Daniel Gregory Mason

CHAPTER VIII
BEETHOVEN (CONTINUED)

History and analytic thought alike reveal the fact that the highest pinnacles of art can be scaled only at those happy moments when favoring conditions of two distinct kinds happen to coincide. The artist who is to attain supreme greatness must in the first place have at his command a type of artistic technique that has already been developed to the verge of maturity, but that still awaits its complete efflorescence. As Sir Hubert Parry well says: “Inspiration without methods and means at its disposal will no more enable a man to write a symphony than to build a ship or a cathedral.” These means must be already highly developed, yet not to the point of exhaustion. If the technique is primitive, no ardor of artistic enthusiasm can reach through it a full utterance; if all its potencies have been actualized, no inspiration can reanimate it.

In the second place, the artist so happy as to inherit a technique ripe but not over-ripe, must also, if he is to attain supreme greatness, be in unison with the thought and feeling of his age, echo from the common mind of his fellows a deep, broad, and universal eloquence, as though all mankind spoke through him as mouthpiece. He must live in the midst of some great general awakening of the human spirit, to which he lends voice. Merely personal art can be interesting, graceful, charming, moving, noble, but it cannot have the profundity, the breadth, the elevation, which we recognize in the highest art, such as Greek sculpture, Elizabethan drama, or the symphonic music we are now studying. “A great man,” says Emerson, “finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love of the materials he wrought in. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their labors.”[44]

When Beethoven resolved on his “new path,” his ambition was favored by the two necessary conditions. That he had at his command an inherited technique, just brought to the verge of maturity, we have already seen. And he had furthermore, behind and below him, as a rich nourishing soil for his genius, a great, new, common enthusiasm of humanity.

The eighteenth century had been a time of formalism in art and literature, of rigid conventionality in social life, of paternalism in politics, and of dogmatic ecclesiastical authority in religion. At its end, however, all those dim, half-conscious efforts of humanity towards freer and fuller life which we have indicated under the general term of idealism, were beginning to reach definiteness and self-consciousness. Men were beginning to assert deliberately and openly what they had long been feeling intuitively but insecurely. They were boldly erasing from their standards the mediÆval formula: “Poverty, celibacy, and obedience,” to write in its place the modern one: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” They were revolting from the tyrannies of Church and State, to proclaim the sacredness of the individual soul.

It was Beethoven’s high privilege to be the artistic spokesman of this new, enfranchised humanity. Haydn, as we know, had reflected for the first time in music the universal interest in all kinds of human emotion, sacred and profane, that marked the dawn of the new era. But in his music the emotion remains naÏve, impulsive, childlike; it has not taken on the earnestness, the sense of responsibility, of manhood. It is still in the spontaneous stage, has not become deliberate, resolute, purposeful. But with Beethoven childishness is put away, and the new spirit steps boldly out into the world, aware of its obligations as well as of its privileges, clear-eyed, sad, and serious, to live the full yet difficult life of freedom.

The closeness of Beethoven’s relation to the idealistic spirit of his time is shown equally by two distinct yet supplementary aspects of his work. As it was characteristic of the idealism which fed him to set supreme store by human emotion in all its intensity and diversity, so it is characteristic of his music to voice emotion with a fullness, poignancy, definiteness, and variety that sharply contrast it with the more formal decorative music of his forerunners. And as it was equally characteristic of idealism to recognize the responsibilities of freedom, to restrain and control all particular emotions in the interest of a balanced spiritual life, so it was equally characteristic of Beethoven to hold all his marvelous emotional expressiveness constantly in subordination to the integral effect of his composition as a whole, to value plastic beauty even more highly than eloquent appeal to feeling. In other words, Beethoven the musician is equally remarkable for two qualities, eloquence of expression and beauty of form, which in his best works are always held in an exact and firmly controlled balance. And if we would fully understand his supremacy, we must perceive not only his achievements in both directions, but the high artistic power with which he correlates them. Just as the courage to insist on the rights of the individual, and the wisdom to recognize and support the rights of others, are the two essentials of true idealism, so eloquence and beauty are the equal requisites of genuine art.

