That Mendelssohn should have been a romanticist at all is a proof of the strength of the romantic tendency in his day; he seemed born rather for the severest, purest, most uncompromising classicism; and if he did, as a matter of fact, come to share the ideals of his age, it was in his own way and for his own ends. The crudities, the exaggerations, the morbid self-involution of the extreme phases of the movement, certainly never infected him. For this happy immunity he was indebted largely to the fortunate conditions of his life, both personal and artistic. Crudity is usually a result of narrowness of culture or of a deficiency in technique; and Mendelssohn grew up in a singularly refined domestic and social circle, and was a skilled musician before he was breeched. Exaggeration springs from a lack of taste; and Mendelssohn's taste, both by native endowment and by training, was consummate. Self-consciousness, whether blessed or baneful, is the child of suffering; how, then, should it come to one whose whole life was so protected, so guided, so lapped in material prosperity, family affection, and social respect?
Mendelssohn's life reads like the story of some fairy prince, beautiful, brave, and virtuous, who is rocked in his cradle by the gentle godmother, Good-fortune, who runs his race amid the plaudits of admiring friends, and who dies young, untarnished, and full of honors, as one loved by the gods. He never knew the squalor of poverty, the paralysis of drudgery, the bitterness of inaptitude, the dull ache of disappointment. In his bright, precocious childhood he was the idol of a wise father, a fond mother, brothers and sisters who shared his tastes and in some measure his abilities, and a circle of literary and artistic friends at the head of which was the aged Goethe. In later years he had all the advantages of university training, the best teachers in music, foreign travel, varied friendships, a happy marriage, and a fame extending to all corners of Europe. Appropriately indeed was he named Felix.
The influence of a long-established, carefully bred, and highly cultivated family played an important part in the formation of his personality. Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, and Liszt blazed out suddenly, meteoric individuals, from respectable but obscure origins; but Mendelssohn was the last bright flower put forth by an ancient stock. Only as such can he be understood. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, an orthodox Jew of the old school and a self-made man, was a famous scholar in his day. He was prominent in the intellectual circles of Berlin in the middle of the eighteenth century, participated in a famous controversy with Lavater, was a friend of Lessing, and was the author of "Phædon, or the Immortality of the Soul," a work translated into all European languages. His son Abraham inherited his strong character and something of his mental power, without his genius. An independent thinker, an unusually wise and devoted father, he was yet singularly modest, and used to say that he began by being "the son of his father" and ended by being "the father of his son." He married Leah Solomon, daughter of a wealthy Jewish family of Berlin. It was her brother, a man of some reputation as an art critic, who, turning Christian, adopted and induced Abraham Mendelssohn to adopt the name of Bartholdy, as a distinction from the branches of their families which retained the ancient faith. Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix's sister, was also an unusual person. She had a genius for music second only to his, and would doubtless have become famous had it not been for her father's prejudice against a professional life for women. Some of the "Songs without Words" are of her composition, and her criticism was always eagerly welcomed by her brother. She married Hensel the painter, who added still further to the artistic interests and associations of the Mendelssohn family.[14]
In Felix's sixteenth year his father bought the mansion known as "Leipziger Strasse no. 3," in the suburbs of Berlin, which became the scene of a most idyllic family and social life. There were separate suites of apartments for the various groups of the clan, Fanny Hensel and her husband occupying one side, and her sister Rebecca and her husband, Edward Devrient, the other; there was a room suitable for theatrical performances, which were frequently given; there was a large garden, and in the middle of it a garden-house with a hall accommodating several hundred persons, in which informal musicales were arranged every Sunday afternoon. No pains were spared to grace the everyday life. "In the summer-houses," we read,[15] "writing materials were provided, and Felix edited a newspaper, called in the summer 'The Garden Times,' and in the winter 'The Snow and Tea Times.' To this all comers were invited to contribute, and the young people were joined in their fun by their elders, including such distinguished personages as Humboldt and Zelter." We can readily imagine that music was the constant accompaniment of all that went on; for not only did Felix and Fanny play the piano and compose, but Rebecca and her husband were singers, and Paul, the youngest of the family, was a good violoncellist. For the Sunday afternoon musicales Felix constantly wrote new things, of which the most important was the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," played before a crowded audience in the garden-house at the end of 1826.
