‘Mozart, with his divine nonchalance, snatched at any earthly happiness, any gaiety of the flesh or spirit, and changed it instantly into the immortal substance of his music. But Beethoven, with his peasant seriousness, could not jest with virtue or the rhythmical order of the world. His art was his religion and must be served with a devotion in which there was none of the easy pleasantness of the world.’[54] This same ability of grasping the fundamental idea, however, led him also sometimes to set an undue valuation upon an inferior poet, such as Klopstock, whom it is said he read habitually for years. Something in the nobility and grandeur of the ideas at the bottom of this poet’s work caused Beethoven to overlook its pompousness and chaotic quality. The words meant less for him than the emotion and conception which prompted them. Beethoven himself, however, says that Goethe spoiled Klopstock for him, but it was only, fortunately, to provide him with something better. His taste for whatever was noble and grand in art never left him; and, so far as he was able, he lived up to the idea that it was the artist’s duty to be acquainted with the ancient and modern poets, not only so as to choose the best poetry for his own work, but also to afford food for his inspiration. Beethoven from the first faced the world with a defiant spirit and a sort of wild independence. His sordid childhood nourished in him a rugged habit of self-dependence, and the knowledge of his own powers was like a steady beacon holding him unfalteringly to a consciousness of his high destiny. He _believed_, with all the innocence of a great mind, that gifts of genius were more than sufficient to raise their possessor to a level with the highest nobility; and, with such a belief, he could not pretend to a humility he was far from feeling in the companionship of social superiors. This feeling was perfectly compatible with the genuine modesty and clearness of judgment in regard to his own work. ‘Do not snatch the laurel wreaths from Handel, Haydn, and Mozart,’ he writes; ‘they are entitled to them; as yet I am not.’ But his modesty in things artistic was born, after all, of a sense of his own kinship with the greatest of the masters of art. He could face a comparison with them, knowing full well he belonged to their court; but to courts of a more temporal nature he did not and could not belong, however often he chanced to come under a princely roof. The light ease of manner, the assured courtesies, the happy audacities of speech and conduct which are native to the life of the salon and court were foreign to his nature. The suffrage of the fashionable world of Vienna he won by reason of qualities which were alien to them, but yet touched their sympathies, satisfied their genuine love of music, and pricked their sensibilities as with a goad. His is perhaps the first historic instance of ‘artistic temperament’ dominating and imposing itself upon society.