there might not be some truth in it. The first _lieder_ written to
poems of Goethe were sober and apt: soon Schubert came and infused his
romantic sentimentality into them and gave them a twist: Schumann
introduced his girlish languor: and, down to Hugo Wolf, the movement had
gone on towards more stress in declamation, indecent analysis, a
presumptuous endeavor to leave no smallest corner of the soul unlit.
Every veil about the mysteries of the heart was rent. Things said in all
earnestness by a man were now screamed aloud by shameless girls who
showed themselves in their nakedness.

Christophe was rather ashamed of such art, by which he was himself
conscious of being contaminated: and, without seeking to go back to the
past,--(an absurd, unnatural desire),--he steeped himself in the spirit
of those of the masters of the past who had been haughtily discreet in
their thought and had possessed the sense of a great collective art:
like Handel, who, scorning the tearful piety of his time and country,
wrote his colossal _Anthems_ and his oratorios, those heroic epics
which are songs of the nations for the nations. The difficulty was to
find inspiring subjects, which, like the Bible in Handel's time, could
arouse emotions common to all the nations of modern Europe. Modern
Europe had no common book: no poem, no prayer, no act of faith which was
the property of all. Oh! the shame that should overwhelm all the
writers, artists, thinkers, of to-day! Not one of them has written, not
one of them has thought, for all. Only Beethoven has left a few pages of
a new Gospel of consolation and brotherhood: but only musicians can read
it, and the majority of men will never hear it. Wagner, on the hill at
Bayreuth, has tried to build a religious art to bind all men together.
But his great soul had too little simplicity and too many of the
blemishes of the decadent music and thought of his time: not the fishers
of Galilee have come to the holy hill, but the Pharisees.