The story of his fine life, watched over from the cradle as by fairies,
is a poem. The family names are compound. Mendelssohn is German for son
of Mendel; Bartholdy is Hebrew for son of Tholdy. One key to his artistic
character is the general culture, intellectual and social, of the man, for
which the opportunities were granted him from infancy in fuller measure
than to any other great musician. Born in prosperity, amid refining
influences; taught Greek and Latin classics; familiar with living poets,
scholars and philosophers who frequented his father's house; passing
a fortnight at the impressible age of eleven in the house of Goethe;
imbued with reverence for the character and teaching of his wise Platonic
grandfather, the Jew Moses Mendelssohn, the model for Lessing's "Nathan
the Wise"; stimulated by the piquant and genial letters of his three
gifted aunts (two of whom had turned Catholic), and above all by the
tender, wise, exacting and appreciative oversight of his excellent father,
to whom the best was only "just good enough," he grew unconsciously into a
large and liberal way of thinking. He was at home in the most cultivated
circles, "a native there, and to the manner born." What might it not have
been to Schubert to have germinated and unfolded under such a genial sun
in such a soil! Well was the youth named Felix!
Moses Mendelssohn, a little humpbacked Jew peddler boy, with keen eyes
and winning face, came to Berlin about the middle of the last century. He
had a hard fight with penury, and an unconquerable passion for knowledge
and the culture of his mind. At that time the Jews in Germany were at the
lowest stage of social repression. Excluded from nearly all honorable and
profitable pursuits, restricted to Jew quarters, outcast and despised,
they were the chosen victims of Christian intolerance. On the other
hand, driven back upon the synagogue, upon the even fiercer bigotry of
their own priests and rabbis, with whom "to speak the German language
correctly or to read a German book was heresy," the young man was caught
between two fires. Yet so brave, so able was he, so faithful to his great
life purpose, and withal so winning by his hearty, sterling honesty of
spirit, that he became one of the lights of German literature, one of its
recognized apostles; the intimate associate of Lessing, Herder, Kant, etc.
His conversation had the Socratic quality; and his "Phaedo," a dialogue
on immortality, founded on that of Plato, was so persuasive that it was
translated into many languages. He married a Jewess in Hamburg, and grew
prosperous as well as learned. He left three daughters and three sons.
Abraham, the father of Felix, was the second son, a thriving banker, for
a while in Paris, when he married Lea Salomon, of the Bartholdy family, a
lady of wealth and culture, from Berlin, and formed a partnership with his
elder brother in his native Hamburg. Their first child was Fanny, born,
as her mother said, with "Bach fugue fingers." The second child, Jakob
Ludwig Felix, was born February 3, 1809. Before he was three years old,
the French occupied Hamburg, and Abraham fled to Berlin, where he formed a
new banking house, and his whole family were baptized into the Protestant
Communion, taking the added name Bartholdy.
The patriarchal rule, obedience and industry, was strict in the house.
But the father was kind and gentle as well as severe, and Felix loved
him dearly; called him "not only my father, but my teacher both in art
and in life"; and wondered how it was possible that a father, not a
technical musician, could criticize the son's early efforts in composition
so shrewdly and so justly. After Felix became famous, Abraham said once
humorously of himself: "Formerly I was the son of my father, now I am the
father of my son."
The mother, a lady of fine person, with an air of much benevolence and
dignity, was a model housewife; spoke several languages, read Homer in the
Greek, played the piano, and gave the first frequent five-minute lessons
to her two eldest children, Fanny and Felix. The boy was full of life and
fond of out-door play, very attractive with his long brown curls and great
brown eyes. He was frank, unspoiled, earnest in what he undertook, and
could bear no foolish flattery, no nonsense.
[Illustration: MENDELSSOHN'S BIRTHPLACE IN HAMBURG.