Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/31

Rh effort; and perhaps there is in it likewise a certain amount of ill-feeling, an unconfessed jealousy which is not willing to share its treasures with others, "as dying stags," according to Pliny, "conceal and bury their antlers that they may not serve as medicine for human beings." Musical folk are only too often constituted thus. Some of them, when they possess a fine composition, will part with the very shirts on their backs rather than divulge a note of it. Let the artist beware of this sordid economy in respect of his goods, his ideas, his energies! Let him scatter them generously about him, without being vain because of them, referring all glory to its Divine source. Let him do all the good of which he is capable. If he receives no thanks (which is the rule in this world) his clear conscience will be his reward; it will give him a foretaste of the celestial pleasure which awaits him after this life, when he will be summoned to the chapel of the Almighty's castle (Schlosscapelle) "where the angels and the seraphim play music of a perfect sweetness."

There is in these ideas, as in the whole book, a balanced judgment, a self-confidence, a hidden strength which explain the tranquillity with which the old German masters of the eighteenth century—such men as Schütz, Johann Christian Bach, Johann Michaël Bach, Pachelbel and Buxtehude regarded the future. They had measured the rest of the world, and their own powers. They awaited their time.

For Germany the hour has struck; it is already a thing of the past. What a contrast between the feverish excitement displayed by the German