15 APRIL 1882, Page 19

THE MENDELSSOHN FAMILY.* FELIX MENDELSSOHN, who loved England so well,

has always been fully appreciated in this country, not only for his genius as a musician, but also for the fine qualities, both of intellect and heart, which made him the most delightful companion and the most constant friend. The charm exercised by Felix was far from being a superficial attraction. It was felt most by those who knew him best, by his parents and sisters, by his in- timate associates, by the men who struggled manfully with him along the road to fortune. There is not a letter, scarcely, indeed, a line, relating to Felix Mendelssohn in these delightful volumes that does not raise our estimate of his character. He lived, as it were, in an atmosphere of love, and he was as manly as he was affectionate. The prurient sentimentality affected by artists and men of letters at the beginning of this century had no influ- ence on the young musician who found the whole joy of his life in his art and in his home. Felix came of a good stock. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, the son of a poor Jew, bad to contend with the severest poverty, and also with a feeble and deformed body. The youth's courage, however, was invincible, and his ardent love of knowledge made him willing to suffer the direst privations. And it was not merely physical suffering he had to undergo. He belonged to a persecuted race, and the intolerance was not wholly on one side. No social intercourse was allowed between Jews and Christians ; in the eyes of the Rabbis, "to speak German correctly, to read a German book, was heresy," and a Jew detected in procuring a German book for Moses was immediately expelled by the Jewish authorities. His strong will, however, overcame every obstacle, and while spend- ing the best hours of the day as bookkeeper in a silk factory, he gained a profound knowledge of languages, mathematics, and philosophy. He was the close friend of Lessing, and his noble character, so full of large tolerance and charity, is de- picted in Nathan der Weise. Yet this high-minded man was never free from petty annoyances in Berlin. "I sometimes go out," he wrote, "in the evening, with my wife and children. Papa,' inquires one of them, in innocent simplicity, what is it those lads call out after us ? Why do they throw stones at us ? What have we done to them Yes, dear papa,' says another, they always run after us in the streets, and shout, "Jew boy ! Jew boy !" Is it a disgrace in the eyes of these people to be a Jew ? What is that to them ?' " Of the children of Moses, three sons and three daughters, Dorothea occupies a rather conspicuous place in the literary history of what the editor terms the "romantic time," the romance consisting generally in a passionate attachment to the wives of other men, and in the feeling that a woman's lawful husband was not likely to sympathise with her ardent aspira- tions. Dorothea left her first husband to marry Frederick Schlegel, while William Schlegel's wife left him to marry the philosopher Schelling, "who had previously chosen the daughter of her first marriage, Augusta Bohmer, but on the death of the latter returned to the mother, and (another sign of the time), was in no way divided from his friend William Schlegel on that account, but unhindered carried his wife home." So charming is mundane philosophy !

"Formerly, I was the son of my father, and now I am the father of my son," was the exclamation of Abraham, the second son of Moses, and the father of Felix Mendelssohn. His

* The Mendelssohn Family (1729-1P47), from Letters and Journals by Sebastian Hensel. With Eight Portraits and Drawings by Wilhelm Hensel. Translated from the Second Revised Edition by Carl Klingemann and an American Collaborator. With a Notice by George Grove, Esq., D.C.L. 2 vols. London : Sampson Low

and Co. 1881.

character stands out with great prominence in the family history, and the warm attachment of the musician, amounting, we are told, almost to adoration, affords a strong testimony to his worth. He had some prejudices, and thought, like Moses, that a girl's only vocation was that of a housewife. Although himself a Jew, he educated his children as Christians and Protestants, and when his daughter Fanny was confirmed,. after writing a beautiful confession of faith, he adds :—

"We, your mother and I, were born and brought up by our- parents as Jews, and without being obliged to change the form of our religion, have been able to follow the divine instinct in us and in our conscience. We have educated you and your brothers and sister in the Christian faith, because it is the creed of most civilised people, and contains nothing than can lead you away from what is good, and mach that guides you to love, obedience, tolerance, and resignation,. even if it offered nothing but the example of its founder, understood by so few, and followed by still fewer."

