Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians — Robert Schumann, Part 1

ROBERT SCHUMANN

That any man should ever write his thoughts for other men to read, seems the very height of egoism.

Literature never dies, and so the person who writes constitutes himself a rival of Shakespeare and seeks to lure us from Montaigne, Milton, Emerson and Carlyle.

To write nothing better than grammatical English, to punctuate properly, and repeat thoughts in the same sequence that have been repeated a thousand times, is to do something icily regular, splendidly null.

To down the demons of syntax and epithet is not enough.

To compose blameless sonatas and produce symphonies in the accepted style, is not adding an iota to the world's worth.

The individual who tries to compose either ideas or harmonious sounds, and hopes for success, must compose because he can not help it.

He must place the thing in a way it has never before been placed; on the subject he must throw a new light; he must carry the standard forward, and plant it one degree nearer the uncaptured citadel of the Ideal.

And he must remember this: the very prominence of his position will cause him to be the target of contumely, abuse and much stupid misunderstanding.

If he complains of these things (as he probably will), he reveals a rift in the lute and proves that he is only a half-god, after all.

Men of the highest type of culture--those of masterly talent--are not gregarious in their nature.

The "jiner" instinct goes with a man who is a little doubtful, and so he attaches himself to this society, club or church.

The very tendency to "jine" is an admission of weakness--it is a getting under cover, a combining against the supposed enemy.

The "jiner" is an ameba that clings to flotsam, instead of floating free in the great ocean of life.

The lion loves his mate, but prefers to flock by himself.

The pioneer in art, as in any other field, must be willing to face deprivations and loneliness and heart-hunger.

He must find companionship with birds and animals, and be brother to the trees and swift-flying clouds.

When men meet on the desert or in the forest wilds, how grateful and how gracious is their hand-clasp!

When love and understanding come to those who live on the border-land of two worlds, how precious and priceless the boon!

* * * * * Robert Schumann was the son of a book-publisher of Zwickau.

He was a handsome lad with the flash of genius in his luminous eyes, and an independence like that of an Alpine goat.

When very young they say he used to have tantrums.

If your child has a tantrum, it is bad policy for you to imitate him and have one, too.

A tantrum is only one of the little whirlwinds of God--it is misdirected energy, power not yet controlled.

When Robert had a tantrum, his father would shake him violently to improve his temper, or fall upon him with a strap that hung handy behind the kitchen-door.

Then the mother, when the father was out of the way, would take the lad and cry over him, and coddle him, and undo the discipline.

The best treatment for tantrums is--nothing.

The more you let a nervous, impressionable child alone, the better.

When the lad was fourteen years old, we find him setting type in his father's printery.

He was working on a book called, "The World's Celebrities," and his share of the work dealt with Jean Paul Richter.

He grew interested in the copy and stopped setting type and read ahead, as printers sometimes will.

The more he read, the more he was fascinated.

He fell under the spell of Jean Paul the Only.

Jean Paul, inspired by Jean Jacques, was the inspirer of the whole brood of young writers of his time.

To him they looked as to a Deliverer.

Jean Paul the Only!

The largest, gentlest, most generous heart in all literature!

The peculiar mark of Richter's style is analogy and comparison; everything he saw reminded him of something else, and then he tells you of things of which both remind him.

He leads and lures you on, and takes you far from home, but always brings you safely back.

Yet comparison proves us false when we deal with Richter himself.

He stands alone, like Adam's recollection of his fall, which according to Jean Paul was the one sweet, unforgetable thing in all the life of the First Citizen of his time.

Jean Paul seems to have combined in that mighty brain all feminine as well as masculine attributes.

The soul in which the feminine does not mingle is ripe for wrong, strife and unreason.

"It was mother-love, carried one step further, that enabled the Savior to embrace a world," says Carlyle.

The sweep of tender emotion that murmurs and rustles through the writing of Jean Paul is like the echo of a lullaby heard in a dream.

Perhaps it came from that long partnership when mother and son held the siege against poverty, and the kitchen-table served them as a writing-desk, and the patient old mother was his sole reviewer, critic, reader and public.

For shams, hypocrisy and pretense Jean Paul had a cyclone of sarcasm, and the blows he struck were such as only a son of Anak could give; but in his heart there was no hate.

