also have been a trial tending to sour him. Furthermore, as in the case of every man of primal genius, his transcendent originality doomed him to a determined struggle with the past, an uncompromising insurrection against conventional authority and usage. He defied the prescriptions of his predecessors, broke pedantic fetters, refuted his teachers, made new rules for himself, upheaved a world dead in professional routine and tradition that he might inspire it with fresh freedom and fresh triumphs; and thus, perforce, he stood alone, battling with obscurity, contempt, and hate, until he slowly conquered the recognition he deserved. Finally, in addition to these previous causes, the sternness of his isolation was made complete by the dreadful calamity of a dense and incurable deaf ness. Dark indeed was his melancholy, bitter the revulsion of his capacious soul upon itself. He says, "I was nigh taking my life with my own hands. But Art held me back. I could not leave the world until I had revealed what lay within me." Resolved at any cost to be himself, and express himself, and leave the record to posterity, he left behind opponents and patrons alike, and consecrated all to his genius and its ideal objects. Occupying for a long time a room in a remote house on a hill, he was called the Solitary of the Mountain. "His life was that of a martyr of the old legends or an iron-bound hero of the antique." Poor, deaf, solitary, restless, proud, and sad, sometimes almost cursing his existence, sometimes ineffably glad and grateful, subject now to the softest yearnings of melancholy and sympathy, now to tempestuous outbreaks of wrath and woe, shut up in himself, he lived alone, rambled alone, created alone, sorrowed and aspired and enjoyed alone. The character of Beethoven has many times been wronged by uncharitable misinterpretations. He has been drawn as a misanthrope, a selfish savage. His nature had attributes as glorious as the music born out of them. He was a democrat, who earnestly desired that the rights of all men should be secured to them in the enjoyment of freedom. Asked, in a law-suit before a German court, to produce the proof of his nobility, he pointed to his head and his heart, and said, "My nobility is here, and here." He was a fond reader of Plato and of Plutarch. One of his biographers says, "The republic of Plato was transfused into his flesh and blood." He always stood by his republican principles stanchly. It was in the firm belief that Napoleon meant to republicanize France that he composed and inscribed to him his Heroic Symphony. On learning that the First Consul had usurped the rank of Emperor, he tore off the dedication and threw it down with explosive execrations. He sympathized intensely with that whole of humanity which to a genius like his ever reveals itself as a great mysterious being, distinct from individuals, yet giving the individual his sacredness and grandeur. His uncertain and furious temper was an accident of his physical condition, the unequal distribution of force in his nervous centres. He once suddenly quitted a summer retreat, where he was supremely happy, because his host persisted in making profound bows whenever he met him in his walks. Such an incident makes his nervous state clear enough. An idea which to a man of stolid health and complacency would be nothing, entering the imagination of the rich and febrile Beethoven, was a terrific stimulus. To judge such an one justly, discriminating insight and charity are needed. In his lofty loneliness his mislikers considered him as "a growling old bear." Those who appreciated his genius thought of him as the mysterious "cloud-compeller of the world of music." Nearly all regarded him as an incomprehensible unique into whose sympathetic interior it was impossible to penetrate. Carl Maria von Weber once paid him a visit, of which his son, Max Weber, has given a graphic description full of interesting lights. Himself kept scrupulously clean by an oriental frequency of bathing, he sat in the disorderly desolate room, amidst the slovenly signs of poverty, his mass of lion-like face glowing with the halo of immortality, his head crowned with a wild forest of hair. He was all kindness and affection to Weber, "embracing him again and again, as though he could not part with him." When he produced his mighty opera, Fidelio, it failed. In vain he again modelled and remodelled it. He went himself into the orchestra and attempted to lead it; and the pitiless public of Vienna laughed. To think now of the Austrian groundlings cackling at the sublimest genius who has ever lifted his sceptre in the empire of sound, making him writhe under the torturing irony of so monstrous a reversal of their relative superiorities! After suffering this cruel outrage, he fled more deeply than ever into his cold solitude. As Weber says, "He crept into his lair alone, like a wounded beast of the forest, to hide himself from humanity." Nothing can be sadder in one aspect, grander in another, than the expression this