to giving way. The hazard of a correspondence which has recently been published has afforded us this information.[1] The Countess of Shaftesbury wrote on the 13th of March, 1745:
I went to Alexander's Feast with a melancholy pleasure. I wept tears of mortification at the sight of the great and unfortunate Händel, crestfallen, gloomy, with fallen cheeks, seated beside the harpsichord which he could not play; it made me sad to reflect that his light has burned itself out in the service of music.
On the 29th of August of the same year the Rev. William Harris wrote to his wife:
Met Händel in the street. Stopped him and reminded him who I was, upon which I am sure it would have entertained you to see his fantastic gestures. He spoke a great deal of the precarious condition of his health.
This condition continued for seven or eight months. On the 24th of October, Shaftesbury wrote to Harris:
Poor Händel looks a little better. I hope he will recover completely, though his mind has been entirely deranged.
He did recover completely, since in November he wrote his Occasional Oratorio, and soon afterwards his Judas Maccabaeus. But we see what a gulf perpetually yawned beneath him. It was only by the skin of his teeth that he, the sanest of geniuses, kept himself going, a hand's-breadth from insanity, and I repeat that these sudden organic lesions have been revealed only by the hazards of a correspondence. There must have been many others of which we know nothing. Let us remember this, and also the fact that Händel's tranquillity concealed a prodigious expenditure of emotion. The indifferent, phlegmatic Händel is only the outer shell.
- ↑ W. B. Squire: Händel in 1745 (in the H. Riemann Festschrift, 1909, Leipzig.)