So closely interwoven, so mutually reactive, are these twin merits of expression and form in the great works of Beethoven’s prime—in the pianoforte sonatas from the Waldstein to Opus 90, in the String Quartets, Opus 59 and 74, in the fourth and fifth piano concertos and the unique concerto for violin, in the Overture to “Coriolanus,” the incidental music to “Egmont,” and the opera, “Fidelio,” in the Mass in C, and above all in the six great symphonies from the “Eroica” to the Eighth—that it seems like wanton violence and falsification to separate them, even for the purposes of study. Synthesis, at any rate, should go hand in hand with analysis; we should constantly remember that the various qualities our critical reagents discern in this music, exist in it not, as in our analysis, single and detached, but fused and interpenetrative in one artistic whole. The chemist may find carbon, and hydrogen, and oxygen in the rose, but a rose is something more, something ineffably more, than a compound of these chemical elements.

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If, bearing constantly in mind the artificiality of analysis, we nevertheless attempt an enumeration of separate qualities in Beethoven’s mature work, we are first of all arrested by the vigor, definiteness, and variety of his expression. In his symphonies from the Eroica on, for example, there is a far more direct and poignant utterance of a wide range of feeling, than we can find anywhere in Haydn or Mozart, or in the early Beethoven. The first “subjects” of the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, shown in Figure XX, illustrate strikingly, brief as they are, this diversity and force of the works of the middle period. Who that had once heard them could ever forget them? And who could ever confuse one with another? How they pierce through the veil of the past, with their vibrant accent of the living, breathing man!

Beethoven’s subjects, attaining so wonderful a degree of individualization, mark the culminating point of a long process of crystallization of definite forms out of the tonal matrix of earlier music. Ever since the Florentine reformers essayed to infuse into academic art the human expressiveness of idealized popular songs and dances, the latent potentialities of vocal phrases to express earnest emotion, and of vigorous rhythms to express the more active and animated feelings, had been becoming more and more fully utilized. We saw how the popular songs were embodied and transfigured in the sarabandes and other slow, serious movements of the eighteenth century suites, and how the rhythms of the popular dances were wrought into their idealized gavottes, bourrÉes, minuets, and gigues.[45] We saw how Haydn, in his naÏve yet skillful way, seized upon and refined the primitive but emotionally vital folk-music of his race.[46] We saw how Mozart contributed still further, by his wonderful genius for organization, to the progress in delicacy, variety, and breadth, of the same type of art. And now we see, in Beethoven, the issue of this long growth: we see him bring to their apotheosis the eloquence of the song and the animation of the dance; we see him, by full utilization of the harmonic and rhythmic potentialities of structure, by vigorous exclusion of the irrelevant and the superfluous, by full concentration of all his faculties of heart and mind on the one idea in hand, attaining a definiteness, a variety, and a compelling eloquence of expression, that may fairly be said to mark an epoch. Before Beethoven music was already an art; with him it becomes also a language.

The variety of what Beethoven has to say is as remarkable as the precision and force with which he says it. To study him is to discern the fallacy of the view so often heard that sentimental expression is the only kind possible to music. In Beethoven one can observe at least four well-contrasted general types of expressiveness, to say nothing of the infinite gradations between them. There is, in the first place, and as perhaps the dominant quality in all his work, the virile energy, the massive and cyclopean power, as of a giant or a god, so well illustrated in the symphonic subjects of Figure XX. What vigor, what inexhaustible force, what a morning freshness and joy there is in such a theme as that of the “Eroica” Symphony! How inexorable is its rhythm, how broad, solid, and simple its harmonic foundation! What controlled excitement, what restrained ferocity, there is in that persistent four-tone motif of the Fifth Symphony—“Fate knocking at the door”! What swift, concise assertiveness, as in the fiat of an emperor, in the opening of the Eighth Symphony, though it was called by Beethoven “my little one”! Elemental strength is the most constant, pervasive quality of expression in Beethoven’s work.

Yet, like every comprehensively great man he had the feminine tenderness and sentiment without which primal power is primitive, and will mere willfulness. His ruggedness hid the most delicate sensibility. At his most heroic moments he is always melting into moods of wistfulness, yearning, and soft emotion. To go for illustration no further than the symphonies, it is sufficient to mention, in the “Eroica,” the hesitant fervor of the second subject of the first movement; the deep and noble pathos of the subject of the Funeral March; the clear and rich emotion of the Trio (in the third movement), with its wonderful final strains, of which Sir George Grove said: “If ever horns talked like flesh and blood, they do it here;” in the Fifth Symphony, the poignant appeal of the second subject of the first movement, and the ceaselessly questing, gently insistent mood of the Andante; and in the Seventh, the resigned, yet still aspiring state of feeling voiced by the melody in A-major in the Allegretto. But it is impossible to do more than shadow forth dimly, in words, the emotions that glow with such deep color in this music. Moreover, to enumerate them is as unnecessary as it is thankless. Every one who knows music at all, knows how incomparable is Beethoven in the expression of all shades of tender, romantic, and impassioned human feeling.