He could despise a man's bad habits and still love the man behind the veneer of folly.

So his arms seem ever extended, welcoming the wanderer home.

Dear Jean Paul, big and homely, what an insight you had into the heart of things, and what a flying-machine your imagination was!

Room for many passengers?

Yes, and children especially, for these you loved most of all, because you were ever only just a big overgrown boy yourself.

You cried your eyes out before your hair grew white, and then a child or a woman led you about; and thus did you supply Victor Hugo a saying that can not die: "To be blind and to be loved--what happier fate!"

Yes, Jean Paul used to cry at his work when he wrote well, and I do, too.

I always know when I write particularly well, for at such times I mop furiously.

However, I seldom mop.

Robert Schumann began to write little essays, and the essays were as near like Jean Paul's as he could make them.

He read them to his mother, just as Jean Paul used to write for his mother and call her "my Gentle Reader"--he had but one.

Robert's mother believed in her boy--what mother does not?

But her love was not tempered by reason, and in it there was a sentimental flavor akin to the maudlin.

The father wanted the lad to take up his own business, as German fathers do, but the mother filled the lad's head with the thought that he was fit for something higher and better.

She was not willing to let the seed ripen in Nature's way--she thought hothouse methods were an improvement.

Such a mother's ambition centers in her son.

She wants him to do the thing she has never been able to do.

She thirsts for honors, applause, publicity, and all those things that bring trouble and distress and make men old before their time.

So we find the boy at eighteen packed off to Heidelberg to study law, with no special preparation in knowledge of the world, of men or books.

But old father antic, the law, was not to his taste.

Robert liked music and poetry better.

His fine, sensitive, emotional spirit found its best exercise in music; and at the house of Professor Carus he used to sing with the professor's wife.

This Professor Carus, by the way, is, I believe, directly related to our own Doctor Paul Carus, of whom all thinking people in America have reason to be proud.

I am told that when a boy of eighteen or nineteen mingles his voice several evenings a week with that of a married lady aged, say, thirty-five, and they also play "four hands" an hour or so a day, that the boy is apt to surprise the married lady by falling very much in love with her.

Boys are quite given to this thing, anyway, of falling in love with women old enough to be their mothers--I don't know why it is.

Sometimes I am rather inclined to commend the scheme, since it often brings good results.

The fact that the woman's emotions are well tempered with a sort of maternal regard for her charge holds folly in check, dispels that tired feeling, promotes digestion, and stimulates the action of the ganglionic cells.

It was surely so in this instance, for Madame Carus taught the youth how to compose, and fired his mind to excel as a pianist.

He wrote and dedicated small songs to her, and their relationship added cubits to the boy's stature.

From a boy he became a man at a bound.

Just as one single April day, with its showers and sunshine, will transform the seemingly lifeless twigs into leafy branches, so did this young man's intellect ripen in the sunshine of love.

As for Professor Carus, he was too busy with his theorems and biological experiments to trouble himself about so trivial a matter as a youngster falling in love with his accomplished wife--here the Professor's good sense was shown.

Jean Paul Richter lighted his torch at the flame of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

In a letter to Agnes Carus, Schumann has acknowledged his obligation to Richter, in a style that is truly Richteresque.

Says Robert: Dear Lady:--I read from Jean Paul last night until I fell asleep and then I dreamed of you.

It was at the torch of Jean Paul that I lighted my tallow dip, and now he is dead and these eyes shall never look into his, nor will his voice fall upon my ears.

I cry salt tears to think that Jean Paul never knew you.

If I could only have brought you two together and then looked upon you, realizing, as I would, that you had both come from High Olympus!

Blissful are the days since I knew you, for you have brought within my range of vision new constellations, and into my soul has come the clear, white light of peace and truth.

With you I am purified, freed from sin, and harmony fills my tired heart.

Without you--why, really I have never dared think about it, for fear that reason would topple, and my mind forget its 'customed way--let's talk of music.

* * * Professor Carus kept his ear close to the ground for a higher call, and when the call came from Leipzig, he moved there with his family.

It was not many weeks before Robert was writing home, explaining that lawyers were men who get good people into trouble, and bad folks out;

and as for himself he had decided to cut the business and fling himself into the arms of the Muse.

