Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/65

Rh fashionable cliques, feminine plots and nationalistic leagues. He was a prey to financial embarrassments which grew daily more inextricable; and he was constantly compelled to write new compositions to satisfy the curiosity of a public that nothing ever did satisfy, that was really interested in nothing, and to strive against the competition of harlequinades and bearfights; to write, and write, and write: not an opera each year, as Lully did so peacefully, but often two or three each winter, without counting the compositions of other musicians which he was forced to rehearse and conduct. What other genius ever drove such a trade for twenty years?

In this perpetual conflict he never made use of concessions, compromises or discreet expedients; neither with his actresses nor their protectors, the great nobles, nor the pamphleteers, nor all that clique which makes the fortune of the theatres and the fame or ruin of the artists. He held his own against the aristocracy of London. The war was bitter and merciless, and, on the part of his enemies, ignobly fought; there was no device, however petty, that was not employed to drive him into bankruptcy.

In 1733, after a long campaign in the Press and the drawing-rooms of London, his enemies managed to contrive that the concerts at which Händel produced his first oratorios were given to empty chairs; they succeeded in killing them, and people were already repeating, exultingly, that the discouraged German was about to return to his own country. In 1741, the fashionable cabal went so far as to hire little street-arabs to tear down the advertisements of Händel's concerts which were posted up out of doors, and "made use of a thousand