“I grow old--I grow old I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” But in the midst of futility and inanity, in the midst of desperation and despair there sounds the music of Beethoven which says without bombast or credo: “This is _not_ the way the world ends.” And says it in such a way that we are forced to listen. We listen to Beethoven when we would listen to nobody else because he is a man without any of the world’s illusions. How feeble and superficial seems the disillusionment of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s poems compared with the agony of the Cavatina in the B flat Quartet with its mysterious pause--as if the pulse of the whole Universe were stopped and might not continue; of the Fugue in B flat Op. 133; and of the last Pianoforte Sonata which Beethoven wrote. In this last Sonata we feel the agony of a man whose imagination is grappling with some insupportable horror. Let us conceive the Captain of a ship standing on its bridge in a calm, unconscious sea. The boats are useless because land does not exist anywhere. From the deck come the cries, curses and weeping of the doomed crew, who are only his own embodied emotions, for he is really alone. Slowly they are going down into the unruffled water. The Captain does not shake his fist defiantly into the sky and deny that he is going down, but knowing that he is going down never to return sinks passionately into the sea. Such is the mind and temper of Beethoven. There is agony but no whimper, and if that is not ending with a bang I don’t know what is. In the music of Beethoven there are no anodynes, no lullings of sense, no deceits of the intelligence, but pure _virtus_. And this _virtus_ is thrilling absolutely, without reservations. After the tremendous drama of the first movement of the C minor Sonata, for example--a drama in which there is the whole ecstatic misery of life--we are not assuaged by a dream. The conflict does not cease. That wonderful Arietta--surely the most wonderful thing in all music--is no bringer of peace and resignation. In it something passes away but _its passing away is an act of creation not of extinction_. It is this which gives Beethoven’s music its peculiar significance, for Creation not Nirvana is the essence of Beethoven. It has its root therefore in human personality and may be most accurately described as the supremest imagination of love in human art. But though beyond the conception of the Neapolitan fisherman mourning for his lost bride it does not lessen but enriches that ancient love-song, making it impossible for us to feel that it was meaningless. And if anyone should say that the question: “Why do I live?” has not been answered, I reply that Beethoven has rendered it ridiculous. FOOTNOTES: [5] The ancient Greeks with characteristic intellectual power did not believe in mere irresponsible accident. [6] Compare for example the feebleness of our contemporary love-songs and ballads.