The name of Handel suggests to most people the sound of music unsurpassed
in massiveness and dignity, and the familiar portraits of the composer
present us with a man whose external appearance was no less massive and
dignified than his music. Countless anecdotes point him out to us as a
well-known figure in the life of London during the reigns of Queen Anne
and the first two Georges. He lies buried in Westminster Abbey. One would
expect every detail of his life to be known and recorded, his every private
thought to be revealed with the pellucid clarity of his immortal strains.
It is not so; to assemble the bare facts of Handel's life is a problem
which has baffled the most laborious of his biographers, and his inward
personality is more mysterious than that of any other great musician of the
last two centuries.

The _Memoirs of the Life of the late George Frederic Handel_, written by
the Rev. John Mainwaring in 1760, a year after his death, is the first
example of a whole book devoted to the biography of a musician. The author
had never known Handel himself; he obtained his material chiefly from
Handel's secretary, John Christopher Smith the younger. Mainwaring is our
only authority for the story of Handel's early life. Many of his statements
have been proved to be untrue, but there is undoubtedly a foundation of
truth beneath most of them, however misleading either Smith's memory or
Mainwaring's imagination may have been. The rest of our knowledge has to
be built up from scattered documents of various kinds, helped out by the
reminiscences of Dr. Burney and Sir John Hawkins. For the inner life of
Mozart and Beethoven we can turn to copious letters and other personal
writings; Handel's extant letters do not amount to more than about twenty
in all, and it is only rarely that they throw much light on the workings of
his mind.