His symphonies are human documents, and even had he not written a single note of music we have sufficient evidence in verbal form to convince us that his personality was one of remarkable power and that music was only one way, though, to be sure, the foremost, of expressing the depth of his feeling and the range of his mental activity.  In distinction from his predecessors, who were merely musicians, Beethoven was a man first and a musician second, and the lasting vitality in his works is due to their broad human import; they evidently came from a character endowed with a rich and fertile imagination, from one who looked at life from many sides.  Several of his most famous compositions were founded on works of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller, and the Heroic Symphony bears witness to his keen interest in the momentous political changes of his time and in the growth of untrammeled human individuality.  No mere manipulator of sounds and rhythms could have impressed the fastidious nobility of Vienna to the high degree chronicled by contemporary testimony.  Beethoven wished to be known as a Tondichter, i.e., a first-hand creator, and his whole work was radically different from the rather cautious and imitative methods which had characterized former composers.  It was through the cultivated von Breuning family of Bonn that the young Beethoven became acquainted with English literature, and his growing familiarity with it exerted a strong influence upon his whole life and undoubtedly increased the natural vigor of his imagination, for the literature of England surpassed anything which had so far been produced by Germany.  Later, in 1823, when the slavery debates were going on in Parliament, he used to read with keen interest the speeches of Lord Brougham.

In estimating the products of human imagination during the last century, a fact of great significance is the relationship of the arts of literature and of music.  Numerous examples might be cited of men who were almost equally gifted in expressing themselves in either words or musical sounds—­notably von Weber, E.T.A.  Hoffmann, Spohr, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, this dual activity reaching a remarkable climax in Richard Wagner, who was both a great dramatic poet and an equally supreme musician.  The same tendency is manifested by leaders of thought in other nations.  Thus the French Berlioz and St. Saens are equally noted as composers and men of letters; the Italian Boito is an able dramatist as well as composer; and, among modern instances, Debussy, d’Indy, and Strauss have shown high literary as well as musical ability.  To turn to the other side of this duality, allusions to music in works of both prose and poetry have become increasingly frequent during the nineteenth century, and the musical art is no longer considered a mysterious abstraction entirely divorced from the outward world of men and events.  It is a long step from Goethe, who was entirely unable to grasp the meaning of Beethoven’s symphonies, to such