Nor will it be difficult, after this brief summary of Beethoven’s fundamental traits, to understand the formidable effect that deafness, coming upon him slowly but relentlessly in early manhood, when intellectual achievement and social and personal happiness seemed equally attainable, exercised upon his character. Naturally self-dependent, deafness made him self-absorbed; naturally proud, it made him so sensitive to imagined slights, so suspicious of even his best friends, that he would at times refuse all intercourse with people; naturally taking keenest joy in intellectual activity, this physical disability forced him, while gradually renouncing social pleasures, to throw himself with ever greater concentration and completer devotion into his work. All these effects of his deafness are clearly discernible in the letters written about 1800. “I can with truth say,” he writes in that year, “that my life is very wretched; for nearly two years past I have avoided all society, because I find it impossible to say to people, _I am deaf_!” “Plutarch,” he continues, “led me to resignation. I shall strive if possible to set Fate at defiance, although there must be moments in my life when I cannot fail to be the most unhappy of God’s creatures.... Resignation!--what a miserable refuge! and yet it is my sole remaining one.” And still later in the same letter: “I live wholly in my music, and scarcely is one work finished when another is begun; indeed, I am now often at work on three or four things at the same time.” Many such passages occur in the letters of this period, but in none does the pathetic mingling of almost despairing wretchedness with a noble courage that will not despair become so striking as in the remarkable document known as “Beethoven’s Will,” written to his brothers in the fall of 1802. The summer had been a trying one, and at the end of it Beethoven, apparently half expecting and a little desiring death, yet dreading its interruption of his beloved work, uttered this cry of pain, which deserves to be quoted almost entire: HEILIGENSTADT, Oct. 6, 1802. TO MY BROTHERS CARL AND JOHANN BEETHOVEN. O! you who think or declare me to be hostile, morose, and misanthropical, how unjust you are, and how little you know the secret cause of what appears thus to you! My heart and mind were ever from childhood prone to the most tender feelings of affection, and I was always disposed to accomplish something great. But you must remember that six years ago I was attacked by an incurable malady, treated by unskilful physicians, deluded from year to year by the hope of relief, and at length forced to the conviction of a _lasting affliction_ (the cure of which may go on for years, and perhaps after all prove impracticable).