ication for driving a wife even madder
than he himself could be on occasions. His most intimate and unswerving
friends were the victims of spasms of suspicious hatred and
maltreatment that surely no wife worth having could ever have endured
through the honeymoon.

And yet in his love-letters there is a notable absence of jealousy or
whim, and we can only accept his life as we find it, and regard him as
a great genius who rushed from love to love, and never tarried for
wedlock. As to the quality of those love affairs,--we meet a conflict
of authority; some of his friends recording him as a wonder of
chastity, and others treating him as a never-tiring flirt.

Among the thirty or more women who accepted his attentions, he could
easily have found a wife, had he been at heart a marrying man. He has
perpetuated in his dedications all these flames, and it was in the
furnace of these flames that much of his music was forged. But how
shall we blame or praise music for its effect upon Beethoven's heart,
in the face of the antipodal life of such a fellow bachelor as Haendel?
And to these two bachelors there belongs a third great bachelor of
music, Schubert, who is said never to have loved a woman. Even the
paltry anecdote or two of his hopeless love for a very young countess
is dismissed by the cautious as a fable. Schubert was a pauper to the
_n_th degree. But he found his joy in the hilarity of the Vienna cafes
with boisterous friends, working up a maximum enthusiasm on a minimum
of food, living a life of much art and equal beer. He seems never to
have truly cared for women, nor to have been cared for by them.

There are all sorts of bachelorhoods, and there is a wide distinction
between the womanless splendour of Haendel's life at court, and the
unilluminated garret of Schubert's obscurity. There is a difference
also in the busy, promiscuous courtship of Beethoven, who dedicated
thirty-nine compositions to thirty-six women, and that of Chopin, who,
though he could conduct three flirtations of an evening, seems to have
loved but thrice, and to have planned marriage but once.

Chopin, only half-Polish, and finding his true home in Paris, had been
loved by the tiny musicienne, hardly so big as her name, Leopoldine
Blahetka, but his first true love was for the raving beauty, Constantia
Gladkovska, whom he mourned for in prose as highly coloured as his
nocturnes, wishing that after his death his ashes might be strewn under
her f