less known than it should be—­desired the development of all men every whit as much as he desired the high culture of a few.  It was for the double goal that he worked.  ‘Only through all men,’ he writes in a notable passage, ’only through all men, can mankind be made.’[72] All good lies in Man, he tells us again, and must be developed, ’only not in one man, but in many’.  Goethe, the so-called aristocrat, has given us here as true a formula for the democratic faith as could well be found.  And to him, as to Shelley and to Wordsworth, Poetry and Science were not enemies but friends dearer than sisters.  Those three, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Goethe, foreshadowed a new poetry of science that has never yet been achieved, though fine work has been done by Tennyson, Whitman, Sully Prudhomme, and Meredith.

Goethe, moreover, again like Shelley and the French, broke with all ideals of mere self-abnegation.  In his poem, ‘General Confession’, he makes his disciples repent of ever having missed an opportunity for enjoyment and resolve never so to offend again.  Here, as often, Goethe comes into the closest touch with our modern feeling.  We, too, can never return to the Franciscan ideal of poverty, celibacy, and obedience as the highest life for man on earth.  We have done with self-denial except as the means to a human end.  We are still in the tide of what I would call the Modern Renascence; we claim the whole garden of the world for our own, the tree with the knowledge of good and evil included, reacting even from Christian ideals if they can make no room for that.  But, after all, the characteristic of the belief dominant a century ago was exactly that such room could be made, that Hellenism could be combined with Christianity, and self-development with self-denial.

And this belief is, I think, reflected in the music of the time.  Schubert, that sweetest soul of tears and laughter, understands every shade of wistfulness, and yet again and again in his music it seems as though the universe had become, to quote a lover of his, one immense and glorious blackbird.  Mozart, in ‘The Magic Flute’, as Goethe seems to have recognized, sings the very song of union between the unreflecting joy of the natural man and the strenuous self-devotion of the awakened spirit.  Beethoven, greatest of them all, plumbs the lowest depths of suffering and then astounds and comforts us by ineffable vistas of happiness.  After years of personal misery he crowns the glorious series of his symphonies by the one that ends in a hymn of joy, freedom, and faith, embracing the whole world—­’Diese Kuss der ganzen Welt’—­that majestic open melody, clear as the morning, fresh as though it came from far oversea, greater even than any of the great harmonies that have gone before, larger than the tortured human heart, steadier than the sudden ecstasy of the spirits set free, stronger than the swansong of the dying, a melody content with earth because it is conscious of heaven.  I offer no apology for weaving my