"Beethoven is the prophet of the new era which the nineteenth century ushers in for mankind. As things must be _felt_ before they can be acted out; so they may be expressed in the indefinite emotional forms of music, before they can be uttered and definitely imaged forth in words or pictorial shapes. Beethoven is the forerunner of Shelley and Whitman among the poets, of J. W. Turner and J. F. Millet among the painters. He is the great poet who holds Nature by the one hand and Man by the other. Within that low-statured, rudely-outlined figure which a century ago walked hatless through the fields near Mödling or sat oblivious in some shabby restaurant at Vienna, dwelt an emotional giant--a being who--though his outer life by deafness, disease, business-worries, poverty, was shattered as it were into a thousand squalid fragments--in his great heart embraced all mankind, with piercing insight penetrated intellectually through all falsehoods to the truth, and already in his art-work gave outline to the religious, the human, the democratic yearnings, the loves, the comradeship, the daring individualities, and all the heights and depths of feeling of a new dawning era of society. He was in fact, and he gave utterance to, a new type of Man. What that struggle must have been between his inner and outer conditions--of his real self with the lonely and mean surroundings in which it was embodied--we only know through his music. When we listen to it we can understand the world-old tradition that now and then a divine creature from far heavens takes mortal form and suffers in order that it may embrace and redeem mankind."--_Ibid_, pp. 205-7. CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE v INTRODUCTION by Edward Carpenter ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xix HIS LIFE 1 HIS WILL 57 LETTERS To Carl Amenda 65 To Fräulein Gerardi 68 To Frl. Eleonore von Breuning 69 To Dr. Wegeler 72 " " " 78 To Capellmeister Hofmeister 81 Wegeler and Eleonore von Breuning to Beethoven 84 To Dr. Wegeler 91 To Sir George Smart in London 92 To I. Moscheles in London 93 " " " " 94 Schindler to Messrs. Schott 96 THOUGHTS 101 HIS WORKS (By the Editor)