But Mozart also fortified himself with a glass of wine or punch when he was in the throes of composition. In one of his apartments his immediate neighbour was Joh. Mart. Loibl, who was musical and a Freemason, consequently intimate with Mozart; he had a well-filled wine-cellar, of the contents of which he was never sparing in entertaining his friends. The partition wall between the houses was so thin, that Mozart had only to knock when he wished to attract Loibl's attention; whenever Loibl heard the clavier going and taps at his wall between the pauses, he used to send his servant into the cellar, and say to his family, "Mozart is composing again; I must send him some wine."[107] His wife made him punch, too, when he was writing the overture to "Don Giovanni" the night before its performance. Whoever casts a glance over Mozart's scores will see that they could not have been written in the excitement caused by wine, so neat and orderly are they even to the smallest details, and in spite of the most rapid execution; and those who are in a position to examine any one of his compositions will not need to be told that no intellect overstrained and excited by artificial means could possibly have produced such perfect clearness and beauty. Whether Mozart was right in providing a bodily stimulus in the form of strong drink during a continuous intellectual strain may well be doubted; experience and opinions differ widely on this point. Goethe advised that there should be no forcing an {MARRIED LIFE.} (308) unproductive mood into activity by external means of any kind; but he answered Eckermann's remark that a couple of glasses of wine were often of great service in clearing the mental vision, and bringing difficult subjects to a solution, as follows: "You know my Divan so well that you will remember that I said myself-- Wenn man getrunken hat, Weiss man das Rechte, and that I entirely agree with you. There exist in wine inspiring forces of a very important kind; but all depends upon circumstances and times and places, and what is useful to one does harm to another."[108] Let us now gather into one the separate traits which we have been constrained to discuss, owing to the wide dissemination of those injurious reports against which Niemetschek has already rightly protested.