ay it to us over and over until it is as familiar as Pop
Goes the Weasel, know that it is sane and methodical. As such, it
must represent something; and as all Beethoven's serious compositions
represent some process within himself, some nerve storm or soul storm,
and the storm here is clearly one of physical movement, I should much
like to know what other storm than the atomic storm could have driven
him to this oddest of all those many expressions of cyclonic energy
which have given him the same distinction among musicians that Michael
Angelo has among draughtsmen.

In Beethoven's day the business of art was held to be 'the sublime and
beautiful.' In our day it has fallen to be the imitative and voluptuous.
In both periods the word passionate has been freely employed; but in the
eighteenth century passion meant irresistible impulse of the loftiest
kind: for example, a passion for astronomy or for truth. For us it has
come to mean concupiscence and nothing else. One might say to the art of
Europe what Antony said to the corpse of Caesar: 'Are all thy conquests,
glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure?' But in fact
it is the mind of Europe that has shrunk, being, as we have seen, wholly
preoccupied with a busy spring-cleaning to get rid of its superstitions
before readjusting itself to the new conception of Evolution.

EVOLUTION IN THE THEATRE

On the stage (and here I come at last to my own particular function in
the matter), Comedy, as a destructive, derisory, critical, negative art,
kept the theatre open when sublime tragedy perished. From Moliere to
Oscar Wilde we had a line of comedic playwrights who, if they had
nothing fundamentally positive to say, were at least in revolt against
falsehood and imposture, and were not only, as they claimed, 'chastening
morals by ridicule,' but, in Johnson's phrase, clearing our minds of
cant, and thereby shewing an uneasiness in the presence of error which
is the surest symptom of intellectual vitality. Meanwhile the name of
Tragedy was assumed by plays in which everyone was killed in the last
act, just as, in spite of Moliere, plays in which everyone was married
in the last act called themselves comedies. Now neither tragedies nor
comedies can be produced according to a prescription which gives only
the last moments of the last act. Shakespear did not make Hamlet out of
its final butchery, nor Twelfth Night out of its final matrimony. And he
could not become