Mr. Scott tells me that his first feeling on receiving these poems, written in English by an Italian boy of eighteen, was one of amazement. I cannot wonder at it. If the "Blessed Damozel," when it was published a quarter of a century later, seemed a masterpiece to those who had, in the meanwhile, read so much that was vaguely inspired by it, what must it have been in 1846? Certain pieces in Tennyson's "Poems," of 1842, and a few fragments of Browning's "Bells and Pomegranates" were the only English poems which can be supposed to have given it birth, even indirectly. In its interpretation of mystical thoughts by concrete images, in its mediaeval fervor and consistence of fancy, in its peculiar metrical facility, it was distinctly new—original as few poems except those by the acknowledged masters of the craft can ever be.

"The sun was gone now; the curled moon Was like a little feather Fluttering far down the gulf; and now She spoke through the clear weather. Her voice was like the voice the stars Had when they sang together."

This was a strange accent in 1846. Miss Barrett and Mr. Tennyson were then the most accepted poets. Mr. Browning spoke fluently and persistently, but only to a very little circle; Mr. Horne's "Orion" and Mr. Bailey's "Festus" were the recent outcomes of Keats and Goethe; the Spasmodic School, to be presently born of much unwise study of "Festus," was still unknown; Mr. Clough, Mr. Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Patmore were quite unapparent, taking form and voice in solitude; and here was a new singer, utterly unlike them all, pouring out his first notes with the precision and independence of the new-fledged thrush in the woodland chorus.

In painting, the process was somewhat different. In this art, no less than in poetry, Rossetti understood at once what it was that he wished to do himself, and what he desired to see others doing; but the difficulties of technique were in his way. He had begun to write in childhood, but he had taken up design late in his youth, and he had undergone no discipline in it. At the present day, when every student has to pass a somewhat stringent examination in design, Rossetti, at eighteen, could not have entered the schools of the Royal Academy. He did so, however, yet without ever advancing to the Life School. The soul of art, at this early period, interested him far more than the body, especially such a substance as he found under the presidency of Sir Martin Shee and the keepership of George Jones. Let us not forget, meanwhile, that it is easy to sneer at the incompetence of mannered old artists, and yet hard to over-estimate the value of discipline in a school, however conventional. Rossetti was too impatient to learn to draw, and this he lived to regret. His immediate associates, the young men whom he began to lead and impress, were better draughtsmen than he. His first oil picture, I believe, was a portrait of his father, now in possession of the family. But, as far as can be now made out, he did not begin to paint seriously till about January, 1848, when he persuaded another Royal Academy student, W. Holman Hunt, to take a large room close to the paternal house in Charlotte street, and make it their studio. Here Mr. Scott visited them in the early spring of that year; he describes to me the large pictures they were struggling upon, Hunt, on his "Oath of Rienzi," and Rossetti, on his "Girlhood of Mary Virgin." The latter was evidently at present but poorly equipped; the painting was timid and boyish, pale in tone, and with no hint or promise of that radiant color which afterward became Rossetti's main characteristic. But the feeling was identical with that in his far more accomplished early poems. The very pulse and throb of mediaeval adoration pervaded the whole conception of the picture, and Mr. Scott's first impression was that, in this marvellous poet and possible painter, the new Tractarian movement had found its expositor in art. Yet this surely was no such feeble or sentimental echo as had inspired the declared Tractarian poets of eight or nine years earlier; there was nothing here that recalled such a book as the "Cherwell Water Lily" of Father Faber. This contained the genuine fleshly mysticism, bodily presentment of a spiritual idea, and intimate knowledge of mediaeval sentiment without which the new religious fervor had no intellectual basis. This strong instinct for the forms of the Catholic religion, combined with no attendance on the rites of that church, fostered by no study of ecclesiastical literature or association with teachers or proselytes, but original to himself and self-supported, was at that time without doubt the feature in Rossetti's intellectual character which demands our closest attention. Nor do I believe that this passion for the physical presentation of a mystical idea was ever entirely supplanted by those other views of life and art which came to occupy his maturer mind. In his latest poems—in "Rose Mary," for instance—I see this first impulse returning upon him with more than its early fascination. In his youth, however, the mysticism was very naive and straightforward. It was fostered by one of the very few excursions which Rossetti ever took—a tour in Belgium in October, 1849. I am told that he and the painter-friend who accompanied him were so purely devoted to the mediaeval aspect of all they saw, that, in walking through the galleries, they turned away their heads in approaching modern pictures, and carefully closed their eyes while they were passing Rubens's "Descent from the Cross." In Belgium, or as the result of his tour there, Rossetti wrote several curious poems, which were so harsh and forced that he omitted them from his collection when he first published his "Poems," in 1870.

The effort in these early pieces is too marked. I remember once hearing Rossetti say that he did not mind what people called him, if only they would not call him "quaint." But the fact was that, if quaintness be defined as the inability to conceal the labor of an art, there is no doubt that both his poems and his designs occasionally deserved this epithet. He was so excessively sincere an artist, so determined not to permit anything like trickiness of effect or meaningless smoothness to conceal the direct statement of an idea, that his lack of initial discipline sometimes made itself felt in a curious angular hardness.

And now it would be necessary, if I were attempting a complete study of Gabriel Rossetti's intellectual career, to diverge into a description of what has so much exercised popular curiosity, the pre-Raphaelite movement of 1848. But there is no reason why, in a few notes on character, I should repeat from hearsay what several of the seven brothers have reported from authoritative memory. It is admitted, by them and by all who have understood the movement, that Gabriel Rossetti was the founder and, in the Shakespearian sense, "begetter" of all that was done by this earnest band of young artists. One of them, Mr. Millais, was already distinguished; two others, Mr. Holman Hunt and Mr. Woolner, had at that time more training and technical power than he; but he was, nevertheless, the brain and soul of the enterprise. What these young men proposed was excellently propounded in the sonnet by "W. M. R.," which they prefixed to their little literary venture, the "Germ," in 1850. Plainly to think even a little thought, to express it in natural words which are native to the speaker, to paint even an insignificant object as it is, and not as the old masters or the new masters have said it should be painted, to persevere in looking at truth and at nature without the smallest prejudice for tradition, this was the whole mystery and cabal of the P. R. B. They called themselves "preraphaelite," because they found in the wings of Lippi's angels, and the columbines of Perugino's gardens that loving and exact study of minute things which gave to them a sense of sincerity, and which they missed in the breadth and ease of later work. They had no ambition to "splash as no one splashed before since great Caldasi Polidore;" but they did wish to draw a flower or a cloud so that it should be a portrait of that cloud or flower. In this ambition it would be curious to know, and I do not think that I have ever heard it stated, how far they were influenced by Mr. Ruskin and his "Modern Painters." I should not expect to find Rossetti influenced by any outside force in this any more than in other instances, but at all events Mr. Ruskin eagerly accepted the brotherhood as practical exponents of the theories he had pronounced. None of them, I think, knew him personally when he wrote the famous letter to the Times in 1851, defending Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt from the abuse of ignorant critics, who, he said, had failed to perceive the very principles on which these "two young men" were proceeding. Somebody wrote to him to explain that there were "three young men," and Mr. Ruskin wrote a note to Gabriel Rossetti, desiring to see his work, and thus the acquaintance of these two remarkable men commenced.

Meanwhile, although the more vigorous members of the brotherhood had shown no special sympathy for Rossetti's religious mysticism, a feebler artist, himself one of the original seven, had taken it up with embarrassing effusion. This was the late James Collinson, whose principal picture, "St. Elizabeth of Hungary," finished in 1851, produced a sort of crisis in Rossetti's career. This painting out-mystified the mystic himself; it was simply maudlin and hysterical, though drawn with some feeling for grace, and in a very earnest spirit. Rossetti, with his strong good sense, recognized that it would be impossible ever to reach the public with art of this unmanly character, and from this time forth he began to abandon the practice of directly sacred art.

