Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men; he was small and excitable, but was counted handsome.  He was versatile to an unusual degree, being an adept at painting, as well as billiards, chess, riding, swimming, and general athletics.  He was also something of a scholar in Greek and Latin, and his correspondence was so enthusiastically kept up that his published letters take a high place in such literature, overflowing as they are with comment of all kinds on the people and things he saw in his wide travels.  As an aunt of his once wrote his mother:  “If God spare him, his letters will in long, long years to come create the deepest interest.  Take care of them as of a holy relic; indeed, they are sacred already as the effusion of so pure and childlike a mind.”

His heart was indeed remarkably clean.  Stratton says of him:  “He was always falling in love, as his letters show, but no breath of scandal bedimmed the shining brightness of his character.”  “He wore his heart upon his sleeve,” says Stratton.  He also wore it on the tip of his pen, and one who wishes to know how possible it is to be both a good and joyous man and a great, busy musician can find such an one in Mendelssohn’s published letters, though the most personal family matters have been omitted from them as printed, and his wife before her death burned all the letters he had written her.

We, however, are concerned only in his amours.  When he was twenty years old, he went to England and thence to Scotland and Wales, where he spent a time composing, sketching, and exercising his fascinations; he wrote home:  “Yes, children, I do nothing but flirt, and that in English.”  Wherever he went, he saw something beautiful in nature or in womankind, and at Munich, in 1830, he was, as his sister wrote, “the darling in every house, the centre of every circle.”  The fifteen-year-old Josephine or “Peppi” Lang and Delphine von Schauroth seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough.  In Italy, in 1831, he found his heart captured easily, and, as once in Schumann’s case, it was an English girl who entangled him.  She was a beauty whom he first met at a ball at Torlonia’s; he danced with her again at the Palazzo Albani.  But music held him fast through all, though he could on occasion impatiently vow that he would be more serious and no longer alter his compositions to suit the whims of pretty girls.

Mendelssohn’s life flowed on in smoothness, in thorough contrast with the violent ups and downs of Beethoven’s mind and music, for he was, as Stratton says, “on the most excellent terms with himself,” as with the world in general.  He was extremely sensitive to criticism and to false friendship, but he was never stung into those virulent humours which poisoned Beethoven’s career.  So placid a life his was, indeed, that some of his admirers have wished that he had met with more tragedy, in order that he might have written more poignant music.  Against this view, Grove wisely protested, comparing Schubert’s words:  “My music is the product of my genius and my misery; and that which I have written in my greatest distress is that which the world seems to like best.”  Grove moralises thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy: