THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN
Happy, they say, is the country that hath no history. Happy, too, the
man whose love affairs make tame reading.
It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as
Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called
him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only
thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments
and rebuffs,--being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither
the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as
human lives go, one of complete felicity.
Well begun is half done, and half the struggle for happiness is achieved
if one's childhood years are made pleasant. Mendelssohn's home life was
so brilliantly joyous, and so busy with artistic and domestic comforts,
that it has almost passed into proverb as ideal. Mendelssohn is
described as having been "enthusiastically, almost fanatically, fond of
his father," who, without possessing musical technic, possessed a
remarkable spiritual grasp of it. His mother was something of a pianist,
and a woman of great sweetness and firmness of character, to whom the
children were devoted and with whom they were confidential to the utmost
degree. In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn's genius bore early
fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his
Overture to "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," a wonderful fabric of harmony
and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was
written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed
of writing music, nor had even turned out that old-fangled and empty
sonata which is beautiful only because it was his first and last offence
of the sort.
Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was
like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when
she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life. Some of her
compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many
things. At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at
the age of forty-two she died.
Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men; he was small and
excitable, but was counted handsome. He was versatile to an unusual
degree, being an adept at painting, as well as billiards, chess,
riding, swimming, and general athletics. He was also something of a
scholar in Greek and Latin, and his correspondence was so
enthusiastically kept up that his published letters take a high place in
such literature, overflowing as they are with comment of all kinds on
the people and things he saw in his wide travels. As an aunt of his once
wrote his mother: "If God spare him, his letters will in long, long
years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a
holy relic; indeed, they are sacred already as the effusion of so pure
and childlike a mind."
His heart was indeed remarkably clean. Stratton says of him: "He was
always falling in love, as his letters show, but no breath of scandal
bedimmed the shining brightness of his character." "He wore his heart
upon his sleeve," says Stratton. He also wore it on the tip of his pen,
and one who wishes to know how possible it is to be both a good and
joyous man and a great, busy musician can find such an one in
Mendelssohn's published letters, though the most personal family matters
have been omitted from them as printed, and his wife before her death
burned all the letters he had written her.
We, however, are concerned only in his amours. When he was twenty years
old, he went to England and thence to Scotland and Wales, where he
spent a time composing, sketching, and exercising his fascinations; he
wrote home: "Yes, children, I do nothing but flirt, and that in
English." Wherever he went, he saw something beautiful in nature or in
womankind, and at Munich, in 1830, he was, as his sister wrote, "the
darling in every house, the centre of every circle." The
fifteen-year-old Josephine or "Peppi" Lang and Delphine von Schauroth
seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a
piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a
forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough. In Italy,
in 1831, he found his heart captured easily, and, as once in Schumann's
case, it was an English girl who entangled him. She was a beauty whom he
first met at a ball at Torlonia's; he danced with her again at the
Palazzo Albani. But music held him fast through all, though he could on
occasion impatiently vow that he would be more serious and no longer
alter his compositions to suit the whims of pretty girls.
Mendelssohn's life flowed on in smoothness, in thorough contrast with
the violent ups and downs of Beethoven's mind and music, for he was, as
Stratton says, "on the most excellent terms with himself," as with the
world in general. He was extremely sensitive to criticism and to false
friendship, but he was never stung into those virulent humours which
poisoned Beethoven's career. So placid a life his was, indeed, that some
of his admirers have wished that he had met with more tragedy, in order
that he might have written more poignant music. Against this view, Grove
wisely protested, comparing Schubert's words: "My music is the product
of my genius and my misery; and that which I have written in my greatest
distress is that which the world seems to like best." Grove moralises
thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy:
"He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a
morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the
other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or
Schumann. Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure,
aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony?
It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his
Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure. But
let us take the man as we have him. Surely there is enough of conflict
and violence in life and in art. When we want to be made unhappy we can
turn to others. It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to
point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters,
and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and
pure, brilliant and solid. For the enjoyment of such shining heights of
goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow."
