Still, the case of Mahler makes one hesitate a while before passing judgment. Whereas it is probable that Richard Strauss would have deteriorated no matter how friendly the age in which he lived, that Reger would have been just as much a pedant had he been born in Paris instead of in Bavaria, that Schoenberg would have developed into his mathematical frigidity wherever he resided, it is possible that Mahler's fate might have been different had he not been born in the Austria of the 1860's. For if Mahler's music is pre-eminently a reflection of Beethoven's, if he never spoke in authentic accents, if out of his vast dreams of a great modern popular symphonic art, out of his honesty, his sincerity, his industry, his undeniably noble and magnificent traits, there resulted only those unhappy boring colossi that are his nine symphonies, it is indubitably, to a great extent, the consequence of the fact that he, the Jew, was born in a society that made Judaism, Jewish descent and Jewish traits, a curse to those that inherited them. The destiny that had made him Jew decreed that, did he speak out fully, he would have to employ an idiom that would recall the harsh accents of the Hebrew language quite as much as that of any tongue spoken by the peoples of Europe. It decreed that, whatever the history of the art he practised, whatever the character of the age in which he lived, he could not impress himself upon his medium without impregnating it with the traits he inherited from his ancestors. It decreed that in speaking he would have to suffuse musical art with the qualities and characteristics engraved in the stock by the history and vicissitudes of his race, by its age-long sojourn in the deserts of Arabia and on the barren hills of Syria, by the constraint of its religion and folkways, by its titanic and terrible struggle for survival against the fierce peoples of Asia, by the marvelous vitality and self-consciousness and exclusiveness that carried it whole across lands and times, out of the eternal Egypt through the eternal Red Sea. But it was just the racial attributes, the racial gesture and accent, that a man in Mahler's position found inordinately difficult to register. For Austrian society put a great price on his suppression of them. It permitted him to participate in its activities only on the condition that he did not remind it continually of his alienhood, of his racial consciousness. It permitted him the sense of equality, of fraternity, of citizenship, only on the condition that he should seek to suppress within himself all awareness of his descent and character and peculiarities, and attempt to identify himself with its members, and try to feel just as they felt and speak just as they spoke.