We are warned on high authority that no man can serve two masters. The
caution should obtain in æsthetics 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 critical 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. Jäger.]
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 born in Bonn in
1770, on a day the date of which is not certain (though we know that his
baptism was December 17th). His youth was not a sunshiny period.
Poverty, neglect, a drunken father, violin lessons under compulsion,
were the circumstances ushering him into his career. He was for a brief
time a pupil of Mozart; just enough so to preserve that succession of
royal geniuses expressed in linking Mozart to Haydn, and in remembering
that Liszt played for Beethoven and that Schubert stood beside
Beethoven's last sick-bed. High patronage and interest gradually took
the composer under its care. Austria and Germany recognized him,
England accepted him early, universal intelligence became enthusiastic
over utterances in art that seemed as much innovations as Wagneristic
writing seemed to the next generation. In Vienna, Beethoven may be said
to have passed his life. There were the friends to whom he wrote--who
understood and loved him. Afflicted early with a deafness that became
total,--the irony of fate,--the majority of his master-works were
evolved from a mind shut away from the pleasures and disturbances of
earthly sounds, and beset by invalidism and suffering. Naturally genial,
he grew morbidly sensitive. Infirmities of temper as well as of body
marked him for their own. But underneath all superficial shortcomings of
his intensely human nature was a Shakespearean dignity of moral and
intellectual individuality.
It is not necessary here even to touch on the works that follow him.
They stand now as firmly as ever--perhaps more firmly--in the honor and
the affection of all the world of auditors in touch with the highest
expressions in the tone-world. The mere mention of such monuments as the
sonatas, the nine symphonies, the Mass in D minor, the magnificent chain
of overtures, the dramatic concert-arias, does not exhaust the list.
They are the vivid self-expressions of one who learned in suffering what
he taught in song: a man whose personality impressed itself into almost
everything that he wrote, upon almost every one whom he met, and who
towers up as impressively as the author of 'Hamlet,' the sculptor of
'Moses,' the painter of 'The Last Supper.'
It is perhaps interesting to mention that the very chirography of
Beethoven's letters is eloquent of the man. Handwriting is apt to be.
Mendelssohn, the well-balanced, the precise, wrote like copper-plate.
Wagner wrote a fine strong hand, seldom with erasures. Spontini, the
soldier-like, wrote with the decision of a soldier. Beethoven's letters
and notes are in a large, open, dashing hand, often scrawls, always with
the blackest of ink, full of changes, and not a flourish to spare--the
handwriting of impulse and carelessness as to form, compared with a
writer's desire of making his meaning clear.
[Illustration: Signature: E. IRENÆUS STEVENSON]