Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/178

 322 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS course the terrible affliction of deafness began to be felt by him. He at this time freely frequented the salons of the Viennese nobility, many of whom were accomplished virtuosi themselves, and were able to appreciate the great genius of the new-comer, rough and bearish as oftentimes he must have appeared to them — a great contrast to the courtly Haydn and Salieri, who might be seen sitting side by side on the sofa in some grandee's music-room, with their swords, wigs, ruf- fles, silk stockings, and snuff-boxes, while the insignificant-looking and meanly dressed Beethoven used to stand unnoticed in a corner. Here is a description of his appearance given by a Frau von Bernhard : " When he visited us, he gen- erally put his head in at the door before entering, to see if there were any one present he did not like. He was short and insignificant-looking, with a red face covered with pock-marks. His hair was quite dark. His dress was very com- mon, quite a contrast to the elegant attire customary in those days, especially in our circles. . . . He was very proud, and I have known him refuse to play, even when Countess Thun, the mother of Princess Lichnowski, had fallen on her knees before him as he lay on the sofa to beg him to. The Countess was a very eccentric person. ... At the Lichnowskis' I saw Haydn and Salieri, who were then very famous, while Beethoven excited no interest." It was in the year 1800 that Beethoven at last was compelled to acknowledge to himself the terrible calamity of almost total deafness that had befallen him. He writes to his friend Wegeler, " If I had not read somewhere that man must not of his own free will depart this life, I should long ere this have been no more, and that through my own act. . . . What is to be the result of this the good God alone knows. I beg of you not to mention my state to any one, not even to Lorchen [Wegeler's wife]. But," he continues, " I live only in my music, and no sooner is one thing completed than another is begun. In fact, as at present, I am often engaged on three or four compositions at one time." But at first all was not gloom ; for Beethoven was in love— not the love of fleeting fancy that, like other poets, he may have experienced before, but deeply, tragically, in love ; and it seems that, for a time at least, this love was returned. The lady was the Countess Julia Guicciardi ; but his dream did not last long, for in the year 1801 she married a Count Gallenberg. Hardly anything is known of this love affair of Beethoven's. A few letters full of passionate tenderness, and with a certain very pathetic simple trustfulness in her love running through them all — on which her marriage shortly afterward is a strange comment ; the " Moon- light Sonata," vibrating, as it is throughout, with a lover's supremest ecstasy of devotion, these are the only records of that one blissful epoch in the poor com- poser's life ; but how much it affected his after life, how it mingled in the dreams from which his loveliest creations of later years arose, it is impossible now to say. In a letter to Wegeler, dated November 16, 1801, he says, "You can hardly realize what a miserable, desolate life mine has been for the last two years ; my defective hearing everywhere pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear a misanthrope ; and yet no one in reality is less so ! This change [to a happier life] has been brought about by a lovely and fascinating