ashion
and changing Taste, and raised to an ever-valid, purely human type.
Beethoven's music will be understood to all time, while that of his
predecessors will, for the most part, only remain intelligible to
us through the medium of reflection on the history of Art.

--_Richard Wagner_

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Music is the youngest of the arts. Modern music dates back about four
hundred years. It is not so old as the invention of printing. As an art
it began with the work of the priests of the Roman Catholic Church in
endeavoring to arrange a liturgy.

The medieval chant and the popular folk-song came together, and the
science of music was born. Sculpture reached perfection in Greece,
painting in Italy, portraiture in Holland; but Germany, the land of
thought, has given us nearly all the great musicians and nine-tenths of
all our valuable musical compositions.

Holland has taken a very important part in every line of art and
handicraft, and in way of all-round development has set the pace for
civilization.

Art follows in the wake of commerce, for without commerce there is
neither surplus wealth nor leisure. The artist is paid from what is left
after men have bought food and clothing; and the time to enjoy comes
only after the struggle for existence.

When Venice was not only Queen of the Adriatic but of the maritime world
as well, Art came and established there her Court of Beauty. It was
Venice that mothered Giorgione, Titian, the Bellinis, and the men who
wrought in iron and silver and gold, and those masterful bookmakers; it
was beautiful Venice that gave sustenance and encouragement to
Stradivari (who made violins as well as he could) up at Cremona, only a
few miles away.

But there came a day when all those seventy bookmakers of Venice ceased
to print, and the music of the anvils was stilled, and all the painters
were dead, and Venice became but a monument of things that were, as she
is today; for Commerce is King, and his capital has been moved far away.

So Venice sits sad and solitary--a pale and beautiful ruin, pathetic
beyond speech, infested by noisy shop-keepers and petty pilferers, the
degenerate sons of the robbers who once roamed the sea and enthroned her
on her hundred isles.

All that Venice knew was absorbed by Holland. The Elzevirs and the
Plantins took over the business of the seventy bookmakers, and the
art-schools of Amsterdam, Leyden and Antwerp reproduced e