For some little time after abandoning the directly sacred field in painting, Rossetti seems to have passed through a disconsolate and dubious period. I am told that he worked for many months over a large picture called "Kate the Queen," from some well-known words by Browning. He made no progress with this, seemed dissatisfied with his own media, felt the weight of his lack of training, and passed, in short, through one of those downcast moods, which Shakespeare has so marvellously described in "Tired with all these," and which are incident, sooner or later, to every man of genius. While his touch in poetry grew constantly more sure and masterly, his power as a draughtsman threatened to leave him altogether. He was to have drawn one of the frontispieces in the "Germ," but, although he toiled with a design, he could not make it "come right." At last a happy accident put him on the true track, and revealed his proper genius to himself. He began to make small drawings of poetical subjects in water-colors—most of those which I have seen are not more than twenty inches by twelve—over which he labored, and into which he poured his exquisite sense of color, inspired without doubt by the glass of mediaeval church windows. He travelled so very little, that I do not know whether he ever saw the treasures of radiant jewel-work which fret the gloom of Chartres or of Bourges; but if he never saw them, he divined them, and these are the only pieces of color which in the least degree suggest the drawings of this, Rossetti's second period. As far as one can gather, his method was, first, to become interpenetrated with the sentiment of some ballad or passage of emotional poetry, then to meditate on the scene till he saw it clearly before him; then—and this seems to have always been the difficult and tedious part—to draw in the design, and then with triumphant ease to fill in the outlines with radiant color. He had an almost insuperable difficulty in keeping his composition within the confines of the paper upon which he worked, and at last was content to have a purely accidental limit to the design, no matter what limbs of the dramatis personae were sheered away by the frame. It would not be the act of a true friend to Rossetti's memory to pretend that these drawings, of which for the next ten or fifteen years he continued to produce a great number, were without faults of a nature which any coxcomb could perceive, or without eccentricities which an untrained eye might easily mistake for faults; but this does not in the least militate against the fact that in two great departments of the painter's faculty, in imaginative sentiment and in wealth of color, they have never been surpassed. They have rarely, indeed, been equalled in the history of painting. A Rossetti drawing of this class hung with specimens of other art, ancient or modern, simply destroys them. I do not mean that it is better or worse than they are, but that it kills them as the electric light puts out a glow-worm. No other man's color will bear these points of ruby-crimson, these expanses of deep turquoise-blue, these flagrant scarlets and thunderous purples. He paints the sleeve of a trumpeter; it is such an orange as the eye can scarce endure to look at. He paints the tiles of a chimney-corner; they are as green as the peacock's eyes in the sunshine.

The world is seldom ready to receive any new thing. These drawings of Rossetti's were scarcely noticed even by those who are habitually on the watch for fresh developments in art. But when the painter next emerges into something like publicity we find him attended by a brilliant company of younger men, all more or less influenced by his teaching and attracted by his gifts. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been a very ephemeral institution; in three years, or four at the most, it had ceased to exist; but its principles and the energy of its founder had left their mark on the whole world of art. In 1849 Rossetti had exhibited his picture, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," at the Portland Gallery, an exhibition in rivalry of the Royal Academy, which existed but a very short time. As far as I can discover, he did not exhibit again in London until 1856, when he and his friends opened a collection of their pictures at 4 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. We would rather have seen that little gallery than see most of the show-exhibitions of Europe. In it the fine art of the Anglo-Saxon race was seen dawning again after its long and dark night. Rossetti himself was the principal exhibitor, but his two earliest colleagues, now famous painters, Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt, also contributed. And here were all the new talents whom Rossetti had attracted around him during the last seven years: Mr. Madox Brown, with his fine genius for history; Mr. J. D. Watson, with his strong mediaeval affinities; Mr. Boyce, with his delicate portraiture of rustic scenes; Mr. Brett, the finest of our students of the sea; Mr. W. B. Scott himself; besides one or two others, Mr. Charles Collins, Mr. Campbell, Mr. Halliday, Mr. Martineau, whom death or adverse fortune removed before they had quite fulfilled their promise. Gabriel Rossetti contributed to this interesting and historic exhibition five or six of those marvellous drawings of which mention has just been made. "Dante's Dream," the famous vision of June 9, 1290, with its counterpart, "The Anniversary of the Dream," in 1291, were the most prominent of these. A "Mary Magdalene" was perhaps the most moving and exciting. This extremely original design showed the Magdalene pursued by her lovers, but turning away from them all to seek Jesus in the house of Simon the Pharisee. The architecture in this drawing was almost childish; the wall of Simon's house is not three inches thick, and there is not room for a grown-up person on the stairs that lead to it; but the tender imagination of the whole, the sweet persuasiveness of Christ, who looks out of a window, the passion of the awakened sinner, who tears the roses out of her hair, the curious novelty of treatment in the heads and draperies, all these combine to make it one of those works, the moral force and directness of which appeal to the heart at once. Perhaps the most brilliant piece of color at the Russell Place Gallery may have been Rossetti's "Blue Closet," a picture which either illustrated or, as I should rather suppose, suggested Mr. Morris's wonderful poem published two years later.

The same year that displayed him to the public already surrounded by a brilliant phalanx of painter-friends, discovered him also, to the judicious, as a centre of poetic light and heat. The circumstances connected with Rossetti's visit to Oxford a little earlier than this are too recent, are fresh in the memories of too many living persons of distinction, to be discussed with propriety by one who was not present. But certain facts are public, and may be mentioned. The Oxford Union still shows around the interior of its cupola strange, shadowy frescoes, melting into nothingness, which are the work of six men, of whom Rossetti was the leader. These youths had enjoyed no practical training in that particularly artificial branch of art, mural painting, and yet it seems strange that Rossetti himself, at least, should not have understood that a vehicle, such as yolk of egg mixed with vinegar, was absolutely necessary to tempera, or that it was proper, in fresco-painting, to prepare the walls, and paint in the fresh wet mortar. They used no vehicle, they fixed their colors in no coat of plaster, but they threw their ineffectual dry paint on the naked brick. The result has been that their interesting boyish efforts are now decayed beyond any chance of restoration. It is impossible, however, to ascend the gallery of the Oxford Union and examine the ghostly frescoes that are fading there, without great interest and even emotion. Of the young men who painted there under Gabriel Rossetti's eye, all have become greatly distinguished. Mr. Edward Burne-Jones, Mr. William Morris, and Mr. Spencer Stanhope were undergraduates at Oxford. Mr. Valentine Prinsep and Mr. Arthur Hughes, I believe, were Royal Academy students who were invited down by Rossetti. Their work was naive and queer to the last degree. It is perhaps not fair to say which one of them found so much difficulty in painting the legs of his figures that he drew an impenetrable covert of sunflowers right across his picture, and only showed the faces of his heroes and heroines between the golden disks.

The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which also dates from the year 1856, is a still more notable expression of budding genius than the dome of the Oxford Union. It was edited by Mr. Godfrey Lushington, all its articles were anonymous, and it contrived to exist through twelve consecutive monthly numbers. A complete set is now rare, and the periodical itself is much less known than befits such a receptacle of pure literature. It contains three or four of Rossetti's finest poems; a great many of those extraordinary pieces, steeped in mediaeval coloring, which Mr. William Morris was to collect in 1858 into his bewitching volume, called "The Defence of Guenevere;" several delightful prose stories of life in the Middle Ages, also by Mr. Morris, which, like certain prose romances by Mr. Burne-Jones, have never been publicly claimed or reprinted by their author; and not a little else that was as new as it was notable. A little later Mr. William Morris's first book was dedicated "To my Friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter," and in 1860 Mr. Swinburne followed with a like inscription of his first-fruits, his tragic drama of "The Queen-Mother." Thus in the course of a little more than ten years, Rossetti had become the centre and sun of a galaxy of talent in poetry and painting, more brilliant perhaps than any which has ever acknowledged the beneficent sway of any one Englishman of genius.

But all this while the world outside knew nothing of the matter. One by one the younger men stepped forward on the public stage and secured the plaudits of the discerning, and ascended the slow incline of general reputation. But Rossetti remained obstinately recluse, far preferring to be the priest and confessor of genius to acting himself a public part. To this determination several outward things engaged him still further. He married quite early in life; and his wife, who was herself an artist of rare, if somewhat wild and untrained talent, bore him a son who died at birth, and then shortly after died herself. During his brief married months Rossetti had collected the MSS. of his poems, and thought to publish them; but when he lost his wife, in a paroxysm of grief he placed the sheets of his poems in her coffin, and would hear no more a suggestion of publication. In 1861 he presented the world with a very learned and beautiful anthology of early Italian poetry, and proposed as early as that year to print his original poems. It was his scheme to name the little volume "Dante in Verona, and other Poems;" but it came to nothing. About 1867 the scheme of publication again took possession of him. I have been told that a sudden sentiment of middle age, the fact that he found himself in his fortieth year, led him to conquer his scruples, and finally arrange his pieces. But he was singularly fastidious; the arrangement would never please him; the cover must be cut in brass, the paper at the sides must bear a special design. These niceties were rarer twelve years ago than they are now, and the printers fatigued him with their persistent obstinacy. It was not till early in 1870 that the "Poems" in stately form first appeared, and were hailed with a shout of admiration which was practically universal.