A third sort of expression characteristic of Beethoven is that of the whimsical, the perverse, the irrepressibly gay. Before him, the classical symphony had had room for the brisk jollity of the Haydn finale and for the forthright animation of the Mozart minuet; but nothing like the Beethoven scherzo had existed. In Italian the word scherzo means a joke; and when he substituted the rollicking scherzo for the more formal and stately minuet Beethoven introduced into music the element of banter, mischief, and whimsy. Even among his several scherzos, there is such a diversity of mood that they introduce into music far more than one new kind of expression; their fancy is protean, inexhaustible. The scherzo of the “Eroica” is a mixture of mystery, gaiety, and headlong elan; in that of the Fifth Symphony, a sort of groping as in darkness alternates with incisive, grandiose, military boldness; in the middle Allegro of the Pastoral Symphony, taking the place of the scherzo, there is rustic merry-making, the awkward, good-natured gambols of peasants; in the Presto of the Seventh, there is upwelling geniality, the broad smile of amiable indolence; and in the Minuet of the Eighth, the old minuet stateliness gives place to a mixture of animal spirits and intellectual subtlety. Nor are the scherzos proper the only embodiment of the antics of this musical Pan; such Finales as those of the Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth Symphonies are but transfigured, ennobled scherzos, with the largeness of the heroic spirit added to the fancy, whim, and tireless merriment of the insatiable humorist. Beethoven is the extreme exponent of the spirit of comedy in music.

A fourth mood distinguishable in Beethoven is the mood of mystery. He loves to suggest the illimitable and the transcendent, to dissolve himself in vagueness; to pique curiosity and stimulate imagination by long stretches of pianissimo, of amorphous, ambiguous harmony, of strange inarticulate melody that baffles the attention—long, wide hushes, audible silences. In these moods he seems to retire, after his onslaughts of expression, into the deep subterranean reservoirs of the unexpressed. The Introduction to the Fourth Symphony is an example; one hears in it, as it were, the groping of vast unorganized impulses that await a birth. The extended pianissimo passage that leads into the Reprise, in the same movement, makes a similar impression, the modulation to the home-key of B-flat, after the long groping in B-major, seeming like the opening of a window in a darkened room. The wide stretches of rippling violin figures, piano, in the “Scene by the Brook” of the Pastoral Symphony illustrate another use of this device of monotony. They affect the mind, as Beethoven meant they should, like a placid sun-bathed landscape at noon, flat, silent, motionless. But perhaps the most striking instance of all is that wonderful page in the Fifth Symphony that prepares for the Finale. The sustained C’s of the strings, the suppressed, barely audible tapping of the drums in the rhythm of the central motif of the work, the fragmentary, aimless, and yet cumulative phrases of the violins, instil a sense of some vast catastrophe impending; and then, after the deliberate, gradual crescendo, pressing upon every nerve, the great joyous theme of the Finale crashes in, to sweep all before it.

Marvelous indeed is this varied and ever forcible expression of feeling in the great works of Beethoven’s maturity; but even more marvelous is the steady power by which he organizes these feelings into forms of perfect beauty, the unfaltering control by which he keeps the intensely characteristic from degenerating into caricature, the impassioned from becoming hysterical. He never forgets that, as an artist, he is the master, not the slave, of his inspiration, however seizing it may be. Though he infuses into music an eloquence new to it, he remembers that it is still music, and that it must be beautiful as music. Titanic were the labors he imposed upon himself to give his compositions balance, symmetry, logical coherence, integral unity emerging from an infinite variety of parts. His sketch-books, several of which, edited by Nottebohm, have been published by Breitkopf and HÄrtel, are the standing evidence of what endless effort it cost him to be an artist. In them we behold him at work, day by day, eliminating the irrelevant, reinforcing the significant, exploring the sources of melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and structural variety, and returning upon his task to gather up all the threads into one complete, close-woven fabric. The result was a type of music seldom equalled, before or since, for that ordered richness, that complex simplicity, which is beauty.

