Gradually the name and fame of Johann Sebastian Bach were obliterated almost from man’s memory.  Half a century of oblivion was followed by the great revival and the apotheosis of his genius.  In that apotheosis some radiance must always be vouchsafed the sweet memory of her to whom he owed so much of his life’s delight and his art’s inspiration, to whom also he dedicated his life and his music—­Anna Magdalena.

CHAPTER IX.

PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN

“Such music by such a nigger!” exclaimed one prince.  Another called him a Moor.  And two others could not endure him at all.  He was undersized and slender as well; and his legs were so very short that they hardly reached the ground.  His nose was long and beaked and disfigured, with nostrils of different shape, and he was undershot like a bulldog, and unusually pitted with smallpox even for those ante-vaccination days, when it was the ordinary thing to show the marks of this plague.  He always wore a wig, too; beginning when he was a child of six, “for the sake of cleanliness”! and continuing to the day of his death, even when wigs were out of style.

This does not read like the portrait of a man particularly successful in his love affairs.  It does not certainly read like a description of the hero of a novel written by The Duchess or even by Miss Jane Austen.  Yet this is the picture of a man plentifully beloved, large-minded but strangely naif; a revolutionist of childlike directness.

Everybody knows the story of the early life of Joseph Haydn, one of the twelve children of a journeyman wheelwright, and throughout his youth a shuttlecock of ill treatment and contempt.

Love seems to have reached his heart at a late day but with compensating suddenness.  It is nearly incredible that a man whose after life was so heart-busy should not have felt the tender passion till he was nearly thirty, but stranger things have happened, and the anecdote given by his friend Griesinger of his wild agitation when at the age of twenty-seven he was accompanying a young countess, and her neckerchief became disarranged for a moment, would seem to indicate a remarkably unsophisticated nature.

A year later he found himself somewhat relieved of the burden of poverty that had always hampered him, and he remembered him of the two daughters of a Viennese wig-maker named Keller.  Keller had frequently been kind to Haydn, and the younger daughter seems to have inspired him with an ardent love, but she took the veil.  Elise Polko has worked up an elaborate fiction on this affair with her usual saccharinity.  When the convent closed the younger Keller from the world, her father ingeniously suggested to Haydn that he might marry the elder sister.

As Louis Nohl says, “Whatever may have been the reason, gratitude, ignorance, helplessness in practical matters, or wish to have a wife at once—­whatever may have been the motive, he married, and sorely suffered for it.”