24 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 
cosmopolitan and shallow, but having a strong, purely human feeling, because music is 
a universal art. I picture him inspired with a glowing enthusiasm for what the great 
minds of all times and of all nations have produced, and having an invincible aversion 
to mediocrity, with which he comes in contact only through his own kindness. I think 
of him as free from envy because conscious of and trusting in his own worth, far above 
any mean ways of advertising his own works; profoundly sincere, and, where needful» 
even indifferent—hence not a great favorite in many places. I imagine him not anxiously 
avoiding social intercourse, but with a tendency towards seclusion—not hating men in 
exaggerated world-grief, but despising their meanness and narrow-mindedness, and so 
choosing only special persons for his daily intercourse. I think of him as not indifferent 
to success or failure, but refusing to allow either to alter his course by a hair’s breadth; 
very indifferent to so-called public opinion, and politically a republican in Beethoven’s 
sense. 
* * * * * * * No doubt in the midst of all this confusion, the great, the 
truly new and original, is silently preparing, but far away from the art market. Its appear- 
ance will be a question of personality and not of education. The artist cannot live far 
from the activity of the world. He must get his ideas, his inspirations, and the plumb- 
line of his work from life. Will our present most intense, nervous, and strenuous exist- 
ence let some soul develop within, in the midst of all the press and drive, that degree of 
intuitiveness and poise from which alone great works of art, stamped neither more nor 
less with the fad of the day, can come? Will—without reaction—that loftiness without 
pathos, that charm without coquetry, that strength and sweetness of spirit, by which 
our great masters were characterized, return to day upon the basis of the modern philos- 
ophy of life? In this age of invention and mechanics is an art possible that, standing 
as far above all time as everything really great does, is still the child of its time? 
* * * * To only a few is it permitted to wander on the highest summits of 
humanity, and this “superhuman’”’ state cannot be constructed, learned, or acquired. 
That endowment comes only as a transcendent gift from the regions above. ‘“‘From 
which ?” you eagerly ask. Well,—from that region which only he would deny who has 
never felt its breath wafted across to him! Be it a little song or a great symphony that 
you compose, it will only be a masterpiece if it deserves the same motto that the great 
Beethoven wrote on the score of his Missa Solemnis: 
“Von Herzen—mége es zu Herzen gehen!” 