It was about Christmas in that same year, 1870, that he who writes these lines was first presented to Gabriel Rossetti. The impression on my mental eye is as fresh as if it had been made yesterday, instead of twelve years ago. He was a man of average height, commonly loosely clad in black, so as to give one something of the notion of an abbe; the head very full, and domed like that of Shakespeare, as it was then usual to say—to my thinking more like that of Chaucer—in any case a head surcharged with imagination and power, strongly Italian in color and cast. The eyes were exceedingly deep set, in cavernous sockets; they were large, and black, and full of a restless brilliance, a piercing quality which consoled the shy novice by not being stationary. Lastly, a voice of bell-like tone and sonority, a voice capable of expressing without effort every shade of emotion from rage and terror to the most sublime tenderness. I have never heard a voice so fitted for poetical effect, so purely imaginative, and yet, in its absence of rhetoric, so clear and various, as that of Gabriel Rossetti. I retain one special memory of his reading in his own studio the unfinished MS. of "Rose Mary," in 1873, which surpassed in this direction any pleasure which it has been my lot to enjoy; and on various occasions I have listened to his reading of sonnets, his own and those of others, with a sense that his intonation revealed a beauty in the form of that species of verse which it had never been seen to possess before. I have already spoken of his wonderful courtliness to a new acquaintance, his bewitching air of sympathy; on a closer intimacy this stately manner would break up into wild fits of mirth, and any sketch of Rossetti would be incomplete that did not describe his loud and infectious laughter. He lived very much apart from the every-day life of mankind, not ostentatiously, but from a genuine lack of interest in passing events. An old friend tells me that during the French Revolution he burst into Rossetti's studio with the incredible news, "Louis-Philippe has landed in England!" "Has he?" said Rossetti, calmly. "What has he come for?" That certain political events, in which he saw a great symbolic significance, could move him deeply, is easily proved by such sonnets as the noble "On the Refusal of Aid between Nations," and "Czar Alexander II." But such glances out of window into the living street were rare, and formed no characteristic part of his scheme of life.

As a poet in these great years he possessed rare gifts of passionate utterance, and harmony of vision and expression. Mr. Swinburne has characterized these qualities in words which leave no later commentator the chance of distinguishing himself. But it would be totally unjust, even in so cursory and personal a sketch as this, to allow the impression to go undisputed that Rossetti preferred the external form to the inward substance of poetry. This charge was brought against him, as it has always been brought against earnest students of poetic art. I will rather quote a few words from a letter of Rossetti to me, written in 1873, when he was composing his own magnum opus of "Rose Mary." I have always felt them to be very salutary, none the less because it is obvious that the writer did not at all times contrive, or perhaps desire, to make them true in his own work:

"It seems to me that all poetry, to be really enduring, is bound to be as amusing (however trivial the word may sound) as any other class of literature; and I do not think that enough amusement to keep it alive can ever be got out of incidents not amounting to events, or out of travelling experiences of an ordinary kind however agreeably, observantly, or even thoughtfully treated. I would eschew in writing all themes that are not so trenchantly individualized as to leave no margin for discursiveness."

During the last eight years of his life, Rossetti's whole being was clouded by the terrible curse of an excitable temperament—sleeplessness. To overcome this enemy, which interfered with his powers of work and concentration of thought, he accepted the treacherous aid of the new drug, chloral, which was then vaunted as perfectly harmless in its effect upon the health. The doses of chloral became more and more necessary to him, and I am told that at last they became so frequent and excessive that no case has been recorded in the annals of medicine in which one patient has taken so much, or even half so much, chloral as Rossetti took. Under this unwholesome drug his constitution, originally a magnificent one, slipped unconsciously into decay, the more stealthily that the poison seemed to have no effect whatever on the powers of the victim's intellect. He painted until physical force failed him; he wrote brilliantly to the very last, and two sonnets dictated by him on his death-bed are described to me as being entirely worthy of his mature powers. There is something almost melancholy in such a proof of the superior vitality of the brain. If the mind had shared the weakness of the body, the insidious enemy might perhaps have been routed in time to secure the elastic rebound of both. But when the chloral was stoutly met at last, it was too late.

So at the age of fifty-four we have lost a man whom we should have retained, in the nature of things, for twenty years longer in the plentitude of his powers, but for a mistake in hygiene—a medical experiment. His work of inspiring the young, of projecting his fiery originality along the veins of others, was perhaps completed; it is doubtful whether this can ever be continued with advantage through more than two generations. The prophet is apt at last to become a tyrant, and from this ill apotheosis Rossetti was spared. But there was no reason why he should not, for at least a score of years, have produced noble pictures and have written gorgeous poems, emphasizing a personal success which he would have extended, though he hardly could have raised it. Yet he was always a melancholy man; of late years he had become almost a solitary man. Like Charles of Austria, he had disbanded his body-guard, and had retired to the cloister. Perhaps a longer life would not have brought much enjoyment with it. But these are idle speculations, and we have rather to call to our remembrance the fact that one of the brightest and most distinguished of our race, a man whose very existence was a protest against narrowness of aim and feebleness of purpose, one of the great torch-bearers in the procession of English art, has been called from us in the prime of life, before the full significance of his genius had been properly felt. He was the contemporary of some mighty names older than his, yet there scarcely was to be found among them all a spirit more thoroughly original; and surely, when the paltry conflicts of passing taste are laid to rest forever, it will be found that this man has written his signature indelibly on one of the principal pages of the register of our intellectual history.

[Signature of the author.]



GUSTAVE DORE[11]

[Footnote 11: Reprinted by permission, from the "Nation."]

By KENYON COX

(1832-1883)



It is now eleven years since Gustave Dore died. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, had attained considerable wealth, and was probably more widely known than any other artist of his day. His name was a household word in two continents. Yet he died a disappointed and embittered man, and is proclaimed by his friends as a neglected and misunderstood genius. He was known the world over as the most astonishingly prolific illustrator of books that has ever lived; he wished to be known in France as a great painter and a great sculptor, and because the artists and critics of France never seriously recognized his claims to this glory, he seems to have become a victim of the mania of persecution, and his naturally sunny nature was over-clouded with moroseness and suspicion. Hailed by some as the emulator and equal of the great names of the Italian Renaissance, and considered a great moral force—a "preacher painter"—by others he has been denounced as "designer in chief to the devil," and described as a man wallowing in all foulness and horror, a sort of demon of frightful power. Both these extreme judgments are English. The late Blanchard Jerrold, an intimate friend and collaborator of the artist, takes the first view. Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Hamerton have taken the second. Dore's own countrymen have never accepted either. Just where, between them, the truth lies, as we see it, we shall endeavor to show in this article.

The main facts of Dore's life may be dismissed very briefly. He was born with a caul on January 6, 1832, in the Rue Bleue at Strasbourg, near the Cathedral. About 1841 his father removed to Bourg, in the Department of Ain, where he was chief government engineer of the department. These two residences of the young artist are supposed to account for the mastery of Gothic architecture and of mountain scenery which his admirers find in his mature work. He showed very early in life a passion for drawing, and, as a small child, had always a pencil in his hand, which he begged to have "sharpened at both ends," that he might work longer without interruption. His father intended him for an engineer, but he was determined from the first to be an artist. He was of a gay and jovial disposition, given to pranks and practical jokes, and of an athletic temperament. Theophile Gautier afterward called him a "gamin de genie." In 1847, when he was fifteen years old, being in Paris with his parents, he called upon Phillippon, the publisher, and showed him some of his sketches. M. Phillippon looked at them, and sent a letter to Dore's parents, persuading them to allow the boy to remain in Paris, and promising them to begin using his work at once and to pay for it. Thus, without any study of art whatever, he began his career, and in a few years had produced a prodigious quantity of work, and was a celebrated man before he was twenty. No one knows how many drawings he made. He "lived like an Arab," worked early and late, and with astonishing rapidity made thousands of drawings for the comic papers, besides early beginning the publication of independent books. One estimate, which Mr. Jerrold thinks excessive, credits him with having published forty thousand drawings before he was forty! Mr. Jerrold himself reckons two hundred and sixty-six drawings done in one year. His "Labors of Hercules" was brought out in 1848, when he was sixteen, and before he was twenty-seven he had published his "Holy Russia," his "Wandering Jew," his illustrations to Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," to Rabelais, and many other authors. His best work was done at an age when most artists are painfully acquiring the rudiments of their art. We all know the books that followed.

