equally supreme
musician. The same tendency is manifested by leaders of thought in other
nations. Thus the French Berlioz and St. Saens are equally noted as
composers and men of letters; the Italian Boito is an able dramatist as
well as composer; and, among modern instances, Debussy, d'Indy, and
Strauss have shown high literary as well as musical ability. To turn to
the other side of this duality, allusions to music in works of both
prose and poetry have become increasingly frequent during the nineteenth
century, and the musical art is no longer considered a mysterious
abstraction entirely divorced from the outward world of men and events.
It is a long step from Goethe, who was entirely unable to grasp the
meaning of Beethoven's symphonies, to such men as Heine, who has made
some very illuminating comments on various composers and their music;
Max Mueller, a highly cultivated musical amateur; Schopenhauer, whose
esthetic principles so deeply influenced Wagner; and Nietzsche, a
musician of considerable technical ability. To these names should be
added that of Robert Browning who, together with Shakespeare, has shown
a truer insight into the real nature of music than any other English
writers have manifested.

With Beethoven, then, music ceases to be an opportunity for the display
of mere abstract skill and takes its place on an equality with the arts
of poetry and painting as a means of intense personal expression. If the
basis of all worth in literature is that the writer shall have something
genuine to say, Beethoven's letters are certainly literature, for they
are the direct revelation of a great and many-sided personality and
furnish invaluable testimony as to just what manner of man he was--too
great indeed for music wholly to contain him. The Letters are not to be
read for their felicity of expression, as one might approach the letters
of Stevenson or Lamb; for Beethoven, even in his music, always valued
substance more than style, or, at any rate, kept style subservient to
vitality of utterance. In fact, one modern French musician claims that
he had no taste! He was not gifted with the literary charm and subtlety
of his great follower, Hector Berlioz, and had no practise as a
journalist or a critic. As his deafness increased after the year 1800
and he was therefore forced to live a life of retirement, he committed
his thoughts more and more to writing, and undoubtedly left to the world
a larger number of letters t