do not disturb them,” was his maxim, to which he remained true through all the calamities of his “artist-life.”
Gentleness and forbearance were virtues of which he was incapable. His spirit was deeply loving, but stern. Incapable himself of vice or meanness, he could not hope anything from men that were not so. He could not try experiments; he could not pardon. If at all dissatisfied with a man, he had done with him forever. This uncompromising temper he carried out even in his friendliest relations. The moment a man ceased to be important to him or he to the man, he left off seeing him, and they did not meet again, perhaps for twenty years. But when they did meet, the connexion was full and true as at first. The inconveniences of such proceedings in the conventional world are obvious, but Beethoven knew only the world of souls.
“In man he saw only the man. Rank and wealth were to him mere accidents, to which he attached no importance. To bow before Mammon and his ministers he considered absolute blasphemy; the deepest degradation to the man who had genius for his dower. The rich man must show himself noble and beneficent, if he would be honoured by the least attention from Beethoven.” “He thought that the Spirit, the Divine in man, must always maintain its preëminence over the material and temporary; that, being the immediate gift of the Creator, it obliged its possessor to go before other men as a guiding light.”
How far his high feeling of responsibility, and clear sight of his own position in the universe were from arrogance, he showed always by his aversion to servile homage. He left one of his lodging houses because the people would crowd the adjacent bridge to gaze on him as he went out; another because the aristocratic proprietor, abashed before his genius, would never meet him without making so many humble reverences, as if to a domesticated god. He says, in one of the letters to Julietta, “I am persecuted by kindness, which I think I wish to deserve as little as I really do deserve it. Humility of man before man,—it pains me; and when I regard myself in connexion with the universe,
