Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/274

270 if his chief enjoyments are limited to the table." While absorbed in the composition of the Mass in D, he worked like one possessed, and at least once was so absorbed that he went without eating for twenty-four hours, and he "looked as if he had gone through a struggle of life and death." His irregular meals of badly prepared food, hastily devoured, would have damaged more perfect organs of digestion than those of Beethoven.

For breakfast he usually had coffee, which, like Brahms, he often prepared himself. He allowed sixty beans to a cup, and made it a rule, when he had company, of counting the beans for each cup. At dinner his favorite dish was macaroni with Parmesan cheese. He was very fond of fish and on Friday always had fish and potatoes. A plate of soup or some left-over answered his purpose for supper. His favorite beverage was fresh spring water, which he took in large quantities. He was no judge of wines and is said to have injured his stomach by drinking adulterated kinds. He liked a good glass of beer and a pipe of tobacco in the evening.

If erratic in his habits, it was chiefly Beethoven who suffered the consequences. He was singularly pure in his life,—but only from such loftiness of character could come such music.

The physical Beethoven is reflected in his art—all but his ailments and illnesses. These never touched his spirit. He was a Titan and his work was titanesque. Not only is there nothing morbid in his music, but it contains more of humor than that of any composer. Beethoven remained physically robust to the last, notwithstanding his continual fight with disease. His afflictions only served to drive his soul farther into the realms of the ideal. His most profound utterances were poured forth in his last years, and, even in his last illness, "his overflow of fancy was indescribable and his imagination showed an elasticity which his friends had noticed but seldom when he was in health."

The examination of the wreck of that most powerful bodily machine showed the auditory nerves shriveled and degenerated, the liver, the source of his digestive disturbances, shrunken to half its normal size, and there were other signs of chronic disease, which, on slight grounds, has been attributed to syphilis. The convolutions of the brain were more numerous and twice as deep as usual.

So much for the Beethoven laid away at Bonn in 1827. The Beethoven of the Heroic Symphony—of the Leonore and of the Mass in D—is even more alive in all his inspiring strength and beauty than he was a century ago.