BEETHOVEN

O

NE of the most fascinating, and at the same time the most baffling, problems of the biographer, is to determine just what propor

tion of the characteristics of a great man are inherited from his ancestors, and what proportion take their origin in himself as an individual, to what degree his personality is merely a resultant or résumé of various qualities converging from many points into a fresh focus, and to what degree it is a unique creation, without traceable precedents or ascertainable causes. It is always possible to concoct a given character, however striking or unusual, by a judicious selection of ancestral traits; if we will but search far enough back, any man's ancestors will make up quite an adequate repre

sentation of the entire human race, so that each of his qualities need only be observed, noted, and traced to the particular great-grandfather or great-great-grandmother who happened to manifest it previously; and we can thus cleverly explain and label the oddest individual. The real difficulty is to explain how he happened to inherit just these qualities and no others, why he is, in a word, just this self instead of some other self, equally derivable but totally different. This difficulty has brought the whole subject of heredity into disfavor with some students; and it is certain that in the present state of our knowledge the study of the individual must precede and guide the study of his origins. Nevertheless, there are cases in which the essential qualities are so unmistakably inherited that the most illuminating way to approach an individual is through a study of his

ancestors.

Such a case is Beethoven's. A French writer, M. Teodor de Wyzewa, in a book called “ Beethoven et Wagner," has made so masterly, so discriminating an analysis of Beethoven's parents and grandparents, that no one can read it without a strong conviction of the important