Had Mendelssohn not been surrounded, thanks to the wealth and cultivation of his parents, by this atmosphere of social friendliness and artistic charm, he might have had reason to regret the nervous sensibility he had inherited from them. The abnormal delicacy of constitution indicated by the fact that his grandfather, father, mother, and sister all died of cerebral paralysis took in him the form of such an excitability, physical, emotional, and mental, as would have brought much suffering upon a youth whose conditions of life had been less ideal. Extreme sensitiveness was the most radical trait of his character and temperament. His affection for his relatives was of passionate intensity; a slight misunderstanding or coolness would reduce him to tears, he could not work when his brother or sisters were ill, and the death of his sister Fanny was a shock from which he never recovered. His friendships were romantic in their ardor and in their exacting demands; he showed in them, indeed, the childish egotism of the oversensitive. "Write soon, and love me," he ends one of his letters; and a friend said of him, significantly, "He loved only in the measure that he was loved."[16] His brother-in-law, Devrient, in his reminiscences, says that when crossed or disappointed he sometimes lost all self-control, and in illustration tells the story of some theatricals planned for the silver-wedding celebration of his parents, for which he had written the music, and in which Devrient was to sing the principal part. At the last moment Devrient was summoned to sing at the Crown Prince's on the very evening appointed. With singular blindness to everything but his own plans, Mendelssohn begged him not to go, and when all were assembled began to talk incoherently, and in English. "The stern voice of his father," says Devrient, "at last checked the wild torrent of words; they took him to bed, and a profound sleep of twelve hours restored him to his normal state." It was the same sensitiveness, doubtless, that underlay his vanity in regard to his work, and made indifference so intolerable to him. "The atmosphere of love and appreciation," says Devrient, "in which he had been nurtured was a condition of life to him; to receive his music with coldness or aversion was to be his enemy, and he was capable of denying genuine merit in any one who did so. A blunder in manners, or an expression that displeased him, could alienate him altogether."
But fortunately, at least for the moment, the cold winds of the outside world rarely invaded the quiet garden of art and friendship in which he passed his youth. Inside the barriers which his father's wealth and devotion, his mother's tender solicitude, and his sisters' comradeship and admiration reared about him, he composed, studied, and dreamed in idyllic peace. For variety there were conversations with men skilled in art and literature, studies in the classics and modern languages, harmless flirtations, letter-writing, water-color sketching, and tours in Italy and Switzerland. For recreation there were bowling, fencing, and swimming. And if the disagreeable could not be entirely eliminated, if there must be an occasional headache or fit of lassitude, or if, in spite of one's personal charm and graceful, lovable nature one's friends would not always take the trouble to understand one, then one could resort to a sort of Epicurean stoicism, refuse to attend to the painful and the annoying, and dwell insistently on all that was bright, gracious, and delightful.
Mendelssohn's earliest compositions reflect all the freshness and gaiety of his youthful nature, all the ease and charm of the circumstances in which it developed. From the first their technical skill is perfect; for Mendelssohn had had no distracting struggles for daily bread, like Schubert, no moiling in arid, uncongenial studies, like Schumann; he had been placed under the best masters, and had assimilated harmony, counterpoint, and fugue as unconsciously as most boys assimilate reading, writing, and arithmetic. What was even better, their style was entirely individual; for the spirit of Ariel had never before been incarnated in a musician—or, if it had been, it had smothered under impeding conditions. In the scherzo of the octet written at sixteen there are all the Mendelssohnian traits: fluent melodiousness, correct harmony, carefully polished detail, and an inimitable delicacy, finesse, and lightness of style. "The whole piece," wrote his sister Fanny, "is to be played staccato and pianissimo, the tremulandos coming in now and then, the trills passing away with the quickness of lightning; everything new and strange, and at the same time most insinuating and pleasing, one feels so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, half inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aërial procession. At the end the first violin takes a flight with a featherlike lightness, and—all has vanished."[17] The last words are quoted from a stanza of the Walpurgis Night Dream in "Faust," of which it was Mendelssohn's intention to give a musical illustration:—
"The flight of the clouds and the veil of mist
Are lighted from above.
A breeze in the leaves, a wind in the reeds,