Meanwhile he was determined to be known as a great painter, and, while flooding the market with his countless illustrations, was working at great canvases of Biblical subjects, which, though the French would not accept them, were hugely admired in the Dore Gallery of London. Later he tried sculpture also, and his last work was a monument to Alexandre Dumas, which he made at his own expense, and presented to the city of Paris. He died in the beginning of the year 1883, worn out with excessive production—a great name, but an unsatisfied man.

Mr. Jerrold has divided his book into two parts, dealing first with Dore the illustrator, and then with Dore the painter and sculptor. It is an eminently natural arrangement, and, in our effort to arrive at Dore's true position in art, we cannot do better than to follow it.

Dore's earliest work was frankly that of a caricaturist. He had a quick eye, no training, and a certain extravagant imagination, and caricature was his inevitable field. He was, however, as Mr. Jerrold himself remarks, "a caricaturist who seldom raises a laugh." Not hearty fun, still less delicate humor, was his. In the higher qualities of caricature his contemporaries, Daumier and Gavarni, were vastly his superiors. An exuberance of grotesque fancy and a recklessness of exaggeration were his dominant notes. His earlier work, up to and including the Rabelais, is not really funny—to many minds it is even painful—but it is unmistakably caricature of a dashing, savage sort. To our mind it remains his best work, and that by which he is most likely to live. At least it is the work that formed him and fixed his characteristics, and an understanding of it is essential to any judgment of him. The qualities and the defects of his later work—that which is most praised and most blamed in his production—are inherent in the work of this period, and are best explained by a reference to the latter.

Take, for instance, what has been denounced as his love of horrors and of foulness, his delight in blood and massacre. He is scored for this as if he were one of that modern French school, beginning, perhaps, with Regnault, who have revelled in the realistic presentation of executions and battles, and have sought to effect by sheer sensationalism what they could not by gentler means. It is surprising that his critics have not seen that Dore's battles are always, even to the end, the battles of a caricaturist. His decapitated trunks, cloven heads, smoking hearts, arms still fighting though severed from their bodies, are simply a debauch of grim humor. There is never the slightest attempt to realize carnage—only to convey, by the caricaturist's exaggeration, an idea of colossally impossible bloodthirstiness. One may not enjoy this kind of fun, but to take it seriously, as the emanation of a gloomy and diabolic genius, is absurd.

The same test is equally destructive of much of the praise Dore has received. He is constantly spoken of, even by severe critics of his painting, as a great illustrator who identified himself with the minds of one great writer after another. But Dore identified himself with no one; he was always Dore. Even in these early drawings he cannot keep to the spirit of the text, though the subjects suited him much better than many he tried later. There is a great deal of broad gayety and "Gallic wit" in the "Contes Drolatiques," but it was not broad enough for Dore, and he has converted its most human characters into impossible grotesques.

Another thing for which Dore is praised is his wonderful memory. Mr. Jerrold repeats more than once Dore's phrase, "I have lots of collodion in my head," and recounts how he could scarcely be induced to make sketches from nature, but relied upon his memory. He also speaks of Dore's system of dividing and subdividing a subject, and noting the details in their places, so that he could reproduce the whole afterward. This question of work from memory is one of the most vital for an understanding of Dore, and one of general interest in all matters of art, and is worth attention. Of course, a man who made hundreds of drawings every year could not work much from nature, and came to rely upon his memory. But what is the nature of artistic memory, and how does it perform its task? We think the truth is, that the artist who habitually works from memory, fills in his details, not from memory of the object, but from memory of the way he has formerly drawn similar objects. He reverts to a series of formulae that he has gradually accumulated. This man must have a cloak. This is the way a cloak is done. A hand? Nothing can be easier; the hand formula is ready. The stock in trade of the professional illustrator and caricaturist is made up of a thousand such formulae—methods of expression that convey the idea readily enough to the spectator, but have little relation to fact. So it is that Dore never learned, in the true sense, to draw. He had made for himself a sort of artistic shorthand, which enabled him to convey his superabundant ideas quickly and certainly to his public, but his drawing is what is called mannered in the extreme. It is not representation of nature at all, but pure formula and chic. He is said to be a master of drapery, but he never drew a single fold correctly. He is said to show great knowledge of Gothic architecture, but he never drew well a single column or finial. In his later years he studied anatomy with great perseverance, and advocated the necessity of dissection, saying, "Il faut fourrer la main dedans" (You must stick your hand in it); but the manner was formed, and he never drew a leg with a bone in it.

With this equipment he illustrated Don Quixote, Dante, the Bible. Is it strange that he shows no sympathy with the grand simplicity of Dante, or the subtle humor of Cervantes, and that we can only be thankful that he never completed his projected illustrations to Shakespeare? Dore, the illustrator, was fecund beyond precedent, possessed a certain strange drollery, had a wonderful flow of ideas, but was superficial, theatrical, and mannered, and as far from expressing real horror as from expressing real fun. What shall we say of Dore the painter and sculptor?

Mr. Jerrold reports a discussion between Dore and Theophile Gautier, in which the roles of artist and man of letters are strangely reversed. "Gautier and Dore," he says, "disagreed fundamentally on the aims and methods of art. Gautier loved correctness, perfect form—the technique, in short, of art; whereas Dore contended that art which said nothing, which conveyed no idea, albeit perfect in form and color, missed the highest quality and raison d'etre of art." What is plain from this is, that Gautier was an artist and cared first of all for art, while Dore was never an artist, properly speaking, at all, and never understood the artist's passion for perfection. To Dore, what was necessary was to express himself anyhow—who cared if the style was defective, the drawing bad, the color crude? The idea was the thing. His admirers can defend him only on this ground, and they adopt of necessity the Philistine point of view. The artists of Dore's time and country were very clear in their opinion. "The painters," says Mr. Jerrold, "said he could not paint."

The sculptors admitted that he had ideas in his groups, but he was not sculpturesque. His friends protest against this judgment, and attribute it, ad nauseam, to "malevolence" and "envy." What if his technique was less brilliant than that of Hals, they say; what if his shadows are less transparent than those of Rembrandt (and they will make no meaner comparison)? He is "teeming with noble thoughts," and these will put his work "on a level with the masterpieces of the Italian masters of the sixteenth century." It is the conception, the creation—not the perfect painting of legs and arms and heads, the harmonious grouping, the happy and delicate combination of color—by which the observer is held spell bound. All these qualities, which his admirers grudgingly admit that Dore had not, are classed as "mere dexterity," and are not considered worth a second thought.

This is the true literary gospel of art, but it is one that no artist, and no critic who has any true feeling of art, has ever accepted or will ever accept. Thoughts, ideas, conceptions, may enhance the value of a work of art, provided it is first of all a piece of beautiful art in itself, but they have never preserved, and never will preserve from oblivion bad painting or bad sculpture. The style is the artist, if not the man; and of the two, beautiful painting with no idea at all (granting, for the sake of argument, that it exists), will ever be infinitely more valuable to the world than the lame expression of the noblest thoughts. What may be the real value of Dore's thoughts is therefore a question with which we have no concern. As painter and sculptor, his lack of education and his great technical imperfections—his bad drawing, false light and shade, and crude color—relegate him forever to a rank far below mediocrity. Such reputation as he has is the result of the admiration of those altogether ignorant of art, but possessed of enough literary ability to trumpet abroad their praises of "great conceptions," and will as surely fade away to nothing as the reputation of such simple painters as Van Der Meer or Chardin will continue to grow, while painting as an art is loved and understood.



