ursts which to-day ring longest in our consciousness) were
considered at the time of their creation as the ravings of a mad-man.
Dissonances, both acoustically and psychologically, are a vital
principle in music. In no respect was his music more original than in
his Promethean boldness in their use. One of his favorite conceptions
was that music should strike fire from the soul of man; it was not
meant to lull the hearer into a drowsy revery, but to awaken his
spiritual consciousness with a shock at times positively galvanic. A
third feature is his subtlety in expression, as is shown by the minute
indications in which every page of his work abounds. The crescendos,
often leading to a sudden drop to pianissimo, the long stretches of
hushed suspense, the violent sforzandos on unimportant beats, the
plasticity of periodic formation, all these workings of a rich
imagination first gave music its place as the supreme art of human
expression.

A word must be spoken concerning two forms which we owe to Beethoven's
constructive genius. In place of the former naive Minuet, so
characteristic of the formal manners of its time, he substituted a
movement with a characteristic name--the Scherzo, which opened up
entirely new possibilities. No mere literary distinction between wit
and humor[135] can explain the power of Beethoven's Scherzos; only
through his own experience of life can the hearer fathom their
secrets. The expression of real humor, akin to that spirit which is
found in Cervantes, Swift, Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, was a
genuine contribution of Beethoven. Deep thinkers alone are capable of
humor which, to quote a recent writer, is "that faculty of imagination
so humane and sympathetic in its nature that it can perceive at the
same time serious and jocose things. It can feel the pathos of a scene
on life's stage and yet have an eye for the incongruities of the
actors. It is imagination, the feel of kinship with the universal
human soul." Beethoven's Scherzos are as varied as life itself. Who
can forget the boisterous vitality of this movement in the Eroica,
which quite sweeps us off our feet, the haunting mystery of the
Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony, or listen unmoved to the grim
seriousness, alternating with touching pathos, in the Scherzo of the
Ninth? Secondly, his conception of the Air and Variations was so
different from anything previously known that he may fairly be called
its creator. With him variations became