Plenty food for thought … ! He goes on … “But rather to love it.”

One is reminded of a similarly late glorification of necessity in Beethoven’s final work – the Quartet in F Major, opus 135, where the bleak fateful question “Must it be?” changes into the fanatical cry of triumph “It must be! It must be!”

Beethoven does not challenge man’s submission to the natural order; he finds his place in it, and often in such deep wells of serenity, of happiness in his own struggle, that the song that rises from him almost at the very end, in his last quartet, is for a dance. Hence, “Must it be?” he wrote on the manuscript. “It must be. It must be.” 

Beethoven String Quartet No 16 Op 135 in F major Es muß sein! Alban Berg Quartet. My favourite part is the third section, Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo – the tranquil bit! Hedd perffaith hedd.

But the idea that ‘something must be’ is the most hateful idea to the very essence of the incomparable William Blake. (Both he and Beethoven died in 1827).