Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/270

266 his youth told of how they had seen the boy standing on a stool before the piano, crying, as he practised. Pfeiffer, a teacher who lived with the family, after coming home with the father late at night from the tavern, frequently took young Ludwig out of bed, and kept him practising until morning.

In later youth, as events in the family produced their influence and as his mind began to go out into the realm of the spirit, he became quiet and reserved. He is described as a boy, as being short in stature, but muscular, "awkward, and with a snub nose."

With many conditions, including poverty, to depress his soul, and with apparently little to aid in his bodily unfolding, he nevertheless developed into a tremendously vigorous man—" the very image of strength," with a constitution that defied the attacks of disease and the influence of mental depression, for fifty-seven years."

As early as his seventeenth year he mentions being "troubled with asthma," which he feared would "lead to consumption." Very naturally he thought of such a termination since his mother died in this year. "I also suffer from melancholy which for me is almost as great an evil as my illness itself." Evidently it was his nature to be brave and buoyant, and it was this attitude toward life which constantly finds expression in his music. There is nothing sickly in his art.

But asthma was but the least of the dark demons of disease that came to dwell with him. At about the same time he had already begun to have symptoms of a depressing malady of the digestive organs which finally brought about his dissolution.

Worst of all, and before he was twenty-eight, there came the affection of the ears which speedily brought about deafness, the most trying of all his ailments. Already at this age this disease had so progressed that he was in mortal dread lest his infirmity be observed. After three more years he "found himself unable to hear the pipe of a peasant played at a short distance in the open air." His genius was fairly unfolding itself and was receiving the recognition of his contemporaries. And to be rapidly growing deaf! It is not to be wondered at that his melancholy became profound, and that only deep religious conviction and his ability to live in the glorious realm of the imagination, saved him from taking his own life.

Many doctors and more cures were tried for his deafness, but with no avail. In 1802 he writes: "For the last two years I have avoided all society, for it is impossible for me to say to people, 'I am deaf.'"

In 1802 his sense of depression reached its lowest during an acute illness, and his despair found utterance in the letter to his brothers, which is known as "The Will." He bewailed his exile by his deafness from the diversions of society which he had so loved; and lamented his seeming moroseness which this condition had brought about. The