This letter brought his mother down upon him with tears and pleadings that he would not fail to redeem the Schumanns by becoming a Great Man.

Poetry was foolishness and all musicians were poor--there were a hundred of them in Zwickau who lived on rye-bread and wienerwurst.

The boy promised and the mother went home pacified.

But not many weeks had passed before Robert set out on a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, to visit the scene of Jean Paul's romances.

On this same tour he went to Munich, and there met Heinrich Heine, who was from that day to enter into his heart and jostle Jean Paul for first place.

He was accompanied on this memorable trip by Gisbert Rosen, who proved his lifelong friend and confidant.

Very naturally Leipzig was the ardently desired goal of his wanderings.

At once on arriving there, he sought out the home of Professor and Madame Carus.

That his greeting (and mayhap hers) did not contain all the warmth the boy lover had anticipated is shown in a letter to Rosen, wherein he says: "This world is only a huge graveyard of buried dreams, a garden of cypress and weeping willows, a silent peep-show with tearful puppets.

Alas for our high faith--I wonder if Jean Paul wasn't right when he said that love lessens woman's delicacy, and time and distance dissipate it like morning dew?"

Yet Madame Carus was kind, for Robert played at little informal concerts at her house, and she urged him to abandon law for music; and he refers the matter to Rosen, asking Rosen's advice and explaining how he wants to be advised, just as we usually do.

Rosen tells him that no man can succeed at an undertaking unless his heart is in the work, and so he shifts the responsibility of deciding on Professor Carus, whom Robert "respects," but does not exactly admire enough to follow his advice.

Robert does not consider the Professor a practical man, and so leaves the matter to his wife.

In the meantime songs are written similar to Heine's, and essays turned off, pinned with the precise synonym, the phrase exquisite, just like Jean Paul's. Progress in piano-playing goes steadily forward, with practise on the violin, all under the tutelage of Madame Carus, who one fine day takes the young man to play for Frederick Wieck, the best music-teacher in Leipzig.

* * * * * "Musicians?"

said Wieck, "I raise them!"

And so he did.

He proved the value of his theories by making great performers of Maria and Clara, his daughters--two sisters more gifted in a musical way have never been born.

Germany excels in philosophy and music--a seeming paradox.

Music is supposed to be a compound of the stuff that dreams are made of--hazy, misty, dim, intangible feelings set to sounds--we close our eyes and they take us captive and carry us away on the wings of melody.

And so it may be true that music is born of moonshine, and fragrant memories, and hopes too great for earth, and loves unrealized; yet its expression is the most exacting of sciences.

A

Great Musician has not only to be a poet and a dreamer, but he must also be a mathematician, cold as chilled steel, and a philosopher who can follow a reason to its lair and grapple it to the death.

And that is why Great Musicians are so rare, and that is also why, perhaps, there are no great women composers.

"Women of genius are men," said the De Goncourts.

A Great Musician is a paradox, a miracle, a multiple-sided man--stern, firm, selfish, proud and unyielding; yet sensuous as the ether, tender as a woman, innocent as a child, and as plastic as potters' clay.

And with most of them, let us frankly admit it, the hand of the Potter shook.

When people write about musicians, they seldom write moderately.

The man is either a selfish rogue or an angel of light--it all depends upon your point of view.

And the curious part is, both sides are right.

Wieck was very fond of his daughters, and like good housewives who are proud of their biscuit, he apologized for them.

"He never quite forgave our mother because we were girls," said Clara once, to Kalkbrenner.

Wieck, the good man, was a philosopher, and he had a notion that the blood of woman is thinner than that of man--that it contains more white serum and fewer red corpuscles, and that Nature has designed the body of a woman to nourish her offspring, but that man's energy goes to feed his brain.

Yet his girls were so much beyond average mortals that they would set men a pace in spite of the handicap.

Fortunate it is for me that I do not have to act as the court of last appeal on this genius business.

The man who decides against woman will forfeit his popularity, have his reputation ripped into carpet-rags, and his good name worked up into crazy-quilts by a thousand Woman's Clubs.

But certain it is that women are the inspirers of music.

As critics they are more judicial and more appreciative.

Without women there would be no Symphony Concerts, any more than there would be churches.

Women take men to the Grand Opera and to Musical Festivals--and I am glad.