As for the widow, she is still living as I write, and still unwearied in behalf of his glory.  In her he had found that ideal of womankind which he had so much upheld:  instant and dauntless obedience to the behest of the one great love.  When he died he was even then at work upon a glorification of the sex, and the last sentence that ever flowed from his pen related to a legend of the Buddhists, granting women a right to the saintliness previously claimed by men alone.

Once he had written:  “Women are the music of life,” and of his “Bruennhilde” he had said:  “Never has woman been so glorified as in this poem.”  For the reward of this trust in womankind, he had also had the privilege of saying, “In the hearts of women it has always gone well with my art.”

And in his grave, where he lay, his head rested upon the long blonde tresses of Cosima, which he had so admired, and which, with final sacrifice, and as a last tribute, she had sacrificed to bury with him.

CHAPTER III.

TSCHAIKOVSKI, THE WOMAN-DREADER

Had his relations with music been as completely original as his relations with women, there would be less dispute as to the genius of this man whom the Germans call a Russian; the Russians, a German.  He was the son of a well-to-do mining and military engineer, who believed in marriage and made three wives happy—­in succession.  The young Tschaikovski was late, like Wagner, in deciding on music, and was twenty-three before he took up instrumentation.

He was of a passionate nature, but his temper usually struck inward, and his friend Kashkin said that he “never began a quarrel or defended himself when attacked.”  That is not, I believe, a type to fascinate women for long, and Tschaikovski’s moroseness, which bordered on morbidness and always hovered on the brink of insanity, made it perhaps fortunate for at least two women that his negotiations with them ended as they did.  And so he drifted—­not such a bachelor as Beethoven, yet quite as wifeless.  Unlike Beethoven, who turned from one disappointing woman to another, Tschaikovski turned to men.  Among his friends was Nikolai Rubinstein, the brother of the more famous pianist, Anton.

Now, Nikolai, like Anton, had tried marriage, and, after two years of quarrels with his wife’s relatives and doubtless with her, had forsworn the other sex.  Incidentally he had taught all day and gambled all night; so the husband was not the only gainer by the separation.  Nikolai and Tschaikovski set up a menage together for a time.  Tschaikovski, however, had not learned that womankind was not his kind; so he flirted a little with the beautiful niece of one Tarnovski, for instance, and with an unknown at a masked ball.  But he was chiefly music-mad and undermined his health by his overwork.