And yet, in the face of such a directory of desire, you'll find Von Seyfried and Haslinger venturing the statement, that "Beethoven was never married, and, what was more marvellous still, never had any love passages in his life," while Francis Hueffer can speak of "his grand, chaste way." On this latter point there is room for debate. Crowest adopts both sides at once by saying: "In the main, authorities concur in Beethoven's attachments being always honourable. There can be no doubt, however, that he was an impetuous suitor, ready to continue an acquaintance into a more serious bond on the slenderest ground, and without the slightest regard to the consequences on either side." Thayer takes a middle ground,--that, in the Vienna of his time and his social grade, it was impossible that Beethoven should have been a Puritan, while he was, however, a man of distinctly clean mind. He could not endure loose talk, and he once boxed the ears of a barmaid who teased him. All his life he had a horror of intrigue with another man's wife, and he once snubbed a man who conducted such an affair. Why, then, thus warm-hearted and clean-hearted, thus woman-loving, did he never marry? Ah, here is one of the sombrest tragedies of art. To say, "Poor Beethoven!" is like pitying the sick lion in his lair. Yet what is more pitiful? Love was the thorn in this lion's flesh, and there was no Fräulein Androcles to take it away. Beethoven was born to the humblest station and the haughtiest aspirations, was left to a sot and a slave-driver for a father, and was early orphaned of his mother. In the first letter we have of his, he says: "She was a good and tender mother to me; she was my best friend. Ah, who was more happy than I when I could still breathe the sweet name of 'mother!' to ears that heard? Whom now can I say it to? Only to the mute image of her that my fancy paints." This same letter, written when he was seventeen, tells three other of his life-long griefs--lack of funds, ill health, and melancholia. He had no childhood; his salad days were bitter herbs; his later life was one wild tempest of ambition frustrated, of love unsated or unreturned, of friendship misprized or thought to be misprized. And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he said, _inter lacrimas et luctum_.