ecome almost fierceness), is there not sometimes, and
perhaps more than sometimes, a morbidness, noble, magnificent, but still
morbidness, in his moods? We are overwhelmed by the grandeur, and are
swallowed up in the gloom of his graver compositions; but when we emerge
are we in as healthy a state of mind as that in which we find ourselves
after listening to Handel or reading Shakespeare--even if we read such
tragedies as "Hamlet," "Othello," and "King Lear"? Then, too, it must be
remembered how carefully Beethoven nursed his genius; how regardless he
was of every consideration except the expression of his own thought; and
how comparatively limited was his productiveness, or certainly his
production.

As to his moodiness, it must, on the other hand, be considered that it
is the peculiar function of music to express moods. Man's soul is
stirred by emotions which cannot be given utterance in words, and which
would remain unexpressed but for music, which to the musically
organized is a means of communication and of sympathy. There is a
question at least whether an art whose function it is to give
expression to inward feeling too subtle for words, an expression which
is above all words, which gives form to the formless and utterance to
the unspeakable, is not rightfully and of necessity at times morbid and
moody; whether if it were not so it would not fail in doing that which
is the very reason of its being. The supremacy lies between Handel and
Beethoven; and we shall find ourselves inclined to assign it now to one
and now to the other, according to the mood in which we are, which will
depend greatly on which of the two we have just heard.

And yet, as to pure music, irrespective of psychological
significance--that is, the expression of an ideal of beauty in musical
form--Mozart stands first among all composers. Another mind so fertile
in thoughts of the finest and highest kind of beauty is unknown in the
history of any art, Shakespeare being of course always excepted.
Writing, like Shakespeare, always for money, and not hesitating to put
his hand to any task that would bring him a return, driven by sharp
necessity almost to the prostitution of his genius, driven in his
boyhood, by an exacting father, to write as an infant prodigy for the
support of the family, dying at the early, and, as far as the mind is
concerned, the immature, age of thirty-seven, he left behind him, in
the mass of his compositions, much that was has