Abraham was in good circumstances, and when his boys and girls were still children, he bought a house with a delightful garden at Berlin, Leipziger Strasse No. 3, which was ever afterwards the gathering-place of the family, the home to which when absent they always referred with the fondest affection.. There the father and mother passed the rest of their days, there Fanny married, after a weary waiting-time, the well-known artist, Hensel, whose son edits these volumes ; and there, or rather im a one-storeyed garden-house in the grounds, the Hensels lived after their marriage. The garden-house was cold and damp in winter, but in summer, though only a hundred yards from the street, "you lived as in the deepest loneliness of a forest," and in almost rural seclusion. A large garden, nearly a park in extent, and stately rooms, one of which was large enough to.

hold several hundred people, were great attractions to a family like the Mendelssohus, who loved nature and society, and whose musical genius attracted a large number of people. it was a singularly happy as well as gifted family. There seemed to be no discordant element in the house, no skeleton in the closet. Fanny, like Felix, was a composer, and the brother's admira- tion of her worth is expressed in no niggard terms. Rebecca's power lay in another direction. She could, indeed, play and sing, and is said to have been beautiful, but she was chiefly distinguished by her knowledge of languages. Paul Mendels- sohu, although very musical, was not a genius ; but he was a man of good-sense and admirable character, and lived to publish a selection of his brother's letters.

Each member of the family, parents as well as children, pass before us in this narrative. It is natural that the chief in- terest should centre in Felix, but Fanny's letters and diary, and the slighter glimpse we have of Rebecca, who married Professor Dirichlet, are almost equally attractive. The reader,. before he closes the volumes, will feel that he has been admitted into a happy and highly intellectual circle, and has added to the list of friends, changeless and always agreeable, whose acquaintance he has made through books.

When a mere boy, Felix delighted Goethe, and something like a warm friendship sprang up between the young composer and the poet of seventy-three. When the boy was eleven years old, he stayed at Weimar, and writes of playing before the Grand Duke and Duchess from eleven in the morning till ten in the evening, with only two hours' interruption. Of Goethe he says :—

" Every afternoon, Goethe opens his instrument, with the words, 'I have not yet heard you to-day—now make a little noise for me.' And then he generally eits down by my side, and when I have done (mostly extemporising), I ask for a kiss, or I take one. You cannot

fancy how good and kind he is to me It does not strike me that his figure is imposing ; he is not much taller than father, but his look, his language, his name, they are imposing. The amount of sound in his voice is wonderful, and he can shout like ten thousand warriors. His hair is not yet white, his step is firm, his way of speaking mild."

Next to Jean Paul, the Mendelssohn children loved Shake- speare, and the overture to the "Midsummer Night's Dream" was written when the composer was seventeen. It was a product of Mendelssohn's inmost nature, and this, says the biographer, may explain the fact, "perhaps the only one of the kind on record in music, that twenty years afterwards, the composer,

taking up this work of his youth, could write the musie to the Midsummer Night's Dream 'without changing a note of the

overture."

Felix and his intimate friend Klingemann, who was loved by all the family, and to whom Fanny writes some of her most charming letters, were both delighted with England. The former wishes he were less near-sighted, for the sake of the English ladies. "They do not know how to make a pancake, but they are desperately pretty;" and Felix, like Charles Lamb, finds the streets of London quite beautiful. He is struck with awe at the constant flow of life, and "to see the masts from the West India Docks stretching their heads over the housetops, and to see a harbour as big as the Hamburg one treated like a mere pond, with sluices, and the ships arranged ndt singly, but in rows like regiments, to see all that makes one's heart rejoice at the greatness of the world." The young man of twenty goes to a ball at the Duke of Devonshire's, and is charmed with the lovely girls, "some of them quite heavenly for beauty." Very modestly he records his London triumphs ; how at one .concert the fine ladies' bonnets were agitated at every little cadenza, which reminded him of the wind sweeping over a tulip- bed ; and how, at another, he was led to the piano like a young lady, and received with immense applause. "You cannot imagine how kind the English people are to me," he writes, after a long confinement to the house. When well enough to go out again, London, albeit in November, was pro. nounced "indescribably beautiful," and when he leaves it, he carries away a "very dear memory of the town." "For indeed it does one's heart good when people are friendly, and set store by one, and it makes me quite happy to be able to say that they do so here by me." It was not only in London that people "set store" by Felix Mendelssohn. He made himself welcome everywhere, and there are some delightful letters describing his mode of life at a country-seat in Wales, which suffice to prove what a pleasant guest he must have been. He could draw well, but his love of nature was expressed in music, and his impro- vised music in the evening would show what he had seen and observed in the day. Wherever he went, Felix found something beautiful, and in a letter from Soden, near Frankfort, be writes to Rebecca at Sorrento :--

"Perhaps you will hardly be able to appreciate the scenery, after Palermo and Sorrento, but that is not a feeling we should encourage. Those who have a true feeling for beauty of one kind, and derive rest and pleasure from it, cannot, I am sure, circumscribe their powers of enjoyment, but will, on the contrary, endeavour to widen them as much as possible, so as to take in all genuine beauty. I never can bear to hear people able to appreciate Beethoven only, or Palestrina only, or again, Mozart or Bach only. Give me all fear, or none at all."

