is well taken." My reply to that is: "The United States never has been, is not, and never will be anything else but a great missionary society." Nominally, the whole island is Roman Catholic, but under the Constitution of the United States there can be no Roman Catholic island any more than there can be a Presbyterian, a Baptist, a Congregational, or an Episcopal island. Now, the time of religious liberty having come, Protestant missionaries of all names are there and are working to evangelize and uplift the people of Porto Rico, to inspire them with higher ideals of living, with the hope of making of them good, Christian American citizens, fit to live under the stars and stripes. While nominally, as I have said, the entire population is Roman Catholic, I think the great majority of the people have no real allegiance to that religion. This condition of things is not confined to ignorant people who have been neglected and who are the prey of superstition. It prevails among the better-informed element of the community, who may be divided into three classes: (1) Those who are loyal to the Roman Catholic Church; (2) those who are bitterly and unreasonably opposed to the Roman Catholic Church (and many of them hate it with an unholy hatred); and (3) those who are absolutely indifferent, if not agnostic. With this condition of things we can find a ready use for any man who can expound the Bible to these people in their own language. While it is easy to master Spanish enough for ordinary purposes, it is as difficult to learn to preach in Spanish as to speak the Latin of Cicero. The Spanish language is beautiful, dignified, subtle, with delicate shades of meaning, full of idiomatic expressions, with many a pitfall for the unwary. For instance, an American in Porto Rico met a couple of gentlemen coming down the street one day, and said, genially," Buenos Dios, caballos !" What he intended to say was: "Buenos dias, caballeros !" (Good-morning, gentlemen). What he did say means, "Good God, horses !" Bishop Blenk, the Roman Catholic bishop, is an American, a gentleman, a scholar, and, I think, a good Christian man, although I regret that he is opposed to the American public schools. He is much beloved all over the island, but he has a very difficult proposition to handle. Under Spain the Roman Catholic Church was the established religion, the clergy were paid by the State, and many held office under the government. But now, under American rule, there is, of course, no connection between Church and State, and many priests went away at the time of the Spanish evacuation. This leaves the Church in a crippled condition as regards numbers, while, I am told, the amount of financial support is extremely small. There is no doubt that, whatever may have been her shortcomings and faults, the Roman Catholic Church has done much good, as is evidenced by the fact that the people of Porto Rico know a good deal about Christianity. They may have perverted ideas, they may have grotesque ways of showing their religion, as in the matter of the carnival and their noisy demonstrations at Christmas and Easter, yet at the same time they know something about redemption and about the great Head and Founder of the Christian Church. But the Church of Rome in Porto Rico neglected the humanities. She built no hospitals; she had very few schools, and those were pay schools; she did not give to the people very much to elevate and brighten their lives. One manifestation of their conception of the humanities may be found in the inadequate methods of administering charitable relief. On every Saturday morning San Juan was crowded with beggars. Saturday was called "beggars' day." On that day copper coins were thrown to these poor creatures and they reaped a harvest, but their poverty was ultimately only augmented, for begging became a professional industry. Regarding the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards our missions, I was told that some one went to Bishop Blenk and said, "Do you see what these Protestants are doing? Do you see how many they are drawing away with them?" "Yes," he replied, "but what of that? If they can do anything to improve the conditions of the Porto Ricans, for pity's sake let them do it; but you may depend on it these people will all return to the Mother Church when they come to die. You do not need to “A worry." My reply to that is, "If we can help the Porto Ricans to live, we do not care who buries them; the Lord will take care of them then." Beethoven as a Composer' By Daniel Gregory Mason GREAT man,' says Emerson, "finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love of the materials he wrought in. