ast years of Beethoven's life, the classic in art
embraces those productions in which the _general_ is aimed at, rather
than the _particular_; the _reposeful_ and _completely satisfactory_,
rather than the _forced_, or the _sensational_; and the _beautiful_
rather than the _exciting_. The philosopher Hegel, who was one of the
first to employ this distinction in art criticism, took his departure
from the famous group of Laocooen and his sons in the embrace of the
destroying serpents. This group, so full of agony and irrepressible
horror, belongs, he said, to a totally different concept of art from
that of the gods and goddesses of Greece, in the beauty and freshness
of their eternal youth. These qualities are those of the general and
the eternal; the Laocooen, in its nature painful, was not nor could be
permanently satisfactory in and of itself, but only through allowance
being made by reason of interest in the story told by it. According to
more recent philosophers, the romantic movement in literature and art
(for they are parts of the same general movement of the latter part of
the eighteenth century) has its essential characteristic in the
doctrine that what is to be sought in art is not the pleasing and the
satisfactory, so much as the true. _Everything_, they say, belonging
to life and experience, is fit subject of art; to the end that thereby
the soul may learn to understand itself, and come to complete
self-consciousness. The entire movement of the romantic writers had
for its moving principle the maxim, _Nihil humanum alienum a me puto_
("I will consider nothing human to be foreign to me"). Yet other
writers make the romantic element to consist of the striking, the
strongly contrasted, the exciting, and so at length the sensational.
Whichever construction we may put upon this much used and seldom
determined term, its general meaning is that of a distinction from the
more moderate writings and compositions of the eighteenth century.
_Individualism_, as opposed to the general, is the key to the
romantic, and in music this principle has acquired great dominance
throughout the century in which we are still living. Moreover, if the
principle of individualism had not been discovered in its application
to the other arts, it must necessarily have found its way into music,
for music is the most subjective of all the arts; having indeed its
general principles of form and proportion, but coming to the composer
(if he be a ge