And certainly it was nothing to the boy—he played with such ease that his talent was quite unknown to himself. He had not yet discovered that every one could not produce music just as they could talk.
Goethe's admiration for the boy was unbounded. The two weeks of Mendelssohn's prescribed visit had expired and Goethe begged for an extension of two weeks more. Every evening there was the little impromptu concert. After that Felix paid various visits to Weimar. Goethe's house was his home, and the affection between the old poet and the young musician was very gentle and very firm. "All souls are of one age," says Swedenborg. Goethe was seventy-three and Mendelssohn thirteen when they first met, but very soon they were as equals—boys together.
Goethe was a learner to the day of his passing: he wanted to know. In the presence of those who had followed certain themes further than he had, he was as an eager, curious child. When Goethe was seventy-eight and Mendelssohn eighteen, they spent another month together; and a regular program of instruction was laid out. Each morning at precisely nine, they met for the poet's "music lesson," as Goethe called it, and the boy would play from some certain composer, showing the man's peculiar style, and the features that differentiated him from others. Goethe himself has recorded in his correspondence that it was Felix Mendelssohn who taught him of Hengstenberg and Spontini, introduced him to Hegel's "Æsthetics," and revealed to him for the first time the wonders of Beethoven.
Can you not close your eyes and see them—the mighty giant of fourscore, with his whitened locks, and the slight, slender, handsome boy?
The old man is seated in his armchair near the window that opens on the garden. The youth is at the piano and plays from time to time to illustrate his thought, then turns and talks, and the old man nods in recognition. The boy sings and the old man chords in with a deep, mellow bass which the years have not subdued.
When there are others present these two may romp, joke and talk much—masking their hearts by frivolity—but together they sit in silence, or speak only in lowered voices as all true lovers always do. Their conversation is sparse and to the point; each is mindful of the dignity and worth that the other possesses: each recognizes the respect that is due to the mind that knows and the heart that feels. "All souls are of one age."
ith one exception, Felix Mendelssohn was unlike all the great composers who lived before him—he was born in affluence; during his life all the money he could use was his. No struggle for recognition marked his growth. He never knew the pang of being misunderstood by the public he sought to serve. Whether these things were to his lasting disadvantage, as many aver, will forever remain a question of opinion.
Felix Mendelssohn was the culminating flower of a long line of exquisite culture. He was an orchid that does not reproduce itself. With him died the race. All that beauty of soul, vivacity, candor and sparkling gaiety, with the nerved-up capacity for work, were but the flaring up of life ere it goes out in the night of death. Such men never found either a race or a school. They are the comets that dash across the plane of our vision, obeying no orbit, leaving behind only a memory of blinding light.