This pianist, like all other pianists, was a German.  A German, like the eminent Liszt and the great Mendelssohn, and Steibelt, and Dussek, and Meyer, and Mozart, and Doelher, and Thalberg, and Dreschok, and Hiller, and