“With love like that of a grandmother, she sought to educate and foster me, which she carried so far as often to come near having a glass bell put over me, lest somewhat unworthy should touch or even breathe on me.” Their house is described as “eine freihafen der Humanitat und feinem sitte,’’ the home of all that is genial, noble and refined.
In these first years, the displays of his uncompromising nature affect us with delight, for they have not yet that hue of tragedy, which they assumed after he was brought more decidedly into opposition with the world. Here wildly great and free, as afterwards sternly and disdainfully so, he is, waxing or waning, still the same orb; here more fairly, there more pathetically noble.
He early took the resolution, by which he held fast through life, “against criticisms or attacks of any kind, so long as they did not touch his honour, but were aimed solely at his artist-life, never to defend himself. He was not indifferent to the opinion of the good, but ignored as much as possible the assaults of the bad, even when they went so far as to appoint him a place in the mad house.” For that vein in human nature, which has flowed unexhausted ever since the days of “I am not mad, most noble Festus,” making men class as magic or madness all that surpasses the range of their comprehension and culture, manifested itself in full energy among the contemporaries of Beethoven. When he published one of his greatest works, the critics declared him “now (in the very meridian of his genius) ripe for the mad-house.” For why? “We do not understand it; we never had such thoughts; we cannot even read and execute them.” Ah men! almost your ingratitude doth at times convince that you are wholly unworthy the visitations of the Divine!
But Beethoven “was an artist-nature;” he had his work to do, and could not stop to weep, either pitying or indignant tears. “If it amuses those people to say or to write such things of me,