COMPOSERS



HANDEL

By C. E. BOURNE

(1685-1759)

George Frederick Handel, of whom Haydn once reverently said, "He is the master of us all," was born at Halle, in Lower Saxony, on February 23, 1685. His father was a surgeon, and sixty-three years of age at the time of his birth—a terribly severe old man, who, almost before his son was born, had determined that he should be a lawyer. The little child knew nothing of the fate before him, he only found that he was never allowed to go near a musical instrument, much as he wanted to hear its sweet sounds, and the obstinate father even took him away from the public day-school for the simple reason that the musical gamut was taught there in addition to ordinary reading, writing, and arithmetic.

But love always "finds out the way," and his mother or nurse managed to procure for him the forbidden delights; a small clavichord, or dumb spinet, with the strings covered with strips of cloth to deaden the sound, was found for the child, and this he used to keep hidden in the garret, creeping away to play it in the night-time, when everyone was asleep, or whenever his father was away from home doctoring his patients.



But, at last, when George Frederick was seven years of age, the old man was compelled to change his views. It happened in this way. He set out one day on a visit to the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels, where another son by a former marriage was a page. George Frederick had been teasing his father to let him go with him to see his elder brother, whom he had not yet met, but this was refused. When old Handel started by the stagecoach the next morning, the persistent little fellow was on the watch; he began running after it, and at length the father was constrained to stop the coach and take the boy in. So, though at the expense of a severe scolding, the child had his way and was allowed to go on to Saxe-Weissenfels. When there, the chapel, with the beautiful organ, was the great attraction, and George Frederick, as indomitable then as he was in after-life, found his way into the organ loft, and when the regular service was over, contrived to take the organist's place, and began a performance of his own; and strange to say, though he had not had the slightest training, a melody with chords and the correct harmonies was heard. The duke had not left the chapel, and noticing the difference in style from that of the ordinary organist, inquired as to the player, and when the little boy was brought to him he soon discovered, by the questions he put, the great passion for music which possessed the child. The duke, a sensible man, told the father it would be wrong to oppose the inclination of a boy who already displayed such extraordinary genius; and old Handel, either convinced, or at any rate submitting to the duke's advice, promised to procure for his son regular musical instruments. Handel never afterward forgot the debt of gratitude he owed to the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels for this intercession.

On his return to Halle he became the pupil of Zachau, the organist of the cathedral there. This man was an excellent teacher and a sound musician. Before the pupil was nine years old his instructor used to set him to write fugues and motets as exercises, and before long the boy was allowed to play the organ at the cathedral services on Sunday, whenever the elder musician was inclined to linger over his breakfast or to take a holiday. At last, when young Handel was nine years old, the master honestly confessed that his pupil knew more music than he himself did, and advised that he should be sent to Berlin for a course of further study there. Thither he accordingly went in the year 1696.

In Berlin the boy of eleven years was soon recognized as a prodigy. There he met two Italian composers of established reputation, Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti, both of whom he was to encounter in after-life, though under very different circumstances, in London. Bononcini, who was of a sour and jealous disposition, soon conceived a dislike for the gifted little fellow, and attempted to injure him by composing a piece for the harpsichord full of the most extraordinary difficulties, and then asking him to play it at sight. The boy, however, at once executed it without a mistake, and thus the malicious schemer was foiled by his own device. Attilio was of a different disposition; he praised the young musician to the skies, and was never weary of sitting by his side at the organ or harpsichord, and hearing him improvise for hours. The Elector of Brandenburg also conceived a great admiration for the boy's talents, and offered to send him to Italy. On old Handel being consulted, however, he pleaded that he was now an old man, and wished his son to remain near him. In consequence of this, probably much to the boy's disappointment, he was brought back to Halle, and there set to work again under his old master, Zachau.

Soon after this return his father died, in 1697, leaving hardly anything for his family, and young Handel had now to seriously bestir himself to make a living. With this object he went to Hamburg, where he obtained a place as second violin in the Opera-house. Soon after arriving there, the post of organist at Luebeck became vacant, and Handel was a candidate for it. But a peculiar condition was attached to the acceptance of the office; the new organist must marry the daughter of the old one! And, as Handel either did not approve of the lady, or of matrimony generally (and in fact he never was married), he promptly retired from the competition. At first, no one suspected the youth's talents, for he amused himself by pretending to be an ignoramus, until one day the accompanyist on the harpsichord (then the most important instrument in an orchestra) was absent, and young Handel took his place, astonishing everybody by his masterly touch. Probably this discovery aroused the jealousy of some of his brother-artists, for soon afterward a duel took place between him and Matheson, a clever composer and singer, who one night, in the midst of a quarrel on leaving the theatre, gave him a box on the ear; swords were drawn, and the duel took place there and then under the portico of the theatre. Fortunately Matheson's weapon was shivered by coming in contact with a metal button on his opponent's coat. Explanations were then offered, and the two adversaries became friends—indeed, close friends—afterward. "Almira, Queen of Castile," Handel's first opera, was brought out in Hamburg in 1705, and was followed by two others, "Nero," and "Daphne," all received with great favor, and frequently performed.



But the young musician determined to visit Italy as soon as possible, and after staying in Hamburg three years, and having, besides the money he sent his mother, saved two hundred ducats for travelling expenses, he was able to set off on the journey, then one of the great events in a musician's lifetime. He visited Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples, in almost every city writing operas, which we are told were produced with the most brilliant success. At Venice an opera was sought for from him, and in three weeks he had written "Agrippina." When produced, the people received it with frantic enthusiasm, the theatre resounding with shouts of "Viva il caro Sassone!" (Long live the dear Saxon!) The following story illustrates the extraordinary fame he so quickly acquired in Italy. He arrived at Venice during the middle of the carnival, and was taken to a masked ball, and there played the harpsichord, still keeping on his mask. Domenico Scarlatti, the most famous harpsichord player of his age, on hearing him, exclaimed, "Why, it's the devil, or else the Saxon whom everyone is talking about!" In 1709 he returned to Hanover, and was appointed by the Elector George of Brunswick, afterward King George I., of England, his Court Capellmeister.

Handel's wanderings next led him to England, where he was treated with so much honor that he showed no great hurry to return to Hanover, and, in fact, he remained in England and coolly ignored his engagement as Capellmeister. But an awkward piece of retribution was at hand. The Elector of Hanover, on the death of Queen Anne, came to England as the new king, and Handel, his delinquent Capellmeister, could hardly expect to receive any share of the royal favor in future. With the help of a friend of his, Baron Kilmanseck, he determined, however, to make an attempt to conciliate the king, and accordingly he wrote twenty-five short concerted pieces of music, and made arrangements for these to be performed by musicians in a boat following the royal barge on the Thames, one day when the king went on an excursion up the river for a picnic. The king recognized the composer at once by his style, and spoke in terms of approbation of the music, and the news was quickly conveyed by his friend to the anxious musician. This is the story of the origin of the famous "Water Music." Soon afterward the king allowed Handel to appear before him to play the harpsichord accompaniments to some sonatas executed by Geminiani, a celebrated Italian violinist, and finally peace was made between them, Handel being appointed music-master to the royal children, and receiving an additional pension of L200. In 1726 a private Act of Parliament was passed, making George Frederick Handel a naturalized Englishman.

In the year 1720 a number of noblemen formed themselves into a company for the purpose of reviving Italian opera in London, at the Haymarket Theatre, and subscribed a capital of L50,000. The king himself subscribed L1,000, and allowed the society to take the name of the Royal Academy of Music, and at first everything seemed to promise the most brilliant success. Handel was appointed director of the music. Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti, his old acquaintances in Berlin, were also attracted by this new operatic venture to London, and their arrival was followed by a competition of a very novel character. The libretto of a new opera, "Muzio Scaevola," was divided between the three composers. Attilio was to put the first act to music, Bononcini the second, and Handel the third. We need hardly wonder that the victory is said to have rested with the last and youngest of the trio, although at this time the cabals against him, which afterward were to do him such grievous harm, had already commenced.

Handel still clung to the operatic speculation; and when he had to leave the Haymarket Theatre, which was given up to another Italian company with the famous Farinelli, from Lincoln's Inn Fields, undauntedly he changed to the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, and there commenced again. More operas were produced, with the one unvarying tale of fiasco, and at last, in 1737, having lost the whole of his hardly earned money, Handel was compelled to close the theatre, and, worse than all, to suspend payment for a time. Happily he now turned his thoughts to oratorio. "Saul" and "Israel in Egypt" were composed in quick succession; the last gigantic work being written in the almost incredibly short space of twenty-seven days. How great it is everyone now knows, but, at the time the colossal choruses were actually considered a great deal too heavy and monotonous; and Handel, always quick in resource, at the second performance introduced a number of operatic songs to make them go down better, and after the third performance the piece was withdrawn altogether. Fortunately, opinions have changed since then. These works were followed by his fine setting of Dryden's "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day," and Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso;" but it cannot be said that his pecuniary affairs were materially improved by their production.

