It is hardly necessary to add that in his
reflections music was never detached from its generic connection with
the fine arts, inclusive of industrial, decorative, and domestic art.
Like many another student and lover of the past Riehl was a man of
conservative habits of mind, without, however, deserving to be classed
as a confirmed reactionary. His anti-democratic tendency of thought
sprang plausibly enough from convictions and beliefs which owed their
existence, in some part at least, to strained and whimsical analogies.
His defense of a static order of society rested at bottom upon a sturdy
hatred of Socialism, then in the earliest stage of its rise. This
ingrained aversion to the new, suggested to him a rather curious sort of
rational or providential sanction for the old. He discerned, by an odd
whim of the fancy, in the physical as well as the spiritual constitution
of Germany a preeestablished principle of "trialism.". According to this
queer notion, Germany is in every respect divided _in partes tres_. The
territorial conformation itself, with its clean subdivision into
lowland, intermediate, and highland, demonstrates the natural
tri-partition to which a like "threeness" of climate, nationality, and
even of religion corresponds. Hence the tripartition of the population
into peasantry, bourgeoisie, and nobility should be upheld as an
inviolable, foreordained institution, and to this end the separate
traditions of the classes be piously conserved.
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