An example or two will make this clearer than much description. The first subject of the Fifth Symphony, one of the most famous of Beethoven’s themes, is entirely made up of ingenious combinations of the “Fate Knocking at the Door” motif, as follows:

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How wonderful here is the stern and relentless logic of that insistently repeated rhythm, the utter naturalness of the melody which builds itself out of the various repetitions of the theme in different voices, and the rugged strength of the harmonic scheme of the entire passage! Had we not documentary evidence, we should find it hard to believe that this was not a sudden and complete thought, struck out by Beethoven at a blow in some moment of high musical excitement. Yet his sketch-book reveals that it grew by a very gradual process of amendment and refining from the monotonous, uninteresting, almost fatuous bit of patchwork shown in Figure XXII. Another, slightly more advanced, state of the same idea is shown in Figure XXIII. In both these passages the rhythm is almost the only element that even dimly suggests the august gravity of the final version; for the rest, these first attempts are depressingly futile.

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The well-known and universally admired subject of the Andante of the Fifth Symphony is another illustration of Beethoven’s artistic power. That was a rare skill indeed which could educe, even after long labor, this beautifully modulated and sustained theme (Figure XXIV), so subtle and varied in contour, from the trite embryo noted in Figure XXV.

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The evolution of Beethoven’s almost perfect ideas from their strangely featureless and uninteresting germs can perhaps be shown best of all, however, by the citation of several consecutive stages in the history of some single notable conception. The indescribably lovely second subject of the first movement of the Eroica Symphony is shown in its final form at (e) of Figure XXVI; (a), (b), (c), and (d) of the same figure being a few of the many sketches through which Beethoven approached it. The points of especial beauty in the matured theme appear sporadically in the earlier sketches. Of these the chief are: the insistent beat of the rhythm; the impressive cadence in the fourth measure and the beat of silence following it in the fifth; the rise to the poignant G in the seventh measure, and the lapse by rapid motion down to B-flat again; the sudden assumption of the minor mode in measure 9, and the modulation to the distant key of D-flat it suggests; and the uneven yet satisfying balance of the three complete phrases, together with the sense of being poised in air given by the sudden cessation of the rhythmic pulse at a point so distant from the key. The rhythm appears in the very first sketch, marked (a); the cadence and beat of silence appear in (b), as does also the rise to G in the melody, except that the G is flatted, slightly sentimentalizing the effect. The modulation to the key of D-flat appears in (c) and (d), but in each case its effectiveness is much weakened by the quickly succeeding further modulation. The sense of poise referred to is entirely lacking in these two variants, because a fourth phrase is added to the three essential ones. In the final form all the effects are made with certainty and economy.

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Beethoven’s method of drafting and re-drafting his subjects enabled him to bring them at last to a formal perfection undreamed of by less painstaking composers. His best themes combine almost the highest possible degree of variety and unity, and therefore attain almost the highest possible degree of beauty. We saw, in connection with the Quintet of Mozart (Figure XVIII), how high synthetic powers of mind enable a composer to combine different motifs in one theme in such a way as to attain great variety of parts with final unity of impression. Beethoven exhibits constantly, in his best work, an even higher degree of this synthetic power than Mozart was master of. He knew how to build the most diverse materials into a compact, indissoluble organism. His briefest themes often discover this power as strikingly as his long and elaborate movements. The first theme of the Sonata in A-major for Violoncello and Piano, which appears in Figure XXVII, is an example of the way the faculty shows itself within narrow limits. Here are six measures, each containing a different scheme of time values; yet the theme as a whole is as compelling in its unity and certainty of intention as it is engaging in its variety.

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The exploitation of the primary themes in the course of a long movement, however, the constant evocation from them of new meanings and interests, is of course the last and finest evidence of Beethoven’s genius in composition. It was in this logical drawing forth of the implications of his thought that he was unapproachable. He uses to admiration all those devices of development we have already enumerated—inversion, augmentation, diminution, shifted rhythm, and the rest—yet never descends to the mechanical, as his great successor, Brahms, who is perhaps the only modern composer who compares with him in this faculty of logical development of an idea, sometimes does. Beethoven always seems to be merely making explicit what was implied in the theme itself.

