h that she has
escaped materialism. That has been a crystal dome overhead, through
which Imagination has been kept alive. New England's imagination is to
be found, not in art and literature, but in her inventions, her social
organism, and above all in her religious life. The Sabbath has been the
nurse of that. When she ceases to have a Sunday, she will be as this
landscape is:--now growing dark, all its lines blurred, its distances
and gradations fast merging into sheeted darkness and night. Come, let
us go in!"

Copyrighted by Fords, Howard and Hulbert.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

(1770-1827)

BY E. IRENAEUS STEVENSON

We are warned on high authority that no man can serve two masters. The
caution should obtain in aesthetics as well as in ethics. As a general
rule, the painter must stick to his easel, the sculptor must carve, the
musician must score or play or sing, the actor must act,--each with no
more than the merest coquettings with sister arts. Otherwise his genius
is apt to suffer from what are side-issues for temperament. To many
minds a taste, and even a singular capacity, for an avocation has
injured the work done in the real vocation.

[Illustration: BEETHOVEN]

Of course there are exceptions. The versatility has not always been
fatal. We recall Leonardo, Angelo, Rossetti, and Blake among painters;
in the ranks of musicians we note Hoffmann, Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner,
Boito. In other art-paths, such personal pages as those of Cellini, and
the critical writings of Story, of to-day, may add their evidence. The
essentially autobiographic in such a connection must be accepted with
reserve. So must be taken much admirable writing as to the art in which
the critic or teacher has labored. Didactics are not necessarily
literature. Perhaps the best basis of determining the right to literary
recognition of men and women who have written and printed more or less
without actually professing letters, will be the interest of the matter
they have left to the kind of reader who does not care a pin about their
real life-work, or about their self-expression as it really comes
down to us.

In painting, the dual capacity--for the brush and for letters--has more
shining examples than in music. But with Beethoven, Schumann, Boito, and
Wagner, comes a striking succession of men who, as to autobiography or
criticism or verse, present a high quality of interest to the general
reader. In the instance of Beethoven the crit