During his residence in Vienna, Spohr met Beethoven many times. He was one of the first to introduce the earlier quartettes, in his concerts throughout Germany, and valued them properly. But in regard to the Beethoven symphonies he placed himself on record in a highly entertaining manner. He says of the melody of the famous "Hymn to Joy," in Beethoven's ninth symphony, that it is so "monstrous and tasteless, and its grasp of Schiller's ode so trivial, that I cannot even now understand how a genius like Beethoven could have written it." [Illustration] Book Fifth. THE Period of the Romantic. WEBER, PAGANINI, SCHUBERT, BERLIOZ, MEYERBEER, MENDELSSOHN, SCHUMANN, CHOPIN, LISZT, WAGNER; THE VIRTUOSI; MUSIC OF THE FUTURE. CHAPTER XXXI. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, THE ROMANTIC; MUSIC OF THE FUTURE. In ordinary speech a distinction is made between the musical productions of the eighteenth century and those of the next following; the former being called _Classic_, the latter _Romantic_. The terms are used rather indefinitely. According to Hegel, whose teaching coincided with the last years of Beethoven's life, the classic in art embraces those productions in which the _general_ is aimed at, rather than the _particular_; the _reposeful_ and _completely satisfactory_, rather than the _forced_, or the _sensational_; and the _beautiful_ rather than the _exciting_. The philosopher Hegel, who was one of the first to employ this distinction in art criticism, took his departure from the famous group of Laocooen and his sons in the embrace of the destroying serpents. This group, so full of agony and irrepressible horror, belongs, he said, to a totally different concept of art from that of the gods and goddesses of Greece, in the beauty and freshness of their eternal youth. These qualities are those of the general and the eternal; the Laocooen, in its nature painful, was not nor could be permanently satisfactory in and of itself, but only through allowance being made by reason of interest in the story told by it. According to more recent philosophers, the romantic movement in literature and art (for they are parts of the same general movement of the latter part of the eighteenth century) has its essential characteristic in the doctrine that what is to be sought in art is not the pleasing and the satisfactory, so much as the true. _Everything_, they say, belonging to life and experience, is fit subject of art; to the end that thereby the soul may learn to understand itself, and come to complete self-consciousness. The entire movement of the romantic writers had for its moving principle the maxim, _Nihil humanum alienum a me puto_ ("I will consider nothing human to be foreign to me"). Yet other writers make the romantic element to consist of the striking, the strongly contrasted, the exciting, and so at length the sensational. Whichever construction we may put upon this much used and seldom