In November, 1835, Mendelssohn's father died, among his last wishes
being the wish that his son should marry, as the two sisters already
had. The blow to Mendelssohn was exceedingly severe, and his condition
alarmed his sister, who urged upon him his father's advice. Mendelssohn
told her that he would look about him on the Rhine next summer.
In 1836 he visited Frankfort, and made the acquaintance of the widow of
a French clergyman who had preached at the French Reformed Church. The
widow was Madame Jeanrenaud (_née_ Souchay); she was so well preserved
and handsome that she was credited with having won Mendelssohn's love.
But it was her second daughter, Cécile Charlotte Sophie, who had stuck
the first pin of permanence through his butterfly heart. She was
seventeen and he twenty-seven; he loved beauty, and she was beautiful.
The hyper-romantic Elise Polko often saw Cécile, and described her:
"To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly
fascination and loveliness. Her figure was slight, of middle height, and
rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown
hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of
transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most
bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and
eyebrows.... Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach
so beautifully calls _Marienhaft_. Her manner was generally thought too
reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called 'the fair Mimosa,'
In music we have an expressive term, 'calm but impassioned,' and this I
deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of Cécile."
Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young
girl had made upon him that he was worried. To make sure that he was
really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at
Scheveningen, near The Hague. But salt water would not wash away his
emotion, and after a month's absence he returned, proposed, and on the
9th of September, 1836, was betrothed. He wrote his mother at once:
"My head is quite giddy from the events of the day; it is already late
at night and I have nothing else to say; but I must write to you, I feel
so rich and happy."
It is a proof of the fondness the people cherished for Mendelssohn that,
when the engagement became noised abroad, the directors of the
Gewandhaus in Leipzig put on the programme the second finale in
"Fidelio," "He who has gained a charming wife" ("_Wer ein holdes Weib
errungen_"). The audience saw the meaning at once and shouted in its
enthusiasm, until Mendelssohn was forced to seat himself at the piano
and extemporise upon the theme.
Felix and Cecile were married March 28, 1837, at the Walloon French
Reformed Church in Frankfort, and his friend Hiller surprised them with
a new bridal chorus. The wedding tour lasted nearly a month, and the
honeymooners kept a journal, in which they both sketched and wrote
humourous nothings. The home they chose was in Leipzig, where Fanny
Hensel visited them, and found Cécile possessed not only of "the
beautiful eyes" Felix had raved over so much, "but possessed also of a
wonderfully soothing temperament, that calmed her husband's whims and
promised to cure him of his irritability."
The married life of the two was interrupted by the journeys the husband
had to make for his important engagements, till he growled vigorously,
and regretted being a conductor at all.
In February, 1838, the first child was born, and Cécile was dangerously
ill. On other tours of his, even to England, she accompanied him. She
bore him five children, three boys and two girls. Their life together
was almost perfect. He writes, in 1841, to a friend who is to be
married:
"If I have still a wish to form it is that your blissful betrothal-mood
may be continued in marriage, that is, may you be like me, who feel
every day of my life that I cannot be sufficiently thankful to God for
my happiness."
In another letter he thus pictures his private paradise: "Eating and
sleeping, without dress coat, without piano, without visiting-cards,
without carriage and horses, but with donkeys, with wild flowers, with
music-paper and sketch-book, with Cécile and the children." Again, in
1844, he writes of a return home:
"I found all my family well, and we had a joyful meeting. Cécile looks
so well again,--tanned by the sun, but without the least trace of her
former indisposition; my first glance told this when I came into the
room, but to this day I cannot cease rejoicing afresh every time I look
at her. The children are as brown as Moors, and play all day long in the
garden. And so I am myself again now, and I take one of the sheets of
paper that Cécile painted for me, to write to you.
