ettina had given it to Philipp von
Nathusius. It had always been thought the most likely one, of the set
to be authentic; the compiler has therefore, used it without hesitation.
From the other letters, in which a mixture of the genuine and the
fictitious must be assumed so long as the originals are not produced,
passages have been taken which might have been thus constructed by
Beethoven. On the contrary, the voluminous communications of Bettina
to Goethe, in which she relates her conversations with Beethoven, were
scarcely used. It is significant, so far as these are concerned, that,
according to Bettina's own statement, when she read the letter to him
before sending it off, Beethoven cried out, "Did I really say that? If
so I must have had a raptus."

In conclusion the compiler directs attention to the fact that in a few
cases utterances which have been transmitted to us only in an indirect
form have been altered to present them in a direct form, in as much
as their contents seemed too valuable to omit simply because their
production involved a trifling change in form.

--Elberfeld, October, 1904. Fr. K.

CONCERNING ART

Beethoven's relation to art might almost be described as personal. Art
was his goddess to whom he made petition, to whom he rendered thanks,
whom he defended. He praised her as his savior in times of despair;
by his own confession it was only the prospect of her comforts that
prevented him from laying violent hands on himself. Read his words
and you shall find that it was his art that was his companion in his
wanderings through field and forest, the sharer of the solitude to which
his deafness condemned him. The concepts Nature and Art were intimately
bound up in his mind. His lofty and idealistic conception of art led him
to proclaim the purity of his goddess with the hot zeal of a priestly
fanatic. Every form of pseudo or bastard art stirred him with hatred to
the bottom of his soul; hence his furious onslaughts on mere virtuosity
and all efforts from influential sources to utilize art for other than
purely artistic purposes. And his art rewarded his devotion richly; she
made his sorrowful life worth living with gifts of purest joy:

"To Beethoven music was not only a manifestation of the beautiful, an
art, it was akin to religion. He felt himself to be a prophet, a seer.
All the misanthropy engendered by his unhappy relations with mankind,
could not shake his devotion to this ideal whi