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their labors." Had Emerson wished to point the truth of this impressive generalization with specific instance, he could hardly have chosen a better example than the greatest composer of the early nineteenth century, Ludwig van Beethoven. a The eighteenth century had been a time of formalism in art and literature, of rigid conventionality in social life, of paternalism in politics, and of dogmatic ecclesiastical authority in religion. At its end, however, all those dim, halfconscious efforts of humanity towards freer and fuller life which we may perhaps best suggest by the general term of idealism were beginning to reach definiteness and self-consciousness. Men were beginning to assert deliberately and openly what they had long been feeling intuitively but insecurely. They were boldly erasing from their standards the mediæval formula, "Poverty, celibacy, and obedience," to write in its place the modern one, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." They were revolting from the tyrannies of Church and State, to proclaim the sacredness of the individual soul. It was Beethoven's high privilege to 'An article on "Beethoven the Man" by Mr. Mason will be found in the issue of The Outlook for January 7.-THE EDITORS. that But be the artistic spokesman of this new, enfranchised humanity. Haydn had reflected for the first time in music the universal interest in all kinds of human emotion, sacred and and profane, marked the dawn of the new era. in his music the emotion remains naïve, impulsive, childlike; it has not taken on the earnestness, the sense of responsibility, of manhood. It is still in the spontaneous stage, has not become deliberate, resolute, purposeful. But with Beethoven childishness is put away, and the new spirit steps boldly out into the world, aware of its obligations as well as of its privileges, clear-eyed, sad, and serious, to live the full yet difficult life of freedom. The closeness of Beethoven's relation to the idealistic spirit of his time is shown equally by two distinct yet supplementary aspects of his work. As it was characteristic of the idealism which fed him to set supreme store by human emotion in all its intensity and diversity, so it is characteristic of his music to voice emotion with a fullness, poignancy, definiteness, and variety that sharply contrasts it with the more formal decorative music of his forerunners. And as it was equally characteristic of idealism to recognize the responsibilities of freedom, to restrain and control all particular emotions in the interest of a balanced spiritual life, so it was equally characteristic of Beethoven to hold all his marvelous emotional expressiveness constantly in subordination to the integral effect of his composition as a whole, to value plastic beauty even more highly than eloquent appeal to feeling. In other words, Beethoven the musician is equally remarkable for two qualities, eloquence of expression and beauty of form, which in his best work are always held in an exact and firmly controlled balance. And if we would fully understand his supremacy, we must perceive not only his achievements in both directions, but the high artistic power with which he correlates them. Just as the courage to insist on the rights of the individual, and the wisdom to recognize and support the rights of others, are the two essentials of true idealism, so eloquence and beauty are the equal requisites of genuine art. So closely interwoven, so mutually reactive, are these twin merits of expression and form in the great works of Beethoven's prime-in the pianoforte sonatas from the Waldstein to Opus 90, in the String Quartets, Opus 59 and 74, in the fourth and fifth piano concertos and the unique concerto for violin, in the Overture to " Coriolanus," the incidental music to " Egmont," and the opera, "Fidelio," in the Mass in C, and above all in the six great symphonies from the "Eroica" to the Eighth-that it seems like wanton violence and falsification to separate them, even for the purposes of study. Synthesis, at any rate, should go hand in hand with analysis; we should constantly remember that the various qualities our critical reagents discern in this music exist in it not, as in our analysis, single and detached, but fused and interpenetrative in one artistic whole. The chemist may find carbon and hydrogen and oxygen in the rose, but a rose is something more, something ineffably more, than a compound of these elements. If, bearing constantly in mind the artificiality of analysis, we nevertheless attempt an enumeration of separate qualities in Beethoven's mature work, we are first of all arrested by the vigor, definiteness, and variety of his expression. In Beethoven one can observe at least four well-contrasted general types of expressiveness, to say nothing of the infinite gradations between them. There is, in the first place, and as perhaps the dominant quality in all his work, the virile energy, the massive and cyclopean power, as of a giant or a god, so well illustrated in the opening subjects of such works as the Third, Fifth, and Eighth Symphonies. What vigor, what inexhaustible force, what a morning freshness and joy there are in such a theme as that of the "Eroica" Symphony! How inexorable is its rhythm, how broad, solid, and simple its harmonic foundation! What controlled excitement, what restrained ferocity, there is in that persistent fourtone motif of the Fifth Symphony— "Fate knocking at the door"! What swift, concise assertiveness, as in the fiat of an emperor, in the opening of the Eighth Symphony, though