"I am sitting here at the open window, looking into the garden at the
children, who are playing with their 'dear Johann.' The omnibus to
Koenigstein passes here twice every day. We have early strawberries for
breakfast, at two we dine, have supper at half-past eight in the
evening, and by ten we are all asleep. The country is covered with
pear-trees and apple-trees, so heavy with fruit that they are all
propped up; then the blue hills, and the windings of the Main and the
Rhine; the confectioner, from whom you can buy thread and shirt-buttons;
the list of visitors, which comes out every Saturday, as _Punch_ does
with you; the walking-post, who, before going to Frankfort, calls as he
passes to ask what we want, and next day brings me my linen back; the
women who sell cherries, with whom my little four-year-old Paul makes a
bargain, or sends them away, just as he pleases; above all, the pure
Rhenish air,--this is familiar to all, and I call it Germany!"
Grove makes this sketch of the blissful circle:
"The pleasure in his simple home life, which crops out now and then in
these Frankfort letters, is very genuine and delightful. Now, Marie is
learning the scale of C; he has actually forgotten how to play it, and
has taught her to pass her thumb under the wrong finger! Now, Paul
tumbles the others about so as to crack their skulls as well as his
own. Another time he is dragged off from his letter to see a great tower
which the children have built, and on which they have ranged all their
slices of bread and jam--'A good idea for an architect,' At ten Carl
comes to him for reading and sums, and at five for spelling and
geography--and so on. 'And,' to sum up, 'the best part of every pleasure
is gone if Cécile is not there,' His wife is always somewhere in the
picture."
Even when Mendelssohn went to England and was cordially received by the
young Queen Victoria, and when she asked him what she could grant him
for his pleasure, he asked to see the royal nursery. Stratton describes
the strange reward of his art as follows:
"Delighted beyond everything, the Queen led the way, and the two were
soon deep in the mysteries of children's clothing, dietary, ailments,
and all that appertains to the duties of the heads of a family.
Perchance he inspected the juvenile wardrobe of the future Empress of
his own Germany."
On one of the home festivals, Cécile and her sister gave and acted a
comic dialogue between two ladies' maids, in Frankfort dialect.
Gradually, however, Mendelssohn's overbusy musical enthusiasm wore down
his health, and at thirty-seven he was nearing the end of his marvellous
vitality and vivacity. In May, 1847, his sister Fanny was conducting a
rehearsal of her choir; she sat at the piano till suddenly her hands
dropped from the keys, and she was dead. The news was told to
Mendelssohn without any preparation; with a scream he dropped senseless;
it was said that a blood-vessel had broken in his brain. From this time
on he was a changed man, weary of everything. He sank gradually until,
the evening of November 4, 1847, he died, painlessly, in the presence of
his wife, his brother, and three friends.
His funeral was a fitting close to his splendid life; six years later
Cécile died at Frankfort of consumption.
Of Mendelssohn's character there is no need to speak further here; it
was strangely summed up in his own words, in a letter he wrote to a man
who had told him that he was spoken of as a veritable saint. How few
saints are canonised in their own time, and how few deserve it ever! But
let us take Mendelssohn's own words for his own epitaph:
"So I am said to be a saint! If this is intended to convey what I
conceive to be the meaning of the word, and what your expressions lead
me to think you also understand by it, then I can only say that, alas! I
am not so, though every day of my life I strive with greater
earnestness, according to my ability, more and more to resemble this
character. I know indeed that I can never hope to be altogether a saint,
but if I ever approach to one, it will be well. If people, however,
understand by the word 'saint' a Pietist, one of those who lay their
hands on their laps and expect that Providence will do their work for
them, and who, instead of striving in their vocation to press on
towards perfection, talk of a heavenly calling being incompatible with
an earthly one, and are incapable of loving with their whole hearts any
human being, or anything on earth,--then God be praised! such a one I am
not, and hope never to become, so long as I live; and though I am
sincerely desirous to live piously, and really to be so, I hope this
does not necessarily entail the other character. It is singular that
people should select precisely _this_ time to say such a thing, when I
am in the enjoyment of so much happiness, both through my inner and
outer life, and my new domestic ties, as well as my busy work, that I
really know not how sufficiently to show my thankfulness. And, as you
wish me to follow the path which leads to rest and peace, believe me, I
never expected to live in the rest and peace which have now fallen to my
lot."