If, bearing constantly in mind the artificiality of analysis, we nevertheless attempt an enumeration of separate qualities in Beethoven’s mature work, we are first of all arrested by the vigor, definiteness, and variety of his expression. In his symphonies from the Eroica on, for example, there is a far more direct and poignant utterance of a wide range of feeling, than we can find anywhere in Haydn or Mozart, or in the early Beethoven. The first “subjects” of the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, shown in Figure XX, illustrate strikingly, brief as they are, this diversity and force of the works of the middle period. Who that had once heard them could ever forget them? And who could ever confuse one with another? How they pierce through the veil of the past, with their vibrant accent of the living, breathing man! Beethoven’s subjects, attaining so wonderful a degree of individualization, mark the culminating point of a long process of crystallization of definite forms out of the tonal matrix of earlier music. Ever since the Florentine reformers essayed to infuse into academic art the human expressiveness of idealized popular songs and dances, the latent potentialities of vocal phrases to express earnest emotion, and of vigorous rhythms to express the more active and animated feelings, had been becoming more and more fully utilized. We saw how the popular songs were embodied and transfigured in the sarabandes and other slow, serious movements of the eighteenth century suites, and how the rhythms of the popular dances were wrought into their idealized gavottes, bourrées, minuets, and gigues.[45] We saw how Haydn, in his naïve yet skillful way, seized upon and refined the primitive but emotionally vital folk-music of his race.[46] We saw how Mozart contributed still further, by his wonderful genius for organization, to the progress in delicacy, variety, and breadth, of the same type of art. And now we see, in Beethoven, the issue of this long growth: we see him bring to their apotheosis the eloquence of the song and the animation of the dance; we see him, by full utilization of the harmonic and rhythmic potentialities of structure, by vigorous exclusion of the irrelevant and the superfluous, by full concentration of all his faculties of heart and mind on the one idea in hand, attaining a definiteness, a variety, and a compelling eloquence of expression, that may fairly be said to mark an epoch. Before Beethoven music was already an art; with him it becomes also a language.