The closeness of Beethoven’s relation to the idealistic spirit of his time is shown equally by two distinct yet supplementary aspects of his work. As it was characteristic of the idealism which fed him to set supreme store by human emotion in all its intensity and diversity, so it is characteristic of his music to voice emotion with a fullness, poignancy, definiteness, and variety that sharply contrast it with the more formal decorative music of his forerunners. And as it was equally characteristic of idealism to recognize the responsibilities of freedom, to restrain and control all particular emotions in the interest of a balanced spiritual life, so it was equally characteristic of Beethoven to hold all his marvelous emotional expressiveness constantly in subordination to the integral effect of his composition as a whole, to value plastic beauty even more highly than eloquent appeal to feeling. In other words, Beethoven the musician is equally remarkable for two qualities, eloquence of expression and beauty of form, which in his best works are always held in an exact and firmly controlled balance. And if we would fully understand his supremacy, we must perceive not only his achievements in both directions, but the high artistic power with which he correlates them. Just as the courage to insist on the rights of the individual, and the wisdom to recognize and support the rights of others, are the two essentials of true idealism, so eloquence and beauty are the equal requisites of genuine art. So closely interwoven, so mutually reactive, are these twin merits of expression and form in the great works of Beethoven’s prime--in the pianoforte sonatas from the Waldstein to Opus 90, in the String Quartets, Opus 59 and 74, in the fourth and fifth piano concertos and the unique concerto for violin, in the Overture to “Coriolanus,” the incidental music to “Egmont,” and the opera, “Fidelio,” in the Mass in C, and above all in the six great symphonies from the “Eroica” to the Eighth--that it seems like wanton violence and falsification to separate them, even for the purposes of study. Synthesis, at any rate, should go hand in hand with analysis; we should constantly remember that the various qualities our critical reagents discern in this music, exist in it not, as in our analysis, single and detached, but fused and interpenetrative in one artistic whole. The chemist may find carbon, and hydrogen, and oxygen in the rose, but a rose is something more, something ineffably more, than a compound of these chemical elements. [Music: score] [Illustration] [Music: score] [Illustration] [Music: score] [Illustration] [Music: score] [Illustration: FIGURE XX.]