lls in the human spirit; not alone all the
noble and the lovely, but also the ignoble, the vicious, the unworthy,
and particularly the tragic--to the end that the soul may learn to
know itself, and awaken to a deeper and better self-consciousness.
Beethoven felt the mental movement of his day. While his acquaintance
with other prominent literary men of his time made little headway,
owing in part to his deafness, and in part to his very strong
self-consciousness, he read and thought, and felt himself akin with
the whole human race. He was a socialist and a republican by instinct.
"Man stands upon that which he really is," was a form of
self-assertiveness, which, if not actually enunciated by him, at least
represents his attitude toward the conventionalities and
superficialities of the courts, the social orders, and the general
movement of mind into which he entered. Moreover this was the time
when the romantic poets of Germany had already set the world thinking
their new ideas. Close by the great composer, in the same city in
fact, worked a young man, worshiping almost the very ground upon which
Beethoven walked, but for the most part unknown to him--Franz
Schubert, who in the symphony was classic to the very highest degree,
and a tone poet gifted lyrically not less than Mozart himself, a
composer whose ideas have equal refinement and grace with those of
Mozart, together with a certain charm peculiarly their own, and an
instinct for musical coloration, which has never found its superior.
This obscure young man, whose lofty genius was recognized only after
his soul had taken its flight from earth, was the founder of the
modern romantic school of music--the musical commentator upon the
productions of all the best of German poets; a composer of such
inexhaustible fertility and melodic inspiration that Schumann said of
him, that if he had lived he would have set to music the whole German
literature. Thus by the combined efforts of all these composers, of
Schubert no less than of the three great masters of whom we are more
particularly speaking, the symphony came to its full expression.

In their relation to the sonata, these three great masters do not
stand in the same position of _quasi_-equality. Haydn is here the
first, as already in the symphony. But in his sonatas he is always
rather hampered, and never attains the flow of his slow melodies for
the violin. Mozart, also, while a beautiful player upon the pianoforte
of h