When a great scheme was started in Berlin for a common monument to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, it was plain to see that the artists felt themselves in the presence of a very mixed task; but it was not so clear where the incongruity lay. They stood under the influence of the popular opinion, which binds these three heroes under a single yoke, and they were the victims of this influence. Nations have an instinct of symmetry in the classification of their great men. The ancients had their seven sages; to-day we are content with two or three; but even so the combinations are none the less strained. The false ideas due to the pairing of Bach and Handel, or of Goethe and Schiller, are hardly to be numbered. The triumvirate of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, is the very acme of perversity. Haydn and Mozart, though two fundamentally different natures, have yet in common the similar features of the age. But Beethoven is as little like them as Goethe is like Racine. We have only to glance round a salon in the Vienna of the last century. The old Haydn and the old Salieri sit smiling and friendly on a sofa; they move in the stilted fashion of the eighteenth century; they retain in their carriage all the features of the “Zopf und Schopf”[110] period; and in every judgment, in every gesture, they show their antagonism to unrestrained emotion. Over against them a young man is leaning on the piano. His demeanour is modish though untidy, and smacks of the Rhine; his movements natural but wooden; his hair is loose and disordered; his compliments are few; he accepts strangers only on compulsion; his playing is perhaps too vigorous, too full of feeling; and the ideas which he incorporates in his works are in their originality half revolutionary, half romantic. This new-comer is Beethoven, a man so different from the settled type, from the old “composers of the Empire,” as he himself calls them, that it is easy to anticipate the future which he himself is conjuring up. He is the first of the Titans, the first of the great fragmentary natures, the first tone-artist who breaks the forms of music to pieces on the iron of his emotions. A strange Providence closes his outward ears, and thus gaining a clearer vision, he receives from Nature herself unheard-of inspirations. How this strange new man, this romantic raver, could be coupled with Haydn and Mozart is a wonder; but popular opinion accounts for it. Beethoven came to Vienna just as Mozart began to be missed. The world gave him the honour of attaching him to the classic school. But it is a mere blunder to treat him as the end of an epoch--he is the beginning of a new one.