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In Figure XXVIII are put down a few of the more important modifications of the first subject of the Eroica Symphony, as an illustration of the inexhaustibility of fancy displayed by Beethoven in this sort of development. (a) is the theme in its initial form. Note how, with that mysterious C-sharp in the bass, in the fifth measure, the outline is momentarily blurred, and the insistence on the tones of the triad relaxed, until with measure 7 the key is re-entered and the sentence soon brought to a firm conclusion. No one but Beethoven could ever have conceived that C-sharp. In (b), which follows, in the score, immediately on (a), the second half of the motif is made the subject of a development by repetition, at a higher and higher pitch. In (c), which occurs after the second subject, and near the end of the first section of the entire movement, the same portion of the motif is further exploited. For the first four measures it is thrown back and forth in imitation. In the fifth, sixth and seventh measures it is given to the bass, in diminution (note how piquantly) and in the eighth measure it is both diminished and inverted, yet without giving the slightest impression of artificiality. The subject appears at (d), which is a part of the working-out portion of the movement, in the minor key, and rapidly modulating to distant keys, as is appropriate in that part of the composition the aim of which is to contrast with the definiteness, orderliness, and precision of the Exposition. At (e) the subject, still in minor, is heard in the bass, while the treble has as a counterpoint to it a tripping rhythm derived from another part of the original material. At (f), becoming emphatic, magniloquent, the theme is sounded forte, and in unison by the whole orchestra, and extended by a natural magnification to an eight-measure phrase. This is developed at some length in the score. (g) is the beginning of the Coda. In one of Beethoven’s breathless pianissimos, the subject is given by the second violins on their G-strings, the first violins meanwhile embroidering in an elastic staccato the most indescribably merry, light-hearted little counter-melody. From the freshness of this, one might fancy that the work was just opening rather than drawing to its close. Truly, Beethoven’s imagination is like some friendly genie of the Arabian Nights, filling our cup of enjoyment as fast as it is drained.

The mental power that in the preliminary parts of composition reveals itself merely as a remarkable ingenuity, inventiveness, and elasticity of mind, appears, when contemplated in its larger action, almost superhuman in its breadth of grasp. In the conception and execution of a great symphonic work, as an integral whole of many and diverse parts, Beethoven is unapproachable. All the successive movements in a long work, all the themes and transitions, all the rhythmic changes, all the modulations, temporary or prolonged, are foreseen and adjusted with perfect control. There is no feature of any moment that has not its relation to the whole. Often the reason of some apparent whim will not appear for pages; but at last it will appear, and when it does it will be seen to fulfil a purpose never lost sight of. As a turret or window at the extreme end of a building may balance a similar feature at the other end, so Beethoven’s treatment of a given theme, early in a movement, may be determined and illuminated by what he finally does to it in the Coda. So integral is his work, so firmly held in the grip of his inexorable artistic logic.

Beauty, in the great compositions of his prime, is therefore as omnipresent as expression; and their supreme greatness is in fact due to the perfect balance, in them, of these two equally important elements of musical effect. Before passing on to the consideration of his later years, it will be well to make still clearer the fact of this balance of qualities by a brief reference to the highly interesting and significant attitude of Beethoven towards program music.

Program music differs from pure music in being aimed rather at the literal imitation or delineation of objects and events in the natural world than at the presentation, through orderly and consequently beautiful tone-combinations, of the general emotions that they arouse. SchÜtz, a very early German composer, depicting by a long downward scale an angel descending from heaven; Beethoven, introducing the notes of the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo in his Pastoral Symphony; Schubert, writing in the accompaniment of his song, “The Trout,” a leaping figure suggestive of the motions of the fish in the water; Raff, sounding the rhythm of a galloping horse all through the ride-movement of his Lenore Symphony: Wagner, imitating in the “Waldweben” the murmurings of the forest; all these composers are writing program music. Of course there is no reason that program music should not be at the same time pure music, provided that the desire to imitate nature accurately does not lead the composer to slight the requirements of plastic beauty in the ordering and combination of his material. A portrait may be good decoration, if composition, massing, light and shade, coloring, and so on, are not sacrificed to a pitiless realism. Just so, program music can be made beautiful, if the needs of abstract tonal beauty are duly considered.

But as a usual thing they are not. The program composer generally makes a fetish of his “idea,” pursues it with the enthusiasm of the literalist, and quite neglects the formal symmetry, the stylistic congruity and harmony, of his web of tones. The result is that program music is as a rule more interesting than moving; that in attempting to make pure sounds do what words, or even colors and shapes, can do better, it sacrifices the legitimate and characteristic effect of tones—the suggestion of a general state of feeling, potent by reason of its very vagueness, and transfigured by the abstract beauty of its medium.

