(en passant, did ever reiteration play such a part?), prompts the wildest fancies. We think of
"The glooms of hell
Echoed with thunder, while the angels wailed;"
or again, echoes of deserted hell on the day of doom—the fiends summoned to the judgment-seat. But let us recur to Beethoven's more human suggestion. Fate knocketh in the form of Duty; Promethean free-will, human passion, rebels and struggles for a time, but at last yields; and heroic resolve is triumphant—heroic love. For, "Ach!" methinks these terrible blows are indeed those of Fate; but also those, viz., which nailed Heroic Love (comprehend both words) to the cross—heroic love that made even
"Destiny coincide with Choice;"
—that from the horrible instrument of torture and death itself, cried, "Father! forgive them, for they know not what they do;" and in the midst of the greatest of struggles and temptations (viz., with himself), wrestled and conquered, and cried, "Not my will (the local), but Thine (the universal) be done."—Such is the colossal difference between the pictures of Christ submitting, and Prometheus cursing the gods.
It is a remarkable fact, that this symphony is so great—indeed, the greatest; and yet, it is a fact fundamentally, instructively natural; for, not premeditating it beforehand, Beethoven sat down to write about the greatest thinkable subject out of his inmost own heart—nay, as it were, with his own heart's blood. Another remarkable fact is, that the so much abused public soon realized that this symphony was the greatest. This symphony paints Beethoven's life—especially inner life—which "life" properly means. Here we see genius struggling with fate, in which his life was sunk (like every life); wherewith our little life is rounded, as with a sleep. Fate! What had it done for Beethoven? What does it mean?
In the first place—mysteriously great fact—Fate had from the outset given him her own answer, had put into his hands the weapon for defeating her, viz., Genius. Armed with this, he can bide his time, and take all the drawbacks plus; especially as with him genius implies, what, properly, it always implies, Valour—or, in the valuable Latin double-sense or many-sense of the word, Virtue. The drawbacks—disagreeables, obstacles, from drunken father, aye, and own character, downward—in no wise fail to come. Amongst the gravest are the physical, deafness; one mixed, unsatisfied heart; and one spiritual, unsatisfied soul—all sunk in the adamantine environment of Fate. But then, as observed, Fate equips her adversary for the battle. And mark how Beethoven quits himself in the encounter. In early morning, in the burden and heat of the day, and by declining sun, he—like every true man, (like the Son of Man, or Brother of Man)—fights Fate with his life; makes his life answer doubts; and queries; and despair, the crucial questions which Fate forces on him. It is in this sense Emerson's saying applies. Beethoven thus answered questions he was not conscious enough to put; as, on the other hand, he also put questions he had not the power to answer—like the nineteenth century itself—questions which the twenty-ninth will probably be seeking a solution for. When Fate buffeted Beethoven at home (bitter mockery!), he worked in the direction, and with the instrument, which nature gave him; when she appeared as grim Vièrge de Fer, commanding him to earn his bread, he worked; when she appeared (more cruelly) as syren (mocking him), he worked (not went away and rioted); when—the most unkind cut of all—she made him deaf (him, Beethoven the grandest representation of man for the constituency, Music), he worked harder than ever; and all through the time, down to the end, when he could not, though he could not, satisfy the most irrepressible and unsatisfiable of all inquirers, his own unsettled soul—incapable of grasping eternity, knowing it must exist; incapable of proving immortality, feeling it is the very breath of life and beauty, and must be—from first to last, he worked. For this, he could dispense with going to hear Immanuel Kant; though, assuredly, their understanding of the "Categorical Imperative" was one, viz., Conscience(?). "Two things strike me dumb,—the heavens by night, and the moral law in man." Let Fate knock as she may,—unannounced, her loudest, long-sustained—as in these portentous notes (was ever chord of the dim. 7th so treated—so inspiredly?):—
