The indebtedness of the early Beethoven to his immediate forerunners, and the untiring pains he took to learn his lesson thoroughly, call for especial emphasis because so much has been said and written of his originality, his disregard for conventions, his non-conforming, revolutionary tendencies. He was indeed an anarch of outworn conventions, but he was anything but an anarch of art. No man ever recognized more cordially his inherited resources; no man was ever less misled by a petty ideal of mere oddness, by a confusion of idiosyncrasy with originality. Beethoven was a great individual because he assimilated the strength of all humanity. His originality, like all originality that has value, consisted in a fresh, sincere expression of universal truths through the best technical means which were available in his day. If any reader has a lingering doubt of Beethoven’s faithfulness as a student, he needs but examine the Sketchbooks edited by Nottebohm from the original manuscript note-books in which Beethoven laboriously worked out his conceptions. Quite tireless was he in the manipulation of a theme, over and over again, until it suited his rigorous taste; truly wonderful is the ever-sensitive discrimination with which he excised redundancies, softened crudities, enhanced beauties, and refined texture, until at last the melody was as perfect, as inevitable, as organic, as a sentence by Flaubert, Sir Thomas Browne, or Cardinal Newman. It was indeed precisely by these qualities of the conscientious artist that Beethoven was chiefly enabled to push his work to a higher stage of interest than his forerunners had attained. He went obediently as far as they could lead him before attempting to push further alone. We find, even in this Second Symphony, conceptions that Haydn and Mozart could not have imagined; but these are worked out with a skill and ingenuity like theirs in kind, if greater in degree. The most striking and pervasive difference lies in the immensely increased closeness of texture, intensity of meaning, logic, vigor, poignancy. All the strings are tightened, and flabbiness, diffuseness, meaningless ornament and filling are swept away. As Beethoven’s self-assurance, habit of examining all conventions for himself, and relentless discrimination of the essence from the accident, already noted, made him in society a brief but pregnant talker, an eccentric but true man, so they made him a forcible, concise, and logical musician. How ruthlessly he discards the merely pretty, the sensuously tickling, the amiably vapid and pointless! He wastes no energy in preamble, interlude, or peroration. He puts in his outline in a few bold, right strokes, leaving much to the intelligence of his hearers. Concentrating his whole mind on a single thought, he follows it out relentlessly to the end, will not be distracted or seduced into side-issues. He tolerates no superfluous tones in his fabric, but makes it compact, close, rigorously thematic.