Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/70

58 to giving way. The hazard of a correspondence which has recently been published has afforded us this information. The Countess of Shaftesbury wrote on the 13th of March, 1745:

On the 29th of August of the same year the Rev. William Harris wrote to his wife:

This condition continued for seven or eight months. On the 24th of October, Shaftesbury wrote to Harris:

He did recover completely, since in November he wrote his Occasional Oratorio, and soon afterwards his Judas Maccabaeus. But we see what a gulf perpetually yawned beneath him. It was only by the skin of his teeth that he, the sanest of geniuses, kept himself going, a hand's-breadth from insanity, and I repeat that these sudden organic lesions have been revealed only by the hazards of a correspondence. There must have been many others of which we know nothing. Let us remember this, and also the fact that Händel's tranquillity concealed a prodigious expenditure of emotion. The indifferent, phlegmatic Händel is only the outer shell.