Marvelous indeed is this varied and ever forcible expression of feeling in the great works of Beethoven’s maturity; but even more marvelous is the steady power by which he organizes these feelings into forms of perfect beauty, the unfaltering control by which he keeps the intensely characteristic from degenerating into caricature, the impassioned from becoming hysterical. He never forgets that, as an artist, he is the master, not the slave, of his inspiration, however seizing it may be. Though he infuses into music an eloquence new to it, he remembers that it is still music, and that it must be beautiful as music. Titanic were the labors he imposed upon himself to give his compositions balance, symmetry, logical coherence, integral unity emerging from an infinite variety of parts. His sketch-books, several of which, edited by Nottebohm, have been published by Breitkopf and Härtel, are the standing evidence of what endless effort it cost him to be an artist. In them we behold him at work, day by day, eliminating the irrelevant, reinforcing the significant, exploring the sources of melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and structural variety, and returning upon his task to gather up all the threads into one complete, close-woven fabric. The result was a type of music seldom equalled, before or since, for that ordered richness, that complex simplicity, which is beauty. An example or two will make this clearer than much description. The first subject of the Fifth Symphony, one of the most famous of Beethoven’s themes, is entirely made up of ingenious combinations of the “Fate Knocking at the Door” motif, as follows: [Music: score] [Illustration: FIGURE XXI.] How wonderful here is the stern and relentless logic of that insistently repeated rhythm, the utter naturalness of the melody which builds itself out of the various repetitions of the theme in different voices, and the rugged strength of the harmonic scheme of the entire passage! Had we not documentary evidence, we should find it hard to believe that this was not a sudden and complete thought, struck out by Beethoven at a blow in some moment of high musical excitement. Yet his sketch-book reveals that it grew by a very gradual process of amendment and refining from the monotonous, uninteresting, almost fatuous bit of patchwork shown in Figure XXII. Another, slightly more advanced, state of the same idea is shown in Figure XXIII. In both these passages the rhythm is almost the only element that even dimly suggests the august gravity of the final version; for the rest, these first attempts are depressingly futile. [Music: score] [Illustration: FIGURE XXII.] [Music: score] [Illustration: FIGURE XXIII.]