unapproachable creator, this deaf Zeus of music, has given of his isolation. "I have no friend; I must live with myself alone; but I well know that God is nearer to me than to my brothers in the art." Of course this is no entire picture either of the soul or the experience of Beethoven. He had his happy prerogatives and hours. Life to him too was often sweet and dear. He knew the joy of a fame which before he died had slowly grown to be stupendous. Almost every one of the musical celebrities who arose in his time, from the author of Der Freischütz to the author of Der Erlkönig, with pilgrim steps brought a tributary wreath to him as the greatest master. Above all, he had a sublime consciousness and fruition of his own genius. At one time he says, "Music is like wine, inflaming men to new achievements, and I am the Bacchus who serves it out to them." At another time he says, "Tell Goethe to hear my symphonies, and he will agree with me that music alone ushers man within the portals of an intellectual world ready to encompass him, but which he can never encompass." If he suffered hunger, loneliness, the misunderstanding of the vulgar and conventional, he kept himself free, and felt himself supreme in his sphere. An anonymous critic has well written of him, "He gained what he sought, but gained it with that strain of discord in his finer nature which is to the soul of the artist what the shadow of a cloud is to a landscape. The desire to make the world different from what it was in kind as well as degree was the error which ruined his earthly peace; for he persisted in judging all relations of life by the unattainable ideals which drew him on in music. Yet it was out of this opposition to the reality, which was to him a sorrow and bitterness known to but few beside, that there came the final victory of his later creations." He also knew that his strains would sound his name and worth down the vista of future ages with growing glory. "I have no fear for my works. No harm can betide them. Whoever understands them shall be delivered from the burdens that afflict mankind." But despite all these alleviations Beethoven was preeminently a lonely nature. He was extremely fond of taking long walks by himself through beautiful sceneryas Petrarch, Rousseau, and Zimmermann were. One hardly knows where to look for a more pathetic outbreak of a loving and disappointed heart than is given in the follow ing expressions in the will he left for his two brothers. The thoughts in that passage of his Heroic Symphony wherein, as he said, he prophesied the melancholy exile and death of Napoleon, are not charged with a more penetrative sadness or immense grief than is in the strain of these pleading, parting words:-"O ye who consider me hostile, obstinate, or misanthropic, what injustice ye do me! Ye know not the secret causes of what to you wears this appearance." "My deafness forces me to live as in an exile." "O God! who lookest down on my misery, thou knowest that it is accompanied with love of my fellow creatures, and a disposition to do good. men! when ye shall read this, think that ye have wronged me. And let the child of affliction take comfort on finding one like himself, who, in spite of all obstacles, did everything in his power to gain admittance within the rank of worthy artists and men. "I go to meet death with joy. Farewell, and do not quite forget me after I am dead." SHELLEY. THE cruel injustice with which Shelley was hunted, in the abused names of morality and religion, by persons immeasurably beneath him in every attribute of nobleness, is one of the bitter tragedies of our century. Few men have existed so brave, thoughtful, disinterested and affectionate as he. Hundreds of passages in his poems, and in his letters, make the heart of the sensitive reader bleed. He writes to his wife, "My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you and our child to a solitary island in the sea, would build a boat, and shut upon my retreat the flood-gates of the world." At another time this exquisite child of intellect and sensibility says, "I feel myself almost irresistibly impelled to seek out some obscure hiding-place, where the face of man may never meet me more." The sorrow of the case is that he so passionately loved his kind all the while, and passionately longed for love in return. He made a transcript from his own heart when he wrote, "In solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, and the grass, and the waters, and the sky." The poor people in Florence who saw him wandering through the neighborhood and in the galleries there, called him "the melancholy Englishman.' In his "Stanzas written in dejection near Naples," occur the lines: I sit upon the sands alone; The lightning of the noontide ocean How sweet did any heart now share in my emotion ! One can hardly help recognizing in the following passage of his Julian and Maddolo, a description partly copied from his own experience. There are some by nature proud, Who, patient in all else, demand but this, |