation five of the greatest Mendelsmusical composers which the world ever knew. Little sohn. inferior to any of the three who had gone before him in the peculiar branches in which they excelled, MENDELSSOHN was superior to any in the felicity with which he wielded their varied powers. If his immortal predecessors exceeded him in separate compositions, he was superior to them in the genius of his combinations, and the bewitching manner in which he united in a single piece all the charms of melody and all the magic of harmony. him, as compared with Beethoven and Mozart, may be said, in the words of the poet, applied to the masters of song "The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, Of Mendelssohn's genius is of the very highest kind; 1800-48. CHAP. there is no one capable of judging of the subject who XXVIII. does not regard it with the utmost enthusiasm. Beyond any other known composer-more so than either Rossini or Mozart-his compositions unite many and varied beauties, indicating a mind full of conceptions, and capable of turning its vast powers at will to the expression of any sentiment, the expression of any charm. In his "Lieder ohne Worte," of world-wide reputation, and his "Overture to the Midsummer Night's Dream," he has shown himself as thorough a master of tenderness and brilliancy, as in his oratorios of "St Paul" and "Elijah" he has of the lofty and sublime. This is the invariable characteristic of the highest class of genius-that which is master not less of itself than others, and can regulate even in its wildest flights the powers of an imagination which charms the world by a strength of mind which nothing can shake, a delicacy of taste which nothing can pervert. 86. Glück. SPOHR, the author of the celebrated opera of "Faust," Spohr and and GLÜCK, of many famed ones, in particular “Iphigenie," are both too celebrated in the musical world not to deserve a place in the gallery, however imperfect, of German genius during the last half-century. Their merits, universally appreciated by the musical world, are less so by the public in general, for a reason peculiar to music, or at least more applicable to it than to any other of the fine arts. This is, that though it is the one of the fine arts which in its simpler form is most universally felt by the whole of mankind, it is the one which, in its more complicated, is felt in its full force by the smallest circle. In truth, no one can duly appreciate, or even understand, the higher branches of music, to whom nature has not given not merely the delicacy of ear requisite for appreciating the charm of sound, but the flexibility and power of hand capable of producing it. Like the figures of Michael Angelo, he must be a thorough draughtsman who can even understand them. XXVIII. 1800-48. 87. on the influ ence of re cent disas mind. Lord Bacon says that felicities are the blessings of the CHAP. Old Testament, and misfortunes of the New. Never was a more striking example of the truth of this profound observation afforded than in the intellectual resurrection Reflections of Germany during the last half-century. It is sometimes well for nations as well as individuals to be in affliction. Compare the selfishness and egotism, the courtly corruption German and popular indifference, the aristocratic pride and general submissiveness of the first part of this period, with the generous sacrifices and heroic struggles of the war of liberation, the intellectual activity, social amelioration, and vast stride in national energy, and in the development of the elements of future freedom which have succeeded it, and the immense impulse given to the German mind by the war of the French Revolution will at once appear. It is not in vain that their fields have been drenched with blood; that the chariot of Napoleon has rolled over their surface; that the iron of subjugation has entered their soul, its bitterness been brought home to every dwelling; with those mortifications the courage was strengthened which might redress, in that agony the spirit was inhaled which might overcome them. Periods of suffering are seldom in the end lost to the cause of humanity, or the moral discipline of nations; it is the sunshine of prosperity which spreads the fatal corruption. The parallel bursts of Grecian genius after the Persian invasion; of Roman, with the civil wars of Cæsar and Pompey; in Italy, after the effort of the Crusades; in England, with the Great Rebellion; in France, with the Revolution; in Germany, after the war of Liberation, prove that periods of national disaster form part of the general system of Divine administration, and are the great means by which individual selfishness is obliterated by common feeling, and energy called forth by the rude discipline of suffering. CHAPTER XXIX. FRANCE FROM THE EXTINCTION OF THE HEREDITARY PEER- REVOLT IN THE CLOISTER OF ST MÉRI IN JUNE 1832, XXIX. 1831. 1. crease of the Crown changes. By the suppression of the Hereditary Peerage, and CHAP. vesting the choice of the members of the Upper House for life in the executive, the French Revolutionists had carried out their principles, which were less directed against Great in- the Crown than the aristocracy, and aimed rather at the power of equality of political rights than the establishment of from these security from restraint or personal freedom. But by so doing they had immensely increased the power of the executive magistrate, by whatever name he might be called, because they had rendered all the authorities in the State dependent upon his appointment, and made the Tuileries the centre from which not only all the real power, but all the lucrative patronage of the Government was to flow. To a generation thirsting for pleasure and excitement, and tormented with artificial wants, which, save from government appointments, they had no means of gratifying, this circumstance before long gave an immense preponderance to the Crown. Asiatic had been exchanged for European civilisation; the prefects had come in place of the pashas; but with that change had come also the loss of that hereditary independence and fixity of purpose, which, from the influence of territorial possessions descending from father to son, has characterised European society, |