Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/525

 CHAPTER XXXI

MENDELSSOHN AND THE LEIPSIC CIRCLE

194. Mendelssohn's Usefulness.—Beginning some years earlier than Schumann, and then continuing side by side with him, ran the picturesque and influential career of Mendelssohn. The vivacity of his genius, his eminent intellectual equipment, and his gifts for social leadership and organization early gave him a commanding position, which he used with zestful earnestness for the advance of artistic culture until cut off in the midst of his years. Like Schumann, he was drawn to Leipsic, and there, as a conductor and teacher, he found ample scope for his irrepressible vitality. His extensive travels had given him a wide reputation. The stream of compositions from his pen was constant and full of charm. Pupils and inquirers came to him from far and wide. His style and his ideas were for a time standard in many circles. Thus he had an opportunity in many respects unique, and he met it with superb élan.

But the quality of his musical impulse was distinctly different from Schumann's. He was poetic and romantic without doubt, but with no such depth of conviction. He was too well poised for strange intensities or daring flights. He had an exquisite sense of form and balance, analogous to Mozart's, and a stronger craving for objective beauty than for subjective expression. Hence he was more inclined than Schumann to cling to the classical patterns of style and to the unpassionate classical spirit. With him commenced a new stage in the classical development, one that was warmed and enriched by a new fullness of feeling, and that sometimes pushed out toward new paths, but which, after all, was more the natural sequel of the past than a starting-point for the future.

For this very reason he performed a real service in his day. Without seeming to oppose the ultra-romantic outreaching after self-declaration and unfettered imagination, he yet compelled attention to the just claims of symmetry, technical finish and