Schumann’s music was not an easy music for the world to learn, and it is to Clara Wieck’s eternal honour, that she not only inspired Schumann to write this music, and gave him her support under the long discouragement of its neglect and the temptations to be untrue to his best ideals; but that she travelled through Europe and promulgated his art, until with her own power of intellect and persuasion she had coaxed and compelled the world to understand its right value, and his great messages.

She never married again, but devoted her long widowhood to his memory personally as well as artistically.  She edited his works and published his letters in 1885, with a preface, saying that her desire was to make him known for himself as well as he was loved and honoured in his artistic importance.  As she had written in 1871, “the purity of his life, his noble aspirations, the excellence of his heart, can never be fully known except through the communication of his family and friends.”

In return for her devotion he never made genius an excuse for infidelity or selfishness.  It seems actually and beautifully true, as Reissman says, that “Schumann’s devotions were as chaste and devout as those of the soul of a pure woman.”

Such a love, such a courtship, and such a wedlock as that of Robert and Clara Schumann ennoble not only the art and history of music, but those as well of humanity.

CHAPTER VII.

MUSICIANS AS LOVERS

“Et le cortege chantait quelque chose de triste des oh! et des ah!”—­ZOLA, L’Assommoir.

And now at the end of all this gossip, to see if it has served any purpose, and if the multitude of experiences totals up into any definite result: 

Of course, as you were just going to say, he said, “If music be the food of love.”  But then you must not fail to remember that in another play he hedged by saying, “Much virtue in an ‘if.’” For music is not the food of love, any more than oatmeal or watermelons.  And yet in a sense, music is a love-food—­in the sense I mean, that there is love-nourishment in tubes of paint, which can perpetuate your beauty, my fair readeress; or in ink-bottles all ebon with Portuguese sonnets and erotic rondeaux; or in tubs of plaster of Paris, or in bargain-counterfuls of dress goods to add the last word to a woman’s beauty.  In such a sense, indeed, there is materia amorofica in music, for with music one can—­or at least one did—­show forth the very rhythm of Tristanic desire, and another portrayed in unexpurgated harmonies the garden-mood of Faust and Marguerite.

But as there are in those same tubes of oozy paint horrific visions like Franz Stuck’s “War,” or portraits of plutocrats by Bonnat, and as there are in ink-bottles sad potencies of tailors’ bills and scathing reviews of this very book, so it is possible under the name of music to write fugues and five-finger exercises, and yet more settings of “Hiawatha,” or “Du bist wie eine Blume”