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ing 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 al-
ready 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.
- What a torture are books written in German to a
reader who has a THIRD ear! How indignantly he stands
beside the slowly turning swamp of sounds without tune
and rhythms without dance, which Germans call a ‘book’!
And even the German who READS books! How lazily, how
reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans know,
and consider it obligatory to know, that there is ART in
every good sentence—art which must be divined, if the
sentence is to be understood! If there is a misunderstand-
ing about its TEMPO, for instance, the sentence itself is
misunderstood! That one must not be doubtful about the
rhythm-determining syllables, that one should feel the
breaking of the too-rigid symmetry as intentional and as a
charm, that one should lend a fine and patient ear to every
STACCATO and every RUBATO, that one should divine
the sense in the sequence of the vowels and diphthongs, and
how delicately and richly they can be tinted and retinted in
the order of their arrangement—who among book-reading
Germans is complaisant enough to recognize such duties
