One feels here a touch of disdain and frivolity.  Yet he could grow fervid in such an outcry as that of his forty-sixth year: 

“Love, and love alone, can give me a happy life.  O God! let me find her who will keep me in the path of virtue, the one I may rightly call my own.”

Again, he could coldly rejoice that he had not sacrificed any of his individuality, or any of his devotion to music, to Giulietta Guicciardi.  And the diary of Fanny Giannatasio, whose father took care of Beethoven’s nephew, quotes a conversation Beethoven held on the subject of wedlock.  According to this, he said that marriage should not be so indissoluble, liberty-crushing a bond; that a marriage without love was best, but that no marriages were happy.  He added: 

“For himself he was excessively glad that not one of the girls had become his wife, whom he had passionately loved in former days, and thought at the time it would be the highest joy on earth to possess.”

To this cynic wisdom, the poor Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, whose love for Beethoven would never have been known had not her diary enambered it for publication after her death, adds the words:  “I will not repeat my answer, but I think I know a girl who, beloved by him, would not have made his life unhappy.”

Ay, there’s the rub!  Could any one have woven a happiness about the life of that ferocious master of art, that pinioned, but struggling, victim of fate?

CHAPTER XV.

VON WEBER—­THE RAKE REFORMED

  “Though thou hast now offended like a man. 
  Do not persever in it like a devil;
  Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul,
  If sin by custom grow not into nature.”

  Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus”

Few novels are so brilliantly written, or so variously absorbing, as the life of Von Weber, written by his son, the Baron Max Maria von Weber.  For years the son had resisted the urgence of his mother to undertake the work, fearing that partiality would warp, and indelicacy stain, any such memorial of a father who had lived so lively a life.  When at last the work was begun and done, it was a miracle of impartiality, of frankness which seems complete, of sins confessed and expiated in their confession, and of trenchant characterisation, which one will hardly find surpassed outside of Dickens.

The Von Webers are the most numerous musical dynasty after the Bachs.  We have already seen something of the fortunes of the family into which Mozart married.  The father of Mozart’s wife was the older brother of Franz Anton von Weber, father of Carl Maria.  This Franz Anton was a strange mixture of stalwart and shiftless qualities.  He gave up his orchestral position to fight against Frederick the Great, and brought home a red badge of courage.  It is wonderful, by the way, how many musicians have earned distinction as soldiers—­what, indeed, would the soldiers do without music?