ed as a great character and we miss the note of
sublimity in their music, although it often has great vitality and
charm. Beethoven, however, was a thinker in tones and often in words.

[Illustration: BEETHOVEN]

His symphonies are human documents, and even had he not written a single
note of music we have sufficient evidence in verbal form to convince us
that his personality was one of remarkable power and that music was only
one way, though, to be sure, the foremost, of expressing the depth of
his feeling and the range of his mental activity. In distinction from
his predecessors, who were merely musicians, Beethoven was a man first
and a musician second, and the lasting vitality in his works is due to
their broad human import; they evidently came from a character endowed
with a rich and fertile imagination, from one who looked at life from
many sides. Several of his most famous compositions were founded on
works of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller, and the Heroic Symphony
bears witness to his keen interest in the momentous political changes of
his time and in the growth of untrammeled human individuality. No mere
manipulator of sounds and rhythms could have impressed the fastidious
nobility of Vienna to the high degree chronicled by contemporary
testimony. Beethoven wished to be known as a _Tondichter_, i.e., a
first-hand creator, and his whole work was radically different from the
rather cautious and imitative methods which had characterized former
composers. It was through the cultivated von Breuning family of Bonn
that the young Beethoven became acquainted with English literature, and
his growing familiarity with it exerted a strong influence upon his
whole life and undoubtedly increased the natural vigor of his
imagination, for the literature of England surpassed anything which had
so far been produced by Germany. Later, in 1823, when the slavery
debates were going on in Parliament, he used to read with keen interest
the speeches of Lord Brougham.

In estimating the products of human imagination during the last century,
a fact of great significance is the relationship of the arts of
literature and of music. Numerous examples might be cited of men who
were almost equally gifted in expressing themselves in either words or
musical sounds--notably von Weber, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Spohr, Schumann, and
Mendelssohn, this dual activity reaching a remarkable climax in Richard
Wagner, who was both a great dramatic poet and an