It was in 1853 that his old enthusiasm for new composers broke forth in his ardent welcome to Brahms (who was then twenty years old), who became a devoted friend and was of much comfort to Frau Schumann after Schumann’s death.  This was not far off, but before life went, he must suffer a death in life.

Worst of all in that final disintegration of his great soul was the interest he took in the atrocious frauds of spiritualism.  He was even duped into believing in the cheap swindle of table-tipping.  The bliss of Robert Browning’s home was broken up in this same form, of all-encompassing credulity, only it was Mrs. Browning who was the spiritualist in this case and resisted Browning’s sanity in the matter.

Schumann fancied that he heard spirit voices rebuking and praising him, and he rose once in the night to write down a theme given him by the ghosts of Schubert and Mendelssohn, on which he afterward wrote variations which were never finished and were the last pathetic exercise of his magnificent mind.

He was also distracted by hearing one eternal note ringing in his ears—­the same horror that drove the composer Smetana mad, after he had embodied the nightmare in one of his compositions.  Clara herself in later life was long distressed by hearing a continual pattern of “sequences” in her head, and Bizet’s early death was a release from two notes that dinned his ears interminably.

Schumann’s eccentricities became a proverb.  Alice Mangold Diehl tells of meeting Robert and Clara, and finding him peevish and her a model of meekness and patience.  Poor Schumann realised his failings and his own danger, and often suggested retirement to an asylum.  But the idea was too ghastly to endure.

On February 27, 1854, after an especial attack of the bewilderment and helpless terror that thrilled him, he stole away unobserved, and leaped from a bridge into the Rhine.  He was saved by boatmen and taken home.  He recovered, but it was now thought best that he should be placed under restraint, and he passed his last two years in a private asylum, near Bonn.  Periods of complete sanity, when he received his friends and wrote to them, alternated with periods of absolute despair.  Under the weight of his affliction, his soul, like Giles Corey’s body in the Salem witchcraft times, was gradually crushed to death, and at the age of forty-six he died.  Clara, who had been away on a concert tour to earn much-needed funds, hastened back from London just in time to give him her own arms as his resting-place in his last agony.

After his funeral she and her children went to Berlin to live with her mother.  She found it necessary to travel as a performer and to teach until 1882, when her health forbade her touring longer.  She had shown herself a woman worth fighting for, even as Schumann fought for her, and she had given him not only the greatest ambition and the greatest solace his life had known, but she had been also the perfect helpmeet to his art.