rest were always subservient to the demands of a mentality that could neither rest nor be still. He flung all his youth, his physical power, his nerve-force into a sacrifice to his ambition. He never realised fatigue when it came, because the brain was the exerting force, numbing the body to physical feeling. The wonder is that he did not die before he was forty, for he treated his body as some brute would treat a wretched mongrel that followed at his heels. "Mr Handel was tired, but he played in a wonderful way," wrote a Society dame of an afterdinner conversazione. "They say Mr Handel is ruined so he has begun a new opera," wrote another diarist a little later. Failures were to come, but out of every failure he drew new strength. When the treasury was empty and creditors were pressing, when enemies herded about him and brought the flail of hatred upon his back, he discovered a new vitality in the silence of his room. His mind had always the power to soar above the pettiness of men, beyond the humiliations of failure. His music had brought to his feet women in plenty. The women in London Society crowded about to get him to their salons. Old women; young women. He had a peculiar way with them. He loved a battle with a bright conversationalist of the other sex. But he had no interest in the sex as such. What passion he ever knew sought emission in his love-songs at this time. Only on two occasions in his life did the question of marriage ever seriously occur to him. Once he even went so far as to become engaged. There is no record of how it happened, or what was the particular snare that caught him. The episode would not have been later than the Radamisto period. This unknown maiden may have been responsible for some of the finest love songs in his early work. He may have improvised to her on the harpsichord melodies of exquisite worth which the world has lost. But should the work of the brain that comes into being at a time of very intimate love always be preserved ? The affaire ended abruptly. The mother of the girl in question objected to her daughter marrying a musician. He must give up his music or her daughter. The moment of that decision in Handel's mind might have been one of the world's Handel Matures great losses. Imagine him as a tutor or a clerk earning a pittance to keep a wilful ingénue, with all the melodies that were singing in his brain stifled for ever! He decided quickly. His Art was his wife and his mistress. He said so, and he went his way. A second woman intrigued him. Again music was the difficulty. A musician was only a roving mountebank, was the remark thrown at him. Again he decided as before. So Youth crept forward and ripened. He matured. He liked the society of women-those women who loved art. His courtesies, his gentleness to them were extreme. The years passed. He became, by easy stages, the accepted bachelor, sexless, safe. The lure of his music, as a percussion of sex, faded and disappeared from the minds of anxious husbands who, with the habit of husbands, had at first suspected that magic figure of genius that strode through their drawing-rooms, and at whose feet their wives seemed to crouch in indolent adoration. Still later, when years and flesh were crowding upon him, when the world had smitten him hard, and he had come through as a conquering, unsuppressed being, he settled into the place by which he is remembered -that of a man never born for love of women-who gave all the love he knew to the wonderment of his notes. of bachelor uncle, fat, heavy, who had run the gamut of the world's affairs, and come out of it all very experienced and knowing. The rare person who could take the young girl of eighteen, broken in her first love affair, on his knee, and say to her in a way her mother would never have dared: "My dear, don't be a fool!" The curtain of Radamisto in June 1720 was the curtain to Handel's youth. To-morrow was the day of battle. Senesino, Bononcini, were forms of violence just over the horizon on that June night. For commercialism had never entered his dreams till the formation of the Academy threw him into a world he had never known. In June 1720 they should have put him on a desert island with a harpsichord, some paper and ink. Instead, they tumbled him on to a hotbed of intrigue, of jealousy and commercialism, which at first he never understood. They swept him into a world of vanity-ridden singers, and cat-brained, sensual women. They flung against him every contraption that would kill the art in the average soul. It would have destroyed some men, fresh and excited with the first lilts of the world's appraise. It would have destroyed Handel, but for his secret store of courage. |