Yet even here we are forced back for a moment to the political background. For it is to be noticed that the great German composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century found their activities centred in and near Vienna: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert are all preëminently Austrian. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century--that is, after the death of Schubert--there is not a single great composer living in Vienna for more than a short period of time. The political situation of Vienna, the stronghold of darkness at this time, must have had a blighting effect on vigorous and open-minded men. At a time when the most stimulating intellectual life was surging through Germany generally, Vienna was suffering the most rigid censorship and not a ray of light from the intellectual world was permitted to enter the city. Weber felt this in 1814 in Austrian Prague. He wrote: ‘The few composers and scholars who live here groan for the most part under a yoke which has reduced them to slavery and taken away the spirit which distinguishes the true free-born artist.’ Weber, a true free-born artist, left Prague at the earliest opportunity and went to Dresden, where the national movement, though frowned upon, was open and aggressive. Schubert, on the contrary, because of poverty and indolence, never left Vienna and the territory immediately surrounding. In the preceding generation, when music was still flowing in the calm traditions, composers could work best in such a shut-in environment. (It is possibly well to remember, however, that Austria had a fit of liberalism in the two decades preceding Napoleon’s régime.) But with the nineteenth century things changed; when the beacon of national life was lighting the best spirits of the time, the composers left Vienna and scattered over Germany or settled in Paris and London. Schubert alone remained, his imagination indifferent to the world beyond. In all things but one he was a remnant of the eighteenth century, living on within the walls of the eighteenth century Vienna. But this one thing, which made him a romanticist, a link between the past and the present, a promise for the future, was connected, like all the other important things of the time, with the revolution and the Napoleonic convulsions. It was, in short, the German national movement expressed in the only form in which it could penetrate to Vienna; namely, the romantic movement in literature. Not in the least that Schubert recognized it as such; his simple soul doubtless saw nothing in it but an opportunity for beautiful melodies. But its inspiration was the German nationalist movement.