This attitude of Beethoven’s towards program music, both in practice and in theory, is but a crucial and striking example of his general attitude towards music, an attitude produced both by the tendencies of the historic moment and by his native genius. Had he had less capacity or taste for expression of the most definite and vivid emotions, he would not have been able to carry music beyond the formalism of Haydn and Mozart, and to make it voice the self-conscious idealism, the romantic intensity, the various, many-sided, and profound spiritual life, of modern men. Had he not, on the other hand, clung pertinaciously to the plastic beauty which, after all, is the most indispensable quality of musical art, had he allowed his interest in the characteristic to betray him into literalism, he would have deprived music of that period of full maturity which he represents, and ushered in too soon the inevitable decadence, in which art is no longer whole and balanced, but seeks special effects and particular expressions, becomes meteoric, dazzling, and fragmentary. That period was bound to come, as the parabola must make its descending as well as its ascending curve, or the plant have its autumn as well as its spring and summer. But before the appealing, but pathetically incomplete work of the romanticists came to give a sort of Indian summer brightness to the musical year, it was meet that it should have its full harvest of ripe, sound, and wholesome beauty. And this it had, in the incomparably sane and noble works of the mature Beethoven. FOOTNOTES: [44] “Representative Men,” Riverside ed., p. 182. [45] See Chap. III., p. 118. [46] See Chap. V., p. 199. CHAPTER IX CONCLUSION CHAPTER IX CONCLUSION The third and last period of Beethoven’s life, from 1813 to 1827, during which he produced the remarkable later pianoforte sonatas and string quartets, the Quintet, opus 104, the Wind Octet, opus 103, the noble Missa Solemnis, which he considered his greatest work, and the immortal Ninth or Choral Symphony, was a time of affliction and wretchedness. The record of these bitter years of the deaf, lonely, poverty-hounded master, surrounded by unfeeling relatives and indifferent and dishonest servants, stricken with disease, and laboring through all to realize his grand artistic conceptions, is relieved only by his unflinching fortitude and grim humor. The heroic spirit of the man matched his misfortunes. For him, if for any one, the boast of the stoic poet would have been justifiable: “In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud; Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody but unbowed.”