But he soon overpaid the score presented by the goddess Fortune--his
nerves were sadly jangled. A horror of the human face obsessed his
waking and sleeping hours; he dreamed of colossal countenances with
threatening eyes, a vast composite of the audiences he nightly faced. As
his popularity increased the waning of his self-respect told him that he
must go into retreat, anywhere out of the musical world--else would his
art suffer. It did suffer. The nervous diffidence, called stage-fright,
which had never assailed his supreme self-balance, intruded its
unwelcome presence. Marco, several months after he had discovered all
these mischievous symptoms, the maladies of artistic adolescence, was
not assured when the critics hinted of them--the public would surely
follow suit in a few weeks. Then came the visit to the learned Viennese
doctor and the trip to Ischl. A few more months of this appalling
absorption in his own personality, this morbid marriage of man to his
own image, and he suspected that his brain would be irretrievably
injured.
He was a curious student of matters psychologic as well as musical.
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