own fairy-tales round such music:  I see no harm in the practice, but only good, so long as we understand what we are about.  Music, it is true, is something other than, in a sense more than, either thought or feeling or even poetry, and cannot be reduced to any of them (nor any of them to it).  The universe would be poor indeed if it could be so.  But none the less the truth may be, as Spinoza thought, that the universe is at once a unity and a unity with many facets, so that any one facet, while for ever unique, can bring to our minds all the mysteries of the rest.

In any case, the high confidence that breathes in the music of a hundred years ago meets us again in the philosophers.

Hegel, born in the same year as Beethoven and Wordsworth (1770), is sure that nothing can resist the onslaught of man’s spirit.  ’Stronger than the gates of Hell are the gates of Thought.’  Fichte is convinced that there waits in man, only to be developed, a power that will unite him with all other men and at the same time develop his own personality to the full.  In a sense, the deepest, each man is his fellow-men, and they are he.

How much this conception has affected modern thought can be seen in a recent and very remarkable book, The New State,[73] where the very basis of democracy is shown to be the faith in this essential unity, a unity to be worked out, not yet realized, but capable of realization, a faith stirring all through the modern world, in ways expected and unexpected, from Syndicalism to the League of Nations.

Later than Hegel and Fichte, the great Positivist conception of life preached by Comte is instinct with this belief that man united with his fellows, and only as so united, can attain heights undreamt-of and unlimited.

The flood-tide of this faith flowed far into the nineteenth century.  The Italian Mazzini, leader of revolt in 1848, was filled with it.  Prophet of the most generous political gospel ever preached, he lived on the hope that, if freedom were given to the nations and duty set before them, they would prove worthy of their double mission, and peace would come to pass between all peoples.

But even Mazzini had his moments of agonizing doubt.  And others beside him, men of lesser intellect as well as greater, were soon to raise, or had already raised, voices, stern or fretful, of protest and criticism.  It became clear at last that this joyous confidence rested on a very definite view of life and one that might easily be challenged, the view, namely, that at bottom the universe meant well to man, that his greatest aspirations were compatible with each other and nowise beyond attainment.  Almost from the first there were men of the modern world who did challenge this.  Byron and Schopenhauer are significant figures, both born in the same year, only eighteen years later than the great Three of 1770, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven.  Byron is full of moody questionings, Schopenhauer of much more than questionings.  Against the dauntless optimism of Hegel, he flatly denies that the universe is good, or happiness possible for man.  On the contrary, at the heart of it and of him there lies an infinite unrest, never to be quieted until man himself gives up the Will to Live and sinks back into the Unconscious from which he came.