ical or essayistic side is
limited. It is by his letters and diary that we study (only less vividly
than in his music) a character of profound depth and imposing nobility;
a nature of exquisite sensitiveness. In them we follow, if
fragmentarily, the battle of personality against environment, the
secrets of strong but high passion, the artist temperament,--endowed
with a dignity and a moral majesty seldom equaled in an art indeed
called divine, but with children who frequently remind us that Pan
absorbed in playing his syrinx has a goat's hoof.

Beethoven in all his correspondence wrote himself down as what he
was,--a superior man, a mighty soul in many traits, as well as a supreme
creative musician. His letters are absorbing, whether they breathe love
or anger, discouragement or joy, rebellion against untoward conditions
of daily life or solemn resignation. The religious quality, too, is
strong in them; that element more in touch with Deism than with one or
another orthodoxy. Withal, he is as sincere in every line of such matter
as he was in the spoken word. His correspondence holds up the mirror to
his own nature, with its extremes of impulse and reserve, of affection
and austerity, of confidence and suspicion. It abounds, too, in that
brusque yet seldom coarse humor which leaps up in the Finale of the
Seventh Symphony, in the Eighth Symphony's waggery, the last movement of
the Concerto in E flat. They offer likewise verbal admissions of such
depression of heart as we recognize in the sternest episodes of the
later Sonatas and of the Galitzin Quartets, and in the awful Allegretto
of the Symphony in A. They hint at the amorous passion of the slow
movements of the Fourth and Ninth Symphonies, at the moral heroism of
the Fifth, at the more human courage of the 'Heroic,' at the mysticism
of the Ninth's tremendous opening. In interesting relation to the group,
and merely of superficial interest, are his hasty notes, his occasional
efforts to write in English or in French, his touches of musical
allusiveness.

[Illustration: _BEETHOVEN._ Photogravure from the Original Painting
by C. Jaeger.]

It is not in the purpose of these prefatory paragraphs to a too-brief
group of Beethoven's letters to enter upon his biography. That is
essentially a musician's life; albeit the life of a musician who, as Mr.
Edward Dannreuther suggests, leaves behind him the domain of mere art
and enters upon that of the seer and the prophet. He was