The first performance of his greatest oratorio, the "Messiah," took place at Neale's Music Hall, in Dublin, on April 18, 1742, at mid-day, and, apropos of the absurdities of fashion, it may be noticed that the announcements contained the following request: "That ladies who honor this performance with their presence, will be pleased to come without hoops, as it will greatly increase the charity by making room for more company." The work was gloriously successful, and L400 were obtained the first day for the Dublin charities. Handel seems always to have had a special feeling with regard to this masterpiece of his—as if it were too sacred to be merely used for making money by, like his other works. He very frequently assisted at its performance for the benefit of the Foundling Hospital, and he left the score as a precious gift to the governor of that institution. This work alone brought no less a sum than L10,299 to the funds of the hospital. In this connection a fine saying of his may be repeated. Lord Kinnoul had complimented him on the noble "entertainment" which by the "Messiah" he had lately given the town. "My Lord," said Handel, "I should be sorry if I only entertained them—I wish to make them better." And when someone questioned him on his feelings when composing the "Hallelujah Chorus," he replied in his peculiar English, "I did think I did see all heaven before me, and the great God himself." What a fine saying that was of poor old George III., in describing the "pastoral symphony" in this oratorio—"I could see the stars shining through it!"

The now constant custom of the audience to rise and remain standing during the performance of this chorus, is said to have originated in the following manner: On the first production of the work in London, "the audience were exceedingly struck and affected by the music in general; but when that chorus struck up, 'For the Lord God Omnipotent' in the 'Hallelujah,' they were so transported that they all together, with the king (who happened to be present), started up and remained standing till the chorus ended." "This anecdote I had from Lord Kinnoul." So says Dr. Beattie, the once famous poet, in one of his letters.

The "Messiah" was commenced on August 22, 1741, finished on September 12th, and the orchestration filled up two days afterward—the whole work thus being completed in twenty-three days. Handel was fifty-six years old at the time.

The next ten years of the life of the "Goliath of Music," as he has been called, are marked by some of the most splendid achievements of his genius. "Samson," the "Dettingen Te Deum," "Joseph," "Belshazzar," "The Occasional Oratorio," "Judas Maccabeus," "Joshua," "Solomon," and, "Theodora," being composed by him during this time, when, already an old man, it might have been thought that he would have taken some repose after the labors of so toilsome and troubled a life. But, oak-like, he was one of those who mature late; like Milton, his greatest works were those of his old age.

But a terrible misfortune was approaching—his eyesight was failing. The "drop serene," of which Milton speaks so pathetically, had fallen on his eyes, and at the time when, in February, 1752, he was composing his last work, "Jephtha" (the one containing "Deeper and Deeper Still," and "Waft her, Angels"), the effort in tracing the lines is, in the original MS., very painfully apparent. Soon afterward he submitted to three operations, but they were in vain, and henceforth all was to be dark to him. His sole remaining work was now to improvise on the organ, and to play at performances of his oratorios. There is a pathetic story told of an incident that occurred on one occasion, when "Samson" was given. While the magnificent air,

Total eclipse! no sun, no moon! All dark, amidst the blaze of noon. O glorious light! no cheering ray To glad my eyes with welcome day. Why thus deprived thy prime decree? Sun, moon, and stars are dark to me—

was being sung by Beard, the tenor, the blind old man, seated at the organ, was seen to tremble and grow pale, and then, when he was led forward to the audience to receive their applause, tears were in the eyes of nearly everyone present at the sight. It was like the scene that is described in Beethoven's life on the occasion of that composer's appearance, when almost totally deaf, to conduct his great Choral Symphony at Vienna.

One night, on returning home from a performance of the "Messiah" at Covent Garden, Handel was seized with sudden weakness and retired hurriedly to bed, from which he was never to rise again. He prayed that he might breathe his last on Good Friday, "in hope of meeting his God, his sweet Lord and Saviour on the day of his resurrection." And strangely enough his wish was granted, for on Good Friday, April 13, 1759, he quietly passed away from this life, being then seventy-four years of age. His remains were laid in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, and the place is marked by a statue by Roubilliac, representing him leaning over a table covered with musical instruments, his hand holding a pen, and before him is laid the "Messiah," open at the words, "I know that my Redeemer liveth."



MOZART

By C. E. BOURNE

(1756-1791)



Leopold Mozart was a violinist in the band of Archbishop Sigismund, the reigning Prince of Salzburg, and it was probably in compliment to his master that he bestowed on the youngest of his seven children the name of Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Sigismundus. Born on January 27, 1756, this child was destined to make the name of Mozart famous wherever music is known; and surely no more beautiful life—beautiful in itself and in the works of immortal beauty which in its short course were produced—has ever been lived by anyone of those to whom the crown of inspired singers and an enduring monument in the temple of art has been given. "Look around," was the epitaph on a great architect. "Listen," is the most fitting tribute to the wonderful genius of a Mozart.

Infant prodigies very often turn out to be nobodies in after-life. But Mozart was an exception; and though he might well have been called "the marvellous boy," his latest works—and he died at the early age of thirty-five—were undoubtedly his grandest and most perfect. He began very early to compose. One of these first attempts was a concerto so difficult that no one could play it; but the child undauntedly said, "Why, that's the very reason why it is called a concerto; people must practise it before they can play it perfectly."

Wolfgang and his sister, Nannerl, as he used to call her, had been taken by their father, in 1762, to Vienna, where the children played the piano before the Empress Maria Theresa and her husband. Little Wolfgang was here, as everywhere, perfectly at his ease, with a simplicity and childish grace that won every heart. When he had been playing for some time, he jumped without ceremony on the lap of the empress, and kissed her heartily for being so good to him. Little Marie Antoinette, her daughter, afterward the ill-fated wife of Louis XVI., and then about the same age as Wolfgang, he treated in almost the same way. He had slipped on the polished floor, to which he was unaccustomed, and the little princess had hurried forward to raise him up, on which he promptly said, "You are good; I will marry you." The empress asked why he wished this, to which he answered, "Out of gratitude; she was kind, while her sister took no notice of me" (she had not come forward to help him). After returning to Salzburg, Leopold Mozart, in the spring of 1763, took his children on a more lengthy tour to Munich, Paris, London, and The Hague, and everywhere their playing, especially Wolfgang's performances on the organ, which he had now learned, were listened to with delight and astonishment. At Heidelberg the priest of the Church of the Holy Ghost engraved on the organ the boy's name and the date of his visit, in remembrance of "this wonder of God," as he called the child. At London, old Mozart says, they were received, on April 27th, by King George III. and Queen Caroline, at the palace, and remained from six to nine o'clock. The king placed before the boy compositions of Bach and Handel, all of which he played at sight perfectly; he had also the honor of accompanying the queen in a song. "On leaving the palace," the careful father says, "we received a present of 24 guineas."

A great delight was now before him, for his father had resolved on a journey to Italy, then far more than now the land of music. How much this visit did for the young maestro it is impossible to say; he has not, like Mendelssohn, left us an "Italian Symphony," recording the impressions which that sunny spot of classic beauty had made upon him, but there can be little doubt of the great influence it had on the whole of his after-life. There are some significant words which he wrote eight years later to his father from Paris: "You must faithfully promise to let me see Italy again in order to refresh my life. I do entreat of you to confer this happiness upon me." In Mantua, Milan, Bologna (where he had the good fortune to meet the learned Padre Martini, one of the soundest musicians of his age, and for whom he ever afterward maintained a warm attachment), Florence, Rome, and Naples, the young genius was received everywhere with enthusiasm by the crowds who came to hear him. In Naples the superstitious people believed that there was magic in his playing, and pointed to a ring on his left hand as the cause of his wonderful dexterity; and it was only when he had taken this off, and gone on playing just the same, that they had to acknowledge it was simply the perfection of art.

