245

before the masses; from the beginning it was second-rate music, which was little thought of by genuine musicians. It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master, who, on account of his lighter, purer, happier soul, quickly acquired admiration, and was equally quickly forgotten: as the beautiful episode of German music. But with regard to Robert Schumann, who took things seriously, and has been taken seriously from the first⁠—he was the last that founded a school⁠—do we not now regard it as a satisfaction, a relief, a deliverance, that this very Romanticism of Schumann’s has been surmounted? Schumann, fleeing into the “Saxon Switzerland” of his soul, with a half Werther-like, half Jean-Paul-like nature (assuredly not like Beethoven! assuredly not like Byron!)⁠—his Manfred music is a mistake and a misunderstanding to the extent of injustice; Schumann, with his taste, which was fundamentally a petty taste (that is to say, a dangerous propensity⁠—doubly dangerous among Germans⁠—for quiet lyricism and intoxication of the feelings), going constantly apart, timidly withdrawing and retiring, a noble weakling who revelled in nothing but anonymous joy and sorrow, from the beginning a sort of girl and noli me tangere ⁠—this Schumann was already merely a German event in music, and no longer a European event, as Beethoven had been, as in a still greater degree Mozart had been; with Schumann German music was threatened with its greatest danger, that of losing the voice for the soul of Europe and sinking into a merely national affair.