Now Beethoven was obliged in his early maturity to face and solve this problem of program music for himself. His intense individualism, his susceptibility to strong feeling, his natural interest in the characteristic, the dramatic, the definite, and the opportunity he found, in music as he received it from his forerunners, for a more detailed expressiveness than had yet been attempted, all inclined him to take the attitude of the program composer. The poetic conception of a work was so clear and distinct in his mind that he could easily assign it a descriptive title. He called his third symphony “The Eroica,” his sixth the “Pastoral,” and said that the motif of the fifth indicated “Fate Knocking at the Door.” He called one of his piano sonatas “Les Adieux, l’Absence et le Retour;” of another, that in G-major, Opus 14, he said, “It is a dialogue between husband and wife, or lover and mistress; between the entreating and the resisting principle;” he tacitly admitted that the sonatas in F-minor, Opus 57, and in D-minor, Opus 29, were illustrative of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Other works, not specifically named by him, wore very naturally titles given by others: as the “Pastoral Sonata,” the “Moonlight Sonata,” and the “Sonata Appassionata.” At the same period that he was writing these instrumental works with programmistic aspect, he wrote also his incidental music descriptive of Goethe’s “Egmont,” his overture on the subject of “Coriolanus,” and his single opera, “Fidelio.” Of interpretation he said:

“Though the poet carries on his monologue, or dialogue, in a progressively marked rhythm, yet the declaimer, for the more accurate elucidation of the sense, must make cÆsuras and pauses in places where the poet could not venture on any interpunctuation. To this extent, then, is this style of declaiming applicable to music, and it is only to be modified according to the number of persons cooperating in the performance of a musical composition.”

Yet in spite of all these indications of the direction in which music was moving with Beethoven, his instinct for beauty kept him from allowing mere delineation to become his ideal. As Sir Hubert Parry well says, the Pastoral Symphony is like a manifesto on that point. Of all Beethoven’s works, it ventures farthest into the domain of program music. It contains actual imitations of sounds and sights in nature, as the rippling of the brook (strings); the muttering of thunder (contrabasses in their low register); flashes of lightning (violins); the bassoon of an old peasant sitting on a barrel, and able to play but three tones; and the song of the nightingale (flute), quail (oboe), and cuckoo (clarinet.) All the movements bear descriptive titles, as follows: “The awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country; Scene by the brook; Merry gathering of peasants; Thunderstorm; Shepherd’s song—Rejoicings and thankfulness after the storm.” It is obvious that here Beethoven was pushing the descriptive power of music to its limits. Yet it is important to note that even here neither his instinctive sense of the proper uses of the musical art nor his reasoned conviction as to the nature of musical expression forsook him. Throughout the growlings of the thunder, the music pursues its way coherently and accordingly to its own laws. The rhythmic scheme and the harmonic sequence are maintained, and the general structure is not for a moment forgotten. After the imitation of the bird-notes, in the second movement, the musical sentence is rounded out to completion by the lovely concluding phrase, imitated by various instruments. (See Fig. XXIX).

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It is only necessary to play the bird-notes alone, omitting the supplementary phrase, to see how much of the effect is a matter of pure music. And that Beethoven realized this himself, that he was clearly aware that music affects us more by setting up vague but potent emotions in us by means of a beautiful embodiment of expressive sounds than by merely copying what is in the actual world, is evidenced by the motto he inscribes at the head of his score: “Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei”—“More the expression of feeling than painting.” Even more succinct, if that is possible, is a note in one of his sketch books: “Pastoral Symphony: no picture, but something in which the emotions are expressed which are aroused in men by the pleasure of the country.”

This attitude of Beethoven’s towards program music, both in practice and in theory, is but a crucial and striking example of his general attitude towards music, an attitude produced both by the tendencies of the historic moment and by his native genius. Had he had less capacity or taste for expression of the most definite and vivid emotions, he would not have been able to carry music beyond the formalism of Haydn and Mozart, and to make it voice the self-conscious idealism, the romantic intensity, the various, many-sided, and profound spiritual life, of modern men. Had he not, on the other hand, clung pertinaciously to the plastic beauty which, after all, is the most indispensable quality of musical art, had he allowed his interest in the characteristic to betray him into literalism, he would have deprived music of that period of full maturity which he represents, and ushered in too soon the inevitable decadence, in which art is no longer whole and balanced, but seeks special effects and particular expressions, becomes meteoric, dazzling, and fragmentary. That period was bound to come, as the parabola must make its descending as well as its ascending curve, or the plant have its autumn as well as its spring and summer. But before the appealing, but pathetically incomplete work of the romanticists came to give a sort of Indian summer brightness to the musical year, it was meet that it should have its full harvest of ripe, sound, and wholesome beauty. And this it had, in the incomparably sane and noble works of the mature Beethoven.