Page:Rolland - Beethoven, tr. Hull, 1927.pdf/20

has been doubted, it is difficult, almost impossible, to suppose that the 'child' or any one else invented them. On the other hand, they agree strangely with those authentic words of his already quoted, 'Every day I come nearer to the object which I can feel though I cannot describe it.'

"Beethoven is the prophet of the new era which the nineteenth century ushers in for mankind. As things must be felt before they can be acted out; so they may be expressed in the indefinite emotional forms of music, before they can be uttered and definitely imaged forth in words or pictorial shapes. Beethoven is the forerunner of Shelley and Whitman among the poets, of J. W. Turner and J. F. Millet among the painters. He is the great poet who holds Nature by the one hand and Man by the other. Within that low-statured, rudely-outlined figure which a century ago walked hatless through the fields near Mödling or sat oblivious in some shabby restaurant at Vienna, dwelt an emotional giant—a being who—though his outer life by deafness, disease, business-worries, poverty, was shattered as it were into a thousand squalid fragments—in his great heart embraced all mankind, with piercing insight penetrated intellectually through all falsehoods to the truth, and already in his art-work gave outline to the religious, the human, the democratic yearnings, the