Page:Rolland - Beethoven, tr. Hull, 1927.pdf/18

 age had little or nothing to show. His first Symphony and his Septett, which he always looked back upon as childish productions, were not written till about the age of twenty-seven; and his first great Symphony (the Eroica) not till he was thirty-two."—Angels' Wings, pp. 141-2.

"Beethoven came at the culmination of a long line of musical tradition. He also came at a moment when the foundations of society were breaking away for the preparation of something new. His great strength lay in the fact that he united the old and the new. He was epic and dramatic, and held firmly to the accepted outlines and broad evolution of his art, like the musicians who went before him; he was lyrical, like those who followed, and uttered to the full his own vast individuality. And so (like the greatest artists) he transformed rather than shattered the traditions into which he was born.

"Beethoven was always trying to express himself; yet not, be it said, so much any little phase of himself or of his feelings, as the total of his life-experience. He was always trying to reach down and get the fullest, deepest utterance of which his subject in hand was capable, and to relate it to the rest of his experience. But being such as he was, and a master-spirit of his age, when he reached into himself for his own expression, he reached to