For a century and a quarter the mob of July 14th has stood like a wall between the Middle Ages and modern times. No less than modern politics, modern thought and all its artistic expression date from 1789. For, against the authority of hereditary rules and rulers, the mob of the Bastille proclaimed another authority, namely that of facts. The notion that forms should square with facts and not facts with forms then became the basis of men’s thinking. This truth had existed as a theory in the minds of individual thinkers for many decades--even for many centuries. But the Parisian mob first revealed the truth of it by enacting it as a fact. From that fact the truth spread among men’s minds, forcing them, according to their lights, to bring all forms and authorities to the test of facts. Babies, who were to be the next generation’s great men, were brought up in this kind of thought and were subtly inoculated with it so that their later thinking was based upon it, whether they would or no. And so men have come to ask of a monarch, not whether he is a legitimate son of his house, but whether he derives his authority from the will of the nation. They have come to ask of a philosophy, not whether it is consistent, but whether it is true. And they have come to ask of an art-form, not whether it is perfect, but whether it is fitting to its subject-matter. When we come to compare the music of the nineteenth century with that of the century preceding we find a contrast as striking as that between the state of Europe as Napoleon left it with that as he found it. The Europe of the eighteenth century was for the most part a conglomeration of petty states, without national feeling, without standing armies in the modern sense--states which their princes ruled as private property for the supplying of their personal wants, with power of life and death over their subjects; states whose soldiers ran away after the second volley and whose warfare was little more than a formal and rather stupid chess game; states whose statesmanship was the merest personal intrigue of favorites. Among these states a few half-trained mobs of revolutionary armies spread terror, and the young Napoleon amazed them by demonstrating that soldiers who had their hearts in a great cause could outfight those who had not.