Figure II.
Before 1818 there is little internal evidence that Schubert had felt at all the influence of the greatest musician of the period, Beethoven, with whom, if we may judge from his diary, he was not yet in complete sympathy. Under date of June, 1816, he compares disparagingly "that bizarrerie for which we have chiefly to thank one of the greatest German artists" with the "naturalness" and "purity" of the Italian, Salieri. In the C-major symphony of 1818, however, he has evidently fallen completely under the sway of the master. The first movement of this work shows a great advance over earlier symphonies; the orchestral resources are increased, and used with more skill; the themes are more concise and vigorous, more truly symphonic, though still showing a tendency to rhythmic monotony; the construction is ampler and more carefully planned, there being a slow introduction and a Beethovenish coda. The transition by which the repetition of the first section of the movement is approached shows afresh the curious literalness with which Schubert copied his models.
Figure III.
The long poising, pianissimo, on a single harmony, and the final almost imperceptible lapse into the original key, are Beethoven to the letter. The other movements show the same influence. Especially noteworthy are the substitution of a scherzo for the old-fashioned minuet, and, in the finale, the many sudden shifts of tonality by a semitone, and sudden alternations of extreme loud and soft. Here, as much as in the earlier things, it is true, Schubert remains the obedient and passive student; he is still, in the phrase of Stevenson, "playing the sedulous ape"; but his model is much more complex, his touch is surer, his technical facility greater, and he needs only to grow a little older, a little more mature and self-conscious, in order to stamp all these gradually acquired materials with his own individuality.
Now maturity comes to most men, the romanticists like the others, as a result of the suffering, misunderstanding, and disappointment that years have a way of bringing. The youth interprets all the world by his own freshness of enthusiasm, keen sensation, untrammelled imagination. Everything seems possible to him, and life is one long, romantic adventure. But when he actually comes in contact with that world which looked so fair from a distance, through the rosy glasses of temperament, he discovers that it is stubborn to his purposes, that it is full of alien wills with which he struggles in vain, and that this struggle reveals insurmountable weaknesses and limitations in himself. Then either bitterness, or a new understanding of himself, resignation to the inevitable, and interpretation of life in more universal terms, is bound to displace the old romantic egotism. Experience regroups itself in soberer colors, and if he be generous enough to escape cynicism he emerges from the ordeal chastened and humanized.
This transition from self-absorbed youth to magnanimous manhood came to Schubert between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years, hastened by the adverse conditions of his life. We have seen how poverty held him in its sullen grasp; ill-health was added in 1824; and all through his last decade the sense of the indifference of the public to his higher artistic aims must have been dispiriting in the extreme. His songs were favorably enough received, but little interest was taken in his chamber and orchestral music except by a small circle of friends. That he could nevertheless go on, year after year, producing so splendid a series of compositions, in a spirit of such uncompromising devotion to art, almost entirely unsupported by public recognition, buoyed up by inward conviction alone, proves that underneath the careless Bohemianism of his everyday existence there was developing in him the stuff of real heroism. Like Columbus, he
"found a world, and had no chart
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies.