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Many successful wooers of the muse have been, fortunately for themselves, the heirs of poverty, and became successful only to yield themselves to fat and slothful ease. But, with every incitement to an idle and contented life, Mendelssohn toiled like a galley-slave, and saw in his wealth only the means of a more exclusive consecration to his art.
Moreover, Lessing had probably by this time sucked his friends dry of any intellectual stimulus they could yield him; and when friendship reaches that pass, it is apt to be anything but inspiring. Except Mendelssohn and Von Kleist, they were not men capable of rating him at his true value; and Lessing was one of those who always burn up the fuel of life at a fearful rate.
I wonder how many chalks Mendelssohn gave himself for having sat two hours on that chair. I wonder how often he looked at his watch to see if his two hours were up.
At this time Mendelssohn himself was indescribably happy. At least, he could not himself find words in which to express all he felt. It is pleasant to find that a great composer is no exception to the rule which makes lovers "too happy for words." "But what words am I to use in describing my happiness?" he writes to his sister.
Mendelssohn benefited to a slight extent by Chopin's example, but he did not add anything new to the treatment of the pianoforte. Nor does even Liszt mark an advance on Chopin from a purely pianistic point of view. Paradoxical as it may seem, Liszt, the greatest pianist the world has known, was really a born orchestral composer.
In my room at the hotel I was mentally reviewing the program, when in a Mendelssohn Fugue, I found I had forgotten a small portion. I could remember what went before and what came after, but this particular passage had seemingly gone. I went down to the little parlor and tried the fugue on the piano, but could not remember the portion in question.
She played some pretty little things from Mendelssohn, Spohr, and Schubert. The gentlemen smoked and praised. Then she found an old music-book, and played Hamlet's overture to Otho, and the minuet. The gentlemen left off praising directly, and came silently into the room to hear the immortal melodist.
You can step in any morning and have a chat with Lawrence, Reynolds, Lessing, Delaroche Hazlitt, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Willis, Irving, Anthon, Sigourney, Osgood, Booth, Kemble, Kean, Cooper, Vandenhoff, Palmerston, Pitt, O'Connel, Lamartine, Napoleon, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Bronté, Lady Blessington, and others of note, who have made themselves illustrious during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
He had ideas sometimes which he thought admirable. He would run tremblingly to his table. Could he keep his inspiration this time? But hardly had he taken pen in hand than he found himself alone in silence, and all his efforts to call to life again the vanished voices ended only in bringing to his ears familiar melodies of Mendelssohn or Brahms.
He played the piano with intelligence and feeling especially Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of us ever having quite reached the "high jinks" of Wagner. To me his oratory was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six.
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