Beethoven had, in a peculiar degree, both the merits and the defects of the individualist. Not even Thoreau was more resolved to follow only the dictates of his own genius, to find his code of action within, in the impulses of his own heart and mind, rather than without, in the conventions, habits, and customs which guide the ordinary man. Like all idealists, he believed in the beauty and rightness of the whole world of human feeling, revealed to him by his naïve consciousness, not trimmed to suit prejudice or partial views of what is proper and admissible. Gifted with an emotional nature of rare richness and intensity, and with an intellect capable of dealing directly with experience on its own account, he lived the life and thought the thoughts that seemed good to him, quite indifferent to accepted views which happened to run counter. Thus his sincerity necessarily led him into an unconventionality, an indifference to established ways of acting, feeling, and thinking, which, when circumstances pushed him still further away from the common human life, easily passed over into morbid eccentricity. His unconventionality appears in all his actions and opinions, from the most trivial to the most momentous. Take, for instance, to begin with, the matter of personal appearance, dress, and demeanor. What an altogether unusual man it was that Carl Czerny, as a boy of ten, in 1801, was taken to visit! “We mounted,” says Czerny, “five or six stories high to Beethoven’s apartment, and were announced by a rather dirty-looking servant. In a very desolate room, with papers and articles of dress strewn in all directions, bare walls, a few chests, hardly a chair except the ricketty one standing by the piano, there was a party of six or eight people. Beethoven was dressed in a jacket and trousers of long, dark goat’s hair, which at once reminded me of the description of Robinson Crusoe I had just been reading. He had a shock of jet black hair, (cut _à la Titus_), standing straight upright. A beard of several days’ growth made his naturally dark face still blacker. I noticed also, with a child’s quick observation, that he had cotton wool, which seemed to have been dipped in some yellow fluid, in both ears. His hands were covered with hair, and the fingers very broad, especially at the tips.” The oddity in dress observed by Czerny was habitual with Beethoven. “In the summer of 1813,” says Schindler, “he had neither a decent coat nor a whole shirt.” His habit of dabbling his hands in water, while following out a musical thought, until he was thoroughly wet, cannot have improved his clothes. Nor did his carriage set them off: he was extremely awkward with his body--could not dance in time, and generally cut himself when he shaved, which, however, he did infrequently.