personal. Art was his goddess to whom he made petition, to whom
he rendered thanks, whom he defended. He praised her as his
savior in times of despair; by his own confession it was only
the prospect of her comforts that prevented him from laying
violent hands on himself. Read his words and you shall find
that it was his art that was his companion in his wanderings
through field and forest, the sharer of the solitude to which
his deafness condemned him. The concepts Nature and Art were
intimately bound up in his mind. His lofty and idealistic
conception of art led him to proclaim the purity of his goddess
with the hot zeal of a priestly fanatic. Every form of pseudo
or bastard art stirred him with hatred to the bottom of his
soul; hence his furious onslaughts on mere virtuosity and all
efforts from influential sources to utilize art for other than
purely artistic purposes. And his art rewarded his devotion
richly; she made his sorrowful life worth living with gifts of
purest joy:

"To Beethoven music was not only a manifestation of the
beautiful, an art, it was akin to religion. He felt himself
to be a prophet, a seer. All the misanthropy engendered by
his unhappy relations with mankind, could not shake his
devotion to this ideal which had sprung in to Beethoven
from truest artistic apprehension and been nurtured by
enforced introspection and philosophic reflection."

("Music and Manners," page 237. H. E. K.)