When Beethoven resolved on his “new path,” his ambition was favored by the two necessary conditions. That he had at his command an inherited technique, just brought to the verge of maturity, we have already seen. And he had furthermore, behind and below him, as a rich nourishing soil for his genius, a great, new, common enthusiasm of humanity. The eighteenth century had been a time of formalism in art and literature, of rigid conventionality in social life, of paternalism in politics, and of dogmatic ecclesiastical authority in religion. At its end, however, all those dim, half-conscious efforts of humanity towards freer and fuller life which we have indicated under the general term of idealism, were beginning to reach definiteness and self-consciousness. Men were beginning to assert deliberately and openly what they had long been feeling intuitively but insecurely. They were boldly erasing from their standards the mediæval formula: “Poverty, celibacy, and obedience,” to write in its place the modern one: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” They were revolting from the tyrannies of Church and State, to proclaim the sacredness of the individual soul. It was Beethoven’s high privilege to be the artistic spokesman of this new, enfranchised humanity. Haydn, as we know, had reflected for the first time in music the universal interest in all kinds of human emotion, sacred and profane, that marked the dawn of the new era. But in his music the emotion remains naïve, impulsive, childlike; it has not taken on the earnestness, the sense of responsibility, of manhood. It is still in the spontaneous stage, has not become deliberate, resolute, purposeful. But with Beethoven childishness is put away, and the new spirit steps boldly out into the world, aware of its obligations as well as of its privileges, clear-eyed, sad, and serious, to live the full yet difficult life of freedom.