Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/490

474 climbing the difficult height of fame. His early creative activity has the same exuberance, the same prodigality as that of Mozart, and the quality of this early production may be seen in the fact that he was only seventeen and a half years old when he composed the well-known overture to the "Midsummer-Night's Dream." The development of Schubert's genius exhibits a similar velocity of movement at the outset. After trying his hand at smaller compositions he essayed a symphony in his seventeenth year, and a few months after produced his first mass—a work, says Sir G. Grove, which is as striking an instance of early ripeness of talent as Mendelssohn's overture.

If we compare with this rapid upward movement the early course of Beethoven's genius we see a marked difference. If, says the authority just quoted, we compare what this composer had done by twenty-two with the abundant productivity of the three others by the same age, we have to pronounce the works to be few and unimportant. He has to show against Mozart's thirty-six symphonies only one, and against the same writer's twenty-eight operas, cantatas, and masses, nothing at all. It was not till the age of twenty-five that Beethoven published works of high importance (including the first three sonatas for the piano, and the song "Adelaide"). And he first attacked large compositions, quintets for strings, symphonies, etc., in his thirtieth year.

Backwardness in original musical production is exemplified by two writers of opera, Gluck and Wagner, both of whom began as imitators of others, and only struck out a new path in middle life. Another example is Sebastian Bach, who did not compose till after forty. But perhaps the most noteworthy instance of late musical development is Haydn, who, though he gained a certain limited reputation in his youth, did not divulge the secret of his great powers till toward the age of sixty.

Nevertheless, in spite of these inequalities, it may be safely said that, as a rule, the great musical composers have redeemed the promise of a precocious youth with a creditable alacrity. This may be seen by a glance at the following figures: Out of thirty names selected for examination, I find that eighteen unquestionably reached eminence under twenty-five, or twenty-two in all under thirty; leaving eight who attained fame after thirty. Thus about three fifths of the illustrious names in the history of music came into possession of their full intellectual heritage on, or soon after, attaining their majority.

—The history of art is so rich in illustrations of precocity that it is difficult to select the best examples. Mantegna showed such marked ability as a child that he was taken up by a patron and entered by his master in the guild of painters before the completion of his eleventh yoaryear [sic]. Again, Andrea del Sarto is said to have shown fondness for drawing as a child, and at the early age of seven to have been introduced to the world of art in the shop of a goldsmith. Raphael seems to have been a painter from the cradle. He