Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/69

Rh Händel! He must have looked with envious eyes upon the man who had attained that mastery over things and self to which he himself was aspiring, and which he was to achieve by an effort of impassioned heroism. It is this effort that we admire: it is indeed sublime. But is not the serenity with which Händel retained his footing on these heights equally sublime? People are too much accustomed to regard his serenity as the phlegmatic indifference of an English athlete:

No one had any suspicion of the nervous tension or the superhuman determination which he must have needed in order to sustain this tranquillity. At times the machine broke down, and his magnificent health of body and mind was shaken to the roots. In 1737 Händel's friends believed that he had permanently lost his reason. But this crisis was not exceptional in his life. In 1745, when the hostility of London society, implacable in its attacks upon his Belshazzar and Herakles, ruined him for the second time, his reason was again very near