There is something sad in contrasting these brilliant early days with the anxious times that came later on, when the great Mozart was compelled to wait in the ante-chambers of the great, dine with their lacqueys, give lessons to stupid young countesses, and write begging letters to his friends; yet, in reality, those later days, when "Don Giovanni," "Die Zauberfloete," and the "Requiem," were composed, were the truly brilliant ones. And it may be that the very greatness came, in some measure, from the sorrow and pain; that Mozart, like so many others of the world's great singers, "learnt in suffering what he taught in song."

On his return to Munich, after composing a comic opera in the Italian style, "La Finta Giardiniera," which had a great success, young Mozart, who had been very shabbily treated by Archbishop Hieronymus—of whose spiteful conduct we shall hear more hereafter—the successor of Sigismund, determined to resign his situation in the court band, and to set out on his travels again, giving concerts from place to place, and everywhere looking out for some suitable appointment that might afford him a permanent income. This time his father was refused permission to travel, and, as on his exertions depended the support of the whole family, he remained behind, while Frau Mozart, the mother, accompanied young Wolfgang. In 1777, now a young man of twenty-one, he set out upon his second great artistic tour, buoyant with hope, and with all the beautiful audacity of young genius determined to conquer the world. This time it was not the infant prodigy whom men listened to, but the matured musician and the composer of melodies sweeter than men had ever listened to before. But the tale is changed now. True, there are triumphs to be spoken of, flattery from the great, and presents sent in recompense for his marvellous playing (he tells one day of his chagrin in receiving from a certain prince a gold watch, instead of money that he sorely wanted—and, besides, he had five watches already!); but rebuffs, intrigues, and all sorts of petty machinations against him, make the tale a sadder one; and so it continued to be to the end.

From Munich—where it had been hoped that the elector would have given him an appointment at court, but he was only told to go to Italy and become famous, "it was too early yet to think about becoming a Capellmeister"—he went to Augsburg, spending some pleasant days there in the society of a cousin, Marianne, nicknamed by him Baesle, a merry, open-hearted girl of nineteen.

Thence, he went on to Mannheim, a town that is memorable as the place where he first met the Webers, and made the acquaintance of Herr Cannabich, the director of the music at the elector's court, and one who proved a stanch friend through everything to the young composer. Cannabich had a daughter named Rosa, a girl of thirteen, exceedingly pretty and clever, and Wolfgang appears to have admired her very much, and perhaps for a time to have flirted and been in love with her. He wrote her a sonata, and was delighted with the way in which she played it; the andante, he said, he had composed to represent her, and when it was finished he vowed she was just what the andante was. But this little love affair, if it existed, soon was forgotten in a more serious one with Aloysia Weber. Her father was a theatre copyist in poor circumstances. There were a number of children, and she was a beautiful girl of fifteen, with a magnificent voice. She was cousin, by the way, to Weber, afterward composer of the "Freischuetz." Mozart was so charmed with her voice that he undertook to give her lessons, and we soon hear of him composing airs for her and meditating a concert tour in Italy in company with her, and her father and sister. In writing of it to his own father he sets out the advantages to be gained by co-partnership, and very prosaically says: "Should we stay long anywhere, the eldest daughter [Josepha, afterward Frau Hofer, for whom Mozart wrote the part of Astrafiammente in the "Zauberfloete"] would be of the greatest use to us; for we could have our own menage, as she understands cooking." But papa Mozart decidedly objected. "Your proposal to travel about with Herr Weber—N. B., two daughters—has driven me nearly wild," and he straightway orders his son off to Paris, whither, with a parting present of a pair of mittens knitted for him by Mlle. Weber, he reluctantly sets out in company with his mother.

His stay in Paris during the next year was not very eventful, and a symphony produced at the Concerts Spirituels seems to have been his most successful work at this time. It was clever and lively, full of striking effects, and was most warmly applauded. He says: "The moment the symphony was over I went off in my joy to the Palais Royal, where I took a good ice, told my beads, as I had vowed, and went home, where I am happiest and always shall be happiest." A great sorrow came to him here in the death of his mother. Owing to the great expense of living in Paris, they had been compelled to live together in a small, dark room, so cramped for space that there was not even room for the indispensable piano. Here she was taken ill, and though for fourteen days Wolfgang most devotedly attended to her wants, she died in his arms. The letters in which he breaks the news to his father and sister are full of the most beautiful tenderness and forgetfulness of his own grief in solicitude for theirs. Things did not indeed prosper with him in Paris; he tried to give lessons, but the ladies whom he taught paid him very shabbily, and the labor of getting from one part of the city to another to teach was so great that he found it difficult to give the time he wished to composition.

Music in Paris, just then, was at a low ebb. Vapidly pretty Italian operas were in fashion, and Piccinni was the favorite composer. It was some years afterward that the great contest between the Piccinnists and Gluckists culminated in the victory of the latter, though "Alceste," had already been produced, and "Iphigenia" was soon to follow. Mozart was a fervent admirer of Gluck, and the music of the older master had evidently an important influence on that of the younger and more gifted composer.

Once more his thoughts were turned to Salzburg, for two of the leading musicians there having died, the Archbishop Hieronymus offered their posts to the Mozarts, father and son, at a salary of a thousand florins for the two. The father anxiously entreated his son to return and accept this offer, mentioning as a further bait, that Aloysia Weber would probably be engaged to sing in Salzburg. Much as Wolfgang hated Salzburg, or rather the people living there, his love for his father and sister prevailed over his aversion; and though with no pleasure at all in the prospect of seeing the hateful archbishop again, he set out from Paris, travelling to Salzburg in very leisurely fashion via Strasbourg, Mannheim, and Munich. At Strasbourg he was induced to give several concerts, but they were not pecuniary successes, and he did not make by any one more than three louis d'or. But how the artist peeps out in every line of the letters in which he describes these! After saying how few were present, and how cold it was, he proceeds: "But I soon warmed myself, to show the Strasbourg gentlemen how little I cared, and played to them a long time for my own amusement, giving a concerto more than I had promised, and at the close extemporizing. It is now over, but at all events I gained honor and fame."

At Munich a great shock awaited him. He visited the Webers, and being in mourning for his mother, wore, after the French fashion, a red coat with black buttons. When he appeared, Aloysia hardly seemed to recognize him, and her coldness was so marked, that Mozart quietly seated himself at the piano, and sang in a loud voice, "Ich lass das Maedchen gern das mich nicht will" (I gladly give up the girl who slights me). It was all over, and he had to bear the loss of the fickle girl as best he might. There is a significant line in one of his letters at this time to his father: "In my whole life I never wrote worse than I do to-day, but I really am unfit for anything; my heart is so full of tears." After two years' absence he returned home to Salzburg, where he was warmly welcomed back. Here he remained for a little while, and wrote his first serious opera, "Idomeneo," to the text of an Abbe Varesco, a Salzburger. This opera Beethoven thought the finest of all that Mozart wrote. It was brought out at Munich in January, 1781, and was brilliantly successful. In the March following, an order was received from the archbishop to follow him to Vienna, where he wished to appear with all the full pomp and brilliant retinue of a prince of the church; and as one of this retinue Mozart had to follow him, little thinking at the time that he should never return to Salzburg, but that Vienna henceforth was to be his home.

In Vienna he found that he had to live in the archbishop's house, and was looked upon there as one of the ordinary servants. He says, "We dine at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, unluckily rather too early an hour for me. Our party consists of the two valets, the comptroller, Herr Zetti, the confectioner, the two cooks, Cecarilli, Brunetti (two singers), and my insignificant self. N. B.—The two valets sit at the head of the table. I have, at all events, the honor to be placed above the cooks; I almost believe I am back to Salzburg."

Mozart was a true gentleman, with no foolish false pride, but with the honorable self-respect that every gentleman must possess, and it was very galling to him to have to suffer such odious treatment from the mean-spirited archbishop. Indeed, it was only for his father's sake that he submitted to the continued contumely and petty slights to which the archbishop delighted in subjecting him. At last the open rupture came. The archbishop called him a knave and dissolute fellow, and told him to be off; and when Mozart waited upon Count Arco, the principal official, to obtain the regular dismissal that was necessary, the fellow poured abuse upon him, and actually kicked him out of the room. Poor Mozart was in a state of violent excitement after this outrage, and for some days was so ill that he could not continue his ordinary work. But now at least he was free, and though his father, like a timid, prudent old man, bewailed the loss of the stipend which his son had been receiving, Mozart himself knew that the release was entirely for the best.

In 1782 appeared "Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail," his first really important opera, full of beautiful airs, which at once became enormously popular with the Viennese. The Emperor Joseph II. knew very little about music, but, as frequently happens in such cases, considered that he possessed prodigious taste. On hearing it he said, "Much too fine for our ears, dear Mozart; and what a quantity of notes!"

The bold reply to this was, "Just as many notes as are necessary, your Majesty."

Much of the delight which Mozart felt in the success of the opera arose from the fact that it enabled him seriously to contemplate marriage. Aloysia Weber had been faithless to him, but there was another sister—with no special beauty save that of bright eyes, a comely figure, and a cheerful, amiable disposition—Constanze, whom he now hoped to make his wife. His father objected to all of the Weber family, and there was some difficulty in obtaining the paternal consent; but at last the marriage took place, on August 4, 1782. How truly he loved his wife from first to last, his letters abundantly show; her frequent illnesses were afterward a great and almost constant source of expense to him, but he never ceased to write to her with the passionate ardor of a young lover. He says: "I found that I never prayed so fervently, or confessed so piously, as by her side; she felt the same." And now for some time everything went smoothly in the modest little menage in Vienna. Mozart had plenty of lessons to give, but none of the commissions for operas which he would have wished.

Passing over a visit to Leipsic—where he studied with the keenest delight a number of the unpublished works of the great Sebastian Bach—and to Berlin, he returned to Vienna, and at once set to work upon some quartets which the King of Prussia had ordered from him. "Cosi fan tutte," a comic opera, with the beautifully flowing music that only Mozart could write, but with a stupid plot that has prevented its frequent repetition in later times; and the glorious "Zauberfloete," written to assist a theatrical manager, Schikaneder, were his next works. At this time a strange melancholy began to show itself in his letters—it may be that already his overwrought brain was conscious that the end was not far distant. Such lines as these, pathetic and sad in their simple and almost childlike expression, occur in a letter he wrote during a short absence from his wife, at Frankfort, in 1790: "I am as happy as a child at the thought of returning to you. If people could see into my heart I should almost feel ashamed—all there is cold, cold as ice. Were you with me, I should possibly take more pleasure in the kindness of those I meet here, but all seems to me so empty." On his return to Vienna pecuniary want was rather pressingly felt; his silver plate had to be pawned, and a perfidious friend, Stadler, made away with the tickets, and the silver was never redeemed. On one occasion Joseph Deiner, the landlord of the "Silberne Schlange," chanced to call upon him, and was surprised to find Mozart and his wife Constanze dancing round the room. The laughing explanation was that they had no firewood in the house, and so were trying to warm themselves with dancing. Deiner at once offered to send in firewood, Mozart promising to pay as soon as he could.

That grand work, the "Zauberfloete," had just been completed when a strange commission was given him. One day a tall, haggard-looking man, dressed in gray, with a very sombre expression of countenance, called upon Mozart, bringing with him an anonymous letter. This letter contained an inquiry as to the sum for which he would write a mass for the dead, and in how short a time this could be completed. Mozart consulted his wife, and the sum of fifty ducats was mentioned. The stranger departed, and soon returned with the money, promising Mozart a further sum on completion, and also mentioned that he might as well spare the trouble of finding out who had given this commission, for it would be entirely useless. We now know that the commission had really been given by Count Walsegg, a foolish nobleman, whose wife had died, and who wanted, by transcribing Mozart's score, to pass it off as his own composition—and this he actually did after the composer's death. Poor Mozart, in the weak state of health in which he now was, with nerves unstrung and over-excited brain, was strangely impressed by this visit, and soon the fancy took firm possession of him that the messenger had arrived with a mandate from the unseen world, and that the "Requiem" he was to write was for himself. Not the less did he ardently set to work on it. Hardly, however, was it commenced than he was compelled to write another opera, "La Clemenza di Tito," for which a commission had been given him by the Bohemian Estates, for production on the occasion of the Emperor Leopold's coronation in their capital. This was accomplished in the short space of eighteen days, and though it does not contain the best music, yet the overture and several of the numbers are full of a piquant beauty and liveliness well suiting the festival of a people's rejoicing. But a far greater work, the "Zauberfloete," was produced in Vienna shortly afterward. It did not take very well at first, but subsequent performances went better.



His labors in bringing out the "Zauberfloete" over, Mozart returned to the "Requiem" he had already commenced, but while writing he often had to sink back in his chair, being seized with short swoons. Too plainly was his strength exhausted, but he persisted in his solemn work. One bright November morning he was walking with Constanze in the Prater, and sadly pointing out to her the falling leaves, and speaking of death, with tears in his eyes, he added; "I well know I am writing this 'Requiem' for myself. My own feelings tell me that I shall not last long. No doubt some one has given me poison—I cannot get rid of this thought." With these gloomy fancies haunting his mind, he rapidly grew worse, and soon could not leave his room. The performances of the "Zauberfloete" were still going on, and extraordinarily successful. He took the greatest interest in hearing of them, and at night would take out his watch and note the time—"Now the first act is over, now is the time for the great Queen of Night." The day before his death he said to his wife, "Oh, that I could only once more hear my 'Flauto Magico!'" humming, in scarcely audible voice, the lively bird-catcher song. The same day, at two o'clock in the afternoon, he called his friends together, and asked for the score of his nearly completed "Requiem" to be laid on his bed. Benedict Schack sang the soprano; his brother-in-law, Hofer, the tenor; Gerl, the bass; and Mozart himself took the alto in a weak but delicately clear voice. They had got through the various parts till they came to the "Lacrymosa," when Mozart burst into tears, and laid the score aside. The next day (Sunday), he was worse, and said to Sophie, his sister-in-law, "I have the taste of death on my tongue, I smell the grave, and who can comfort my Constanze, if you don't stay here?" In her account of his last moments, she says: "I found Suessmayer sitting by Mozart's bed. The well-known 'Requiem' was lying on the coverlet, and Mozart was explaining to Suessmayer the mode in which he wished him to complete it after his death. He further requested his wife to keep his death secret until she had informed Albrechtsberger of it, 'for the situation of assistant organist at the Stephen Church ought to be his before God and the world.' The doctor came and ordered cold applications on Mozart's burning head.... The last movement of his lips was an endeavor to indicate where the kettledrums should be used in the 'Requiem.' I think I still hear the sound."



HAYDN

By C. E. BOURNE

(1732-1809)



No composer has ever given greater or purer pleasure by his compositions than is given by "papa" Haydn; there is an unceasing flow of cheerfulness and lively tone in his music, even in the most solemn pieces, as in his Masses, the predominant feeling is that of gladness; as he once said to Carpani: "At the thought of God my heart leaps for joy, and I cannot help my music doing the same." But it is not alone as the writer of graceful and beautiful music that Haydn has a claim on our remembrance; he has been truly called the "father of the symphony." Mozart once said: "It was from Haydn that I first learned the true way to compose quartettes;" and "The Creation," which must ever be counted one of the masterpieces of oratorio music, was his work.

His family were of the people, his father being a master wheelwright at Rohrau, a small Austrian village on the borders of Lower Austria and Hungary and his mother having been employed as a cook in the castle of Count Harrach, the principal lord of the district. Joseph Haydn was born on March 31, 1732 the second child of his parents; and as ten brothers and sisters afterward came into the world, it can easily be understood that his lot was not a very luxurious one. His parents were simple, honest people of the laboring class, very ignorant, but, like most German peasants, with a certain love for and facility in music, not quite so common in this country. Haydn's father had a good voice, and could sing well, accompanying himself on the harp, though he did not know a single note of written music. Then there was the village schoolmaster, who could actually play the violin, and whom little Joseph watched with wondering eyes, extracting those marvellously sweet sounds from his wooden instrument, until, with the child's spirit of imitation, as his parents sang their "Volkslieder," the little fellow, perched on a stone bench, gravely handled two pieces of wood of his own as if they were bow and fiddle, keeping exact time, and flourishing the bow in the approved fashion of the schoolmaster. From this very little incident came an important change in his life; for a relation, Johann Mathias Frankh, of Hainburg, happened to be present on one occasion, and, thinking he saw an aptitude for music in the boy, offered to take him into his own school at Hainburg, where accordingly young Haydn went at the age of six years.