Händel![1] 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:
Gorgé jusques aux dents de rouges aloyaux
Händel éclate en chants robustes et loyaux.[2]
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
- ↑ His perpetual expenditure of energy and his unremitting labours explain Händel's morbid voracity. Contemporaries jested in the most offensive manner concerning the ogre who was accustomed to order dinners for three, and, when asked where the party was, used to reply: "I am the party!" But this terrific worker had of course to repair his exhausted energies; and after all this diet does not seem to have done him any harm: we may therefore conclude that it was necessary to him. As Mattheson told him, "it would be as irrelevant to measure Händel's eating and drinking by those of ordinary men as to demand that the table of a London merchant should be the same as that of a Swiss peasant."
- ↑ "Gorged to the teeth with underdone sirloins,
Händel bursts into vigorous and loyal song."—Maurice Boucher.
