ve long.

Taken in the entirety, in shine and shade, footlights and firelights,
for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a
sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a
tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze
Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of
the relations of man and woman. They were lovers always.

CHAPTER XIV.

BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE

"No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the
thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of
it, his success and his immortality."

So says the profuse Ludwig Nohl in his reprint of the diary of a young
Spanish-Italian woman, Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, who knew Beethoven
well and loved him well, and as mutely as "a violet blooming at his feet
in utter disregard."

Beethoven the man would be voted altogether impossible either as friend
or as lover, if he had not had so marvellous, so compulsive, a genius.
He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of
ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of
self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose--all the brutal
epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a
Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very
fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but
roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes in immortal rhythms.

A strange contrast he made with the versatile, the catholic, the elegant
and cheerful Goethe, his acquaintance, and his rival in collecting
women's loves into an encyclopaedic emotional life.

Beethoven, unlike his fellow giant Haendel, despised the pleasures of the
table; he substituted a passion for nature. "No man on earth can love
the country as I do!" he wrote; and proved it in his life. His mother
died when he was young, and he found a foster-mother in Frau von
Breuning, of Bonn. Her daughter Eleonore, nicknamed "Lorchen," seems to
have won his heart awhile; she knitted him an Angola waistcoat and a
neckcloth, which brought tears to his eyes; they spatted, and he wrote
her two humbly affectionate notes which you may read with much other
intimate matter in the two volumes of his published letters. He still
had her silhouette in 1826, when he was fifty-six.

Three years before, he had succumbed, at the age of twenty, to the
char