Of the compositions of Beethoven’s last period the most conflicting opinions have been held. Musicians of the Wagner and Liszt school have seen in the Ninth Symphony the opening of a door into a new realm of art, greater, freer, more deeply expressive than any that had gone before. Critics less in sympathy with the tendencies of romanticism, however, have interpreted the last phase of Beethoven’s career as a decadence, the necessary result of flagging vitality and of his previous exhaustion of the legitimate effects of pure music. They have pointed out that his deafness made him indifferent to the actual sensuous effect of his combinations of tone; that his increasing fondness for the subtleties of polyphony was not supported by adequate early training; and that the isolation and sufferings of his life gradually undermined the sanity and marred the balance of his art. Probably there is some truth in each of these views. It is certain that Beethoven, in his last quartets and pianoforte sonatas, and in the Ninth Symphony, showed for the first time the feasibility of those special, highly individualized expressions of feeling in music which were afterwards wrought out in great variety and profusion by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, and the other composers of the Romantic school. He not only made music, as we have already seen, a language as well as an art, but he set the fashion, in his last compositions, of regarding its powers of eloquent and definite utterance as of even greater importance than its general plastic beauty. From the point of view of interest, this was an advance; and judged from this standpoint Beethoven was a pioneer in that movement towards characteristic expression which has been so important a part of the musical activity of our time. But every advance, in art as well as in life, is made at a certain cost, and the price of this increase in complexity and preciseness of expression was a loss of artistic wholeness and poise. As a monument of pure beauty embodied in tones, the Ninth Symphony hardly holds its own beside the Eighth, so much smaller and less ambitious. One misses in it the sense of reserve power, of restraint, of firmly controlled balance of means and ends. The passionate spirit of the work jars and disrupts its body. Music is strained to its limit of power; and great as is the result, the success seems too much like a feat of genius, done in despite of natural laws. In all Beethoven’s later works there is this uncomfortable sense of strain and labor. He achieves the well-nigh impossible, but it is at the cost of serenity.