Beethoven’s mother was a woman of tender sensibilities and affections, condemned to a life of unhappiness by the worthless character of her husband. Her whole life was devoted to the education of her son Ludwig, who wrote of her: “She has been to me a good and loving mother, and my best friend.” She was of delicate health, and died of consumption when Beethoven was but seventeen. This was the curiously assorted set of ancestors from which Beethoven seems to have drawn his more prominent traits. If, to begin with, we eliminate the father, who, as M. de Wyzewa remarks, was an “absolute nullity,” and “merely the intermediary between his son and his father, the Flemish music-director,” we shall find that from the latter, his grandfather, Beethoven derived the foundation of his sturdy, self-respecting, and independent moral character, that from his mother he got the emotional sensibility that was so oddly mingled with it, and that from his afflicted grandmother, Maria-Josepha Poll, he inherited a weakness of the nervous system, an irritability and morbid sensitiveness, that gave to his intense individualism a tinge of the eccentric and the pathological. Without doubt the most important factor in this heredity was that which came from the grandfather; and although M. de Wyzewa is perhaps led by his racial sympathies to assign an undue importance to this Flemish element, yet what he has to say of it is most suggestive. Pointing out the obvious fact that purely German composers, as well as poets and painters, are naturally disposed to vagueness, sentimentality, and cloudy symbolism, he remarks that nothing of the sort appears in Beethoven, “whose effort was constantly toward the most precise and positive expression”; that he eliminated all the artifices of mere ornament, in the interests of “a rigorous presentation of infinitely graduated emotions”; and that he “progressed steadily toward simplification of means combined with complication of effect.” He shows how Beethoven owed to his Flemish blood, in the first place, his remarkable accuracy and delicacy of sensation; in the second place, his wisdom and solid common sense, his “_esprit lucide, raisonable, marchant toujours droit aux choses necessaires_”; in the third place, his largeness of nature, grandeur of imagination, robust sanity, and heroic joy, justly likened to similar qualities in Rubens; and finally, his moral earnestness, that “energy of soul which in his youth sustained him in the midst of miseries and disappointments of all sorts, and which later enabled him to persist in his work in spite of sickness, neglect, and poverty.”