Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/100

88 Vaterlandslied (1700) and his Hermannschlacht to words by Klopstock. Presently the young Mozart, in his palpitating letters, written from Paris in 1778, is moved to fury against the French and Italians:

"My hands and feet are trembling with the ardent desire to teach the French to acknowledge, esteem and fear the Germans more and ever more."

This exacerbated patriotism, which displeases us in great artists like Mozart, because it makes them grossly unjust to the genius of other races, had at least the result of compelling them to emerge from their atmosphere of arrogant individualism or debilitated dilettantism. To German art, which breathed a rarified atmosphere, and would have perished of asphyxia had it not inhaled for two hundred years the oxygen of religious faith, it brought a rush of fresh air. These new musicians did not write for themselves alone; they wrote for all their fellow-countrymen; they wrote for all men.

And here German patriotism found itself in harmony with the theories of the "philosophers" of those days: Art was no longer to be the appanage of a select few; it was the property of all. Such was the Credo of the new period; and we find it repeated in every key:

"He who can benefit many" says Telemann,