18 December: Boreham on Ludwig van Beethoven

The Beneficent Rebel
This is the birthday of Ludwig Van Beethoven. In one of his recent lecturettes on the great musical composers, Mr. Neville Cardus declared that it is the glory of Beethoven that he was essentially a rebel. The statement is provocative. We all have to confess to a sneaking fondness for the man who, right or wrong, stands, like Athanasius, against the world. Nobody has ever been heard to defend the enormity that brought upon Ajax the wrath of all the ancient deities. But the spectacle of Ajax on his lonely rock defying all things, visible and invisible, and daring all the bolts that the gods of Mount Olympus could fling, has appealed to the imagination of every generation, and it is said that even his contemporaries, horrified as they had been by the grossness of his transgression, insisted on his being accorded an honoured sepulture in the island of Leuce, at a spot that was jealously reserved for the bravest of the brave.

In the same way nobody has seriously defended the suicidal indiscretion of King Lear in allowing his anger so to master him as to drive him out, bareheaded, into the storm. We have no patience with him as he exposes his age and frailty to the fury of the howling winds and driving rain. Yet we all recognise something heroic in the magnificent defiance that, out upon the shelterless heath, the old king hurls at the elements that threaten his destruction. The circumstances that lead such men into such situations may evoke our just resentment; the motives from which they act may incur our severest condemnation; yet the fact remains that, be the conditions what they may, the spectacle of a man daringly matching themselves against tremendous odds, appeals to the sporting instinct within us, and we momentarily forget the villain whom we ought to censure in the hero whom we are compelled, in spite of ourselves, to admire.

Revolt Against Custom And Tradition
Coming back to Beethoven, there is a terrific and splendid defiance that is altogether free from the taint we discover in the cases we have cited. Every now and again a man appears of such intellectual grandeur and ethical passion that their whole personality represents an audacious revolt against established custom and tradition. Emerson avers that the arrival upon the planet of an original thinker is like the outbreak of a fire in a great city— nobody knows where it will end. An insurgent and inflammatory element has sprung into being, and rebellion is afoot. In her exquisite monograph on Wordsworth, Miss Rosaline Masson shows how the principle operates among the poets. "The name of Wordsworth," she says, "stands as a great landmark in the history of English poetry. There are several such landmarks in that history. Far back in the centuries, where English melody began, we have Geoffrey Chaucer. After him come Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Between Milton and Wordsworth stretches the Eighteenth Century with all its false ideas and false tastes. Wordsworth marks the end of this. Not only did he dissent from the laws of poetry then prevalent, but he made direct onslaught on the poetic diction of the Eighteenth Century and resolutely, in the face of fierce and bitter antagonism, made new laws."

Here, then, we have a shining example of audacious and beneficent defiance, an outstanding instance of a rebellion in literature akin to Beethoven's rebellion in music. Miss Masson goes a step further. She points out the deep, historic significance that attaches to the manufacture of adjectives out of names. We speak of styles as Chaucerian, Spenserian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, or Wordsworthian. It is obviously an unconscious tribute that we pay to the dominant authority of the rebel. But it is also a sly and oblique suggestion that the writer whose work falls under one or other of these categories lacks that courage of defiance which their model possessed in such a striking degree. Goethe defined genius as "that power of man which, by living and acting, makes laws and rules."

Letting In The Fresh Air To Sweeten Life
Clearly, to make laws is to break laws. The new order outrages and violates the old. In his "Everlasting Man" Mr. Chesterton declares that life is a great game of noughts and crosses, played in a new way. The nought represents the ordinary routine of life—the round, the grind, the treadmill, the conformity of the individual to the established tradition. The cross, if the game is to be played victoriously, must be placed inside the nought so that its extremities, piercing the circle at four separate points, shatter its monotony for ever. The cross represents the spirit of rebellion. Every great thinker, every great inventor, every great discoverer, is represented by that cross. The cross becomes the X of the most spacious algebraic equation. It stands for all those subtle and incalculable factors that impart to life new significance, new vigour, new purpose, and new direction.

A rebel, then, is a man who smashes the window in a stuffy room and allows us all to breathe. He does a certain amount of damage, but he makes life the sweeter and the fresher for mankind. Copernicus was a rebel! He was born into a world that believed itself to be a small and stationary planet round which sun, moon, and stars, like so many glorified Chinese lanterns, moved for its special illumination and edification. The soul of Copernicus rebelled against this narrow and parochial superstition. He smashed the window and, as a result, his fellow-men, inhaling a purer and healthier atmosphere, gazed in astonishment through the aperture he had so violently created and beheld a universe magnified and multiplied a million-fold. To such rebels—Beethoven in music, Darwin in science, Shaftesbury in industry, Wordsworth in literature, and a thousand others—the world owes a debt it will never be able to compute.

F W Boreham

Image: Ludwig Van Beethoven