deep cogitations and moods, and his hopes for the destiny of humanity. Here, indeed, he had found the true sphere of musical expression. It was the expression of his innermost being; and his music rose to such unparalleled heights because he dealt with his own self, which he was bound to know better than most people know themselves because he was so shut off from the world by his deafness; and it may be added that the music is so profoundly interesting also because he was personally such an extraordinary and intensely interesting character. Beethoven occupied the unique position of consummating the sonata type and giving the impulse to the artistic development which reëstablished the full vigor of human expression and feeling. He reëstablished the right of ideas to be expressed by music and indicated the manner in which it was to be done. His ardent nature rebelled against conventions. He sought to eliminate all dead and inert matter, to get rid of the formal types of accompaniment which were everybody’s property, and to make everything subserve to the expression of the idea. It was probably this which impelled him in his later works to revert to the fugue--that is, to the real fugue of the type of John Sebastian Bach, and not to the bastard form in which attempts were made to amalgamate it with the harmonic scheme of sonata form, which caused the introduction of the conventional passages of that form which were totally alien to the real fugue form. In the genuine fugue form, as illustrated by him and Bach, all the texture of the work is alive and there are no conventional formulas of accompaniment, and Beethoven’s point of view enabled him to go right back, as it were, beyond the historical episode of the sonata and bring the true fugue again to life and use it as a most concentrated means of expression. There is a further and very striking aspect of the question which is that Beethoven, in bringing the fugue form into the field again, anticipated and gave impulse to the revival of the polyphonic methods which is such a conspicuous feature of the most recent development in art: and yet further, his use of the fugue form illustrated that gravitation of artistic development which was to find such splendid accomplishment in the later music dramas of Wagner, in which the polyphonic treatment and the use of the leit-motif form a gigantic expansion of the essential principles of the supremely elastic form of the fugue.