Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/273

Rh gray and white hair encircling it in the most picturesque disorder, that square lion's nose, that broad chin, that noble and soft mouth;. . . his thick-set Cyclopean figure told of a powerful frame."

His voice varied. "When quite himself it was light in tone, and singularly affecting; but when forced, as it so often was, on occasions of anger and temper, it became very rough and far from sympathetic."

In his later years, depressed by sickness or wrapped in his music, he grew careless as to his personal appearance, and even one of his admirers—the Countess Gallenberg—noticed that "he was meanly dressed, and very ugly to look at, but full of nobility and fine feeling and highly cultivated."

He was very regular about early rising, work and exercise, but beyond this he was singularly erratic in his habits. He was up with the sun, summer and winter, and worked from breakfast to dinner at two or three p. m. Dinner over, he immediately went, rain or shine, hot or cold, for his half walk, half run, into the country, or, at Vienna, about the ramparts. In his solitary life "Nature became to him a mother, sister and sweetheart." Neate said that he "never met any one who so delighted in nature or so thoroughly enjoyed flowers or clouds or any other natural object." "He was out of doors for hours together, wandering in the woods or sitting in the fork of a favorite tree." To Beethoven "every tree seemed Holy, Holy"; he exclaims: "No one loves the country better than I do," and "Oh! the charm of the woods,—who can express it?" It was in communion with nature in fields and woods that his inspiration flowed most freely into his sketch books. He worked as he walked: "As the bee gathers honey from the flowers of the meadows, so Beethoven often collected his most sublime ideas while roaming about in the open fields." He seldom composed in the afternoon or evening.

Schindler tells us that "the use of the bath was as much a necessity to Beethoven as to a Turk, and he was in the habit of making frequent ablutions. When it happened that he did not walk out of doors to collect his ideas, he would not infrequently, in a fit of the most complete abstraction, go to his wash hand-basin and pour several jugs of water on his hands, all the while humming and roaring, for sing he could not. . . . Then he would seat himself at his table and write; and afterwards get up again to the wash basin, and dabble and hum as before." On more than one occasion the water went through the floor and trickled from the ceiling below, with the consequence that the master was forced to move to other quarters.

Like most great men, the matter of food and eating was of little moment to Beethoven. It was sufficient for him if he derived from his meals ample energy for his work. "Wherefore so many dishes?" he exclaimed on one occasion. "Man stands but little above other animals