Note 204 — THE AWAKENING: A SKETCH OF THE MUSICAL MOVEMENT IN PARIS SINCE 1870

One must at least do Hugo the justice of saying that he always spoke of Beethoven with admiration, although he did not know him. But he rather exalts him in order to take away from the importance of a poet—the only one in the nineteenth century—whose fame was shading his own; and when he wrote in his William Shakespeare that "the great man of Germany is Beethoven" it was understood by all to mean "the great man of Germany is not Goethe."