His art was the source of the intensest pleasure, but he needed at all times the full sympathy of those he loved. And he had it, from his parents, from his sisters, and from his wife in such large measure, that the music of his life is almost without a jarring note. When he became engaged, the mere fact of exist- ence filled him with joy and gratitude, such as he had never felt before ; and when he heard of Klingemann's engagement, he was so glad, that he "danced round the room full five minutes." Apart from these outward manifestations, there are signs of that deep, interior joy with which a stranger inter- meddleth not. A similar feeling is expressed by Fanny, who, like her brother, found life very beautiful. Writing from Rome, she says, "My happiness here is indescribable. For some time past, I have been in a state almost of exaltation, so intense is one's enjoyment of life in its purest and highest sense." And again, on leaving Rome, "A glorious time has passed away ! How can we be thankful enough for these two months of un- interrupted happiness ! The purest joys the human heart can know have succeeded each other, and during all this time we have scarcely had one unpleasant quarter of an hour." And later on, not long before her death, Fanny Hensel writes :—

"Yesterday, the first breath of spring was in the air. It has been a long winter, with much frost and snow, universal dearth and dis- tress ; indeed, a winter full of suffering. What have we done to deserve being among the few happy ones in the world ? My inmost heart is, at any rate, full of thankfulness; and when in the morning, after breakfasting with Wilhelm, we eaoh go to our own work, with a p'easant day to look back upon, ar.d another to look forward to, I am quite overcome with my own happiness."

It is remarkable that most of the Mendelssohn family died suddenly. This was the case with Moses, with his sons Joseph,

Nathan, and Abraham ; with Leah, Abraham's wife, and with their children, Fanny, Rebecca, and Felix. Fanny died while sitting at the piano, shortly after the entry from her diary which we have quoted. The loss was felt so strongly by her husband that, while previously he had been the most industrious of men, "he never painted anything worth having during the fifteen years that he survived her," and did not even complete a large and nearly-finished picture for the coronation hall at Brunswick. In vain does Felix try to console him :—

" This will be a changed world for us all now," he writes, "but we must try and get accustomed to the change, though by the time we have got accustomed to it, our lives may be over, too. Forgive me, I ought to write something else to you, but I cannot. If you ever want a faithful brother who loves you with his whole heart, think of me. I am sure I shall be a better man than I have been, though not such a happy one. But what shall I say to you, my dear Sebastian ? There is nothing to say or to do but this one thing : pray to God that He may create in us a clean heart and renew a right spirit within us, so that we may even in this world betome more and more worthy of her who had the purest heart and spirit we ever knew or loved. God bless her, and point us out the way which none of us can see for ourselves, and yet there mast be one, for God himself has in- flicted this blow upon us for the remainder of our lives, and may He soften the pain. Alas, my dear brother and friend!"

The souls of Felix and Fanny had been knit together like those of David and Jonathan, and her death, as the editor observes, proved a mortal blow. "Once active and energetic almost to restlessness, he would now sit idle with his hands in his lap ; instead of walking with his old, quick, elastic step, he would drag his feet slowly and wearily along, while his irritability with regard to trifling annoyances was extreme." He felt so weary, he said ; and the good effects produced by a tour in Switzerland were destroyed by a visit to Berlin, and the sight of Fanny's rooms. He did not outlive her six months, and now lies by her side in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, at Berlin.

We have given, we fear, a very imperfect sketch of a book which, from the first page to the last, teems with interesting matter. Many hints are to be found with regard to German life and, politics, many remarks upon current events and on dis- tinguished persons, both in England and Germany ; and the letters of Rebecca and Fanny, addressed to the home circle from Italy, have a freshness which shows how possible it is for minds rich in sympathy and, culture to convey new impressions of familar scenes. Truly does Dr. Grove say that "this work de- serves a warm welcome from the English reader, to whom it is now for the first time introduced."