it was called by Beethoven "my little one" Elemental strength is the most constant, pervasive quality of expression in Beethoven's work. Yet, like every comprehensively great man, he had the feminine tenderness and sentiment without which primal power is primitive, and will mere willfulness. His ruggedness hid the most delicate sensibility. At his most heroic moments he is always melting into moods of wistfulness, yearning, and soft emotion. To go for illustration no further than the symphonies, it is sufficient to mention, in the "Eroica," the hesitant fervor of the second subject of the first movement; the deep and noble pathos of the subject of the funeral march; the clear and rich emotion of the Trio (in the third movement), with its wonderful final strains, of which Sir George Grove said, "If ever horns talked like flesh and blood, they do it here;" in the Fifth Symphony, the poignant appeal of the second subject of the first movement, and the ceaselessly questing, gently insistent mood of the Andante; and in the Seventh, the resigned yet still aspiring state of feeling voiced by the melody in A-major in the Allegretto. But it is impossible to do more than shadow forth dimly, in words, the emotions that glow with such deep color in this music. Moreover, to enumerate them is as unnecessary as it is thankless. Every one who knows music at all knows how incomparable is Beethoven in the expression of all shades of tender, romantic, and impassioned human feeling. A third sort of expression characteristic of Beethoven is that of the whimsical, the perverse, the irrepressibly gay. Before him, the classical symphony had had room for the brisk jollity of the room. Haydn finale and for the forthright ani- Reprise, in the same movement, makes mation of the Mozart minuet; but noth- a similar impression, the modulation to ing like the Beethoven scherzo had the home-key of B-flat, after the long existed. In Italian the word scherzo groping in B-major, seeming like the means a joke; and when he substituted opening of a window in a darkened the rollicking scherzo for the more formal and stately minuet, Beethoven introduced into music the element of banter, mischief, and whimsy. Even among his several scherzos there is such a diversity of mood that they introduce into music far more than one new kind of expression; their fancy is protean, inexhaust ible. The scherzo of the "Eroica" is a mixture of mystery, gayety, and headlong élan; in that of the Fifth Symphony, a sort of groping as in darkness alternates with incisive, grandiose, military boldness; in the allegro of the Pastoral Symphony, taking the place of the scherzo, there is rustic merrymaking, the awkward, good-natured gambols of peasants; in the presto of the Seventh there is upwelling geniality, the broad smile of amiable indolence; and in the "minuet" of the Eighth the old minuet stateliness gives place to a mixture of animal spirits and intellectual subtlety. Nor are the Scherzos proper the only embodiment of the antics of this musical Pan; such Finales as those of the Fourth, Seventh, and Eighth symphonies are but transfigured, ennobled scherzos, with the largeness of the heroic spirit added to the fancy, whim, and tireless high spirits of the insatiable humorist. Beethoven is the extreme exponent of the spirit of comedy in music. A fourth mood distinguishable in Beethoven is the mood of mystery. He loves to suggest the illimitable and the transcendent, to dissolve himself in vagueness; to pique curiosity and stimulate imagination by long stretches of pianissimo, of amorphous, ambiguous harmony, of strange, inarticulate melody that baffles the attention-long, wide hushes, audible silences. In these moods he seems to retire, after his onslaughts of expression, into the deep subterranean reservoirs of the unexpressed. The Introduction to the Fourth Symphony is an example; one hears in it, as it were, the groping of vast, unorganized impulses that await a birth. The extended pianissimo passage that leads into the The wide stretches of rippling violin figures, piano, in the "Scene by the Brook" of the Pastoral Symphony illustrate another use of this device of monotony. They affect the mind, as Beethoven meant they should, like a placid, sun-bathed landscape at noon, flat, silent, motionless. But perhaps the most striking instance of all is that wonderful page in the Fifth Symphony that prepares for the Finale. The sustained C's of the strings, the suppressed, barely audible tapping of the drums, in the rhythm of the central motif of the work, the fragmentary, aimless, and yet cumulative phrases of the violins, instill a sense of some vast catastrophe impending; and then, after the deliberate, gradual crescendo, pressing upon every nerve, the great, joyous theme of the Finale crashes in, to sweep all before it. Marvelous indeed is this varied and ever forcible expression of feeling in the great works of Beethoven's maturity; but even more marvelous is the steady power by which he organizes these feelings into forms of perfect beauty, the unfaltering control by which he keeps the intensely characteristic from degenerating into caricature, the impassioned from becoming hysterical. He never forgets that, as an artist, he is the master, not the slave, of his inspiration, however seizing it may be. Though he infuses into music an eloquence new to it, he remembers that it is still music, and that it must be beautiful as music. Titanic were the labors he imposed upon himself to give it balance, symmetry, logical coherence, integral unity emerging from an infinite variety of parts. His sketch-books are the standing evidence of what endless effort it cost him to be an artist. In them we behold him at work, day by day, eliminating the irrelevant, reinforcing the significant, exploring the sources of melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and structural variety, and returning upon his task to gather up all the threads into one complete, close-woven fabric. The result was a type of music seldom equaled, before or since, for that ordered richness, that complex simplicity, which is beauty. In the conception and execution of a great symphonic work, as an integral whole of many and diverse parts, Beethoven is unapproachable. All the successive movements in a long work, all the themes and transitions, all the rhythmic changes, all the modulations, temporary or prolonged, are foreseen and adjusted with perfect control. There is no feature of any moment that has not its relation to the whole. Often the reason of some apparent whim will not appear for pages; but at last it will appear, and when it does it will be seen to fulfill a purpose never lost sight of. As a turret or window at the extreme end of a building may balance a similar feature at the other end, so Beethoven's treatment of a given theme, early in a movement, may be determined and illuminated by what he finally does to it in the Coda. So integral is his work, so firmly held in the grip of his inexorable artistic logic. Beauty, in the great compositions of his prime, is therefore as omnipresent as expression; and their supreme greatness is in fact due to the perfect balance, in them, of these two equally important elements of musical effect. This will come out even more clearly in the course of a brief analysis of the highly significant attitude of Beethoven towards programme music, which he understood, it seems, better than most modern musicians. Programme music differs from pure music in being aimed rather at the literal imitation or delineation of objects and events in the natural world than at the presentation, through orderly and consequently beautiful tone-combinations, of the general emotions that they arouse. Schütz, a very early German composer, depicting by a long downward scale an angel descending from heaven; Beethoven, introducing the notes of the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo in his Pastoral Symphony; Schubert, writing in the accompaniment of his song, "The Trout," a leaping figure suggestive of the motions of the fish in the water; Raff, sounding the rhythm of a galloping horse all through the ride-movement of his "Lenore symphony; Wagner, imitating in the "Waldweben" the murmurings of the forest-all these composers are writing programme music. Of course there is no reason that programme music should not be at the same time pure music, provided that the desire to imitate nature accurately does not lead the composer to slight the requirements of plastic beauty in the ordering and combination of his material. A portrait may be good decoration, if composition, massing, light and shade, coloring, and so on, are not sacrificed to a pitiless realism. Just so, programme music can be made beautiful, if the needs of abstract tonal beauty are duly considered. But as a usual thing they are not. The programme composer generally makes a fetish of his "idea," pursues it with the enthusiasm of the literalist, and quite neglects the formal symmetry, the stylistic congruity and harmony, of his web of tones. The result is that programme music is as a rule more interesting than moving; that in attempting to make pure sounds do what words, or even colors and shapes, can do better, it sacrifices the legitimate and characteristic effect of tones-the suggestion of a general state of feeling, potent by reason of its very vagueness, and transfigured by the abstract beauty of its medium. Now Beethoven was obliged in his early maturity to face and solve this problem of programme music, for himself. His intense individualism, his amenability to strong feeling, his natural interest in the characteristic, the dramatic, the definite, and the opportunity he found, in music as he received it from his forerunners, for a more detailed expressiveness than had yet been attempted, all inclined him to take the attitude of the programme composer. The poetic conception of a work was so clear and distinct in his mind that he could easily assign it a descriptive title. He called his third symphony "The Eroica," his sixth the "Pastoral," and said that the motif of the fifth indicated "Fate Knocking at the Door." He called one of his piano sonatas "Les Adieux, l'Absence et le Retour;" of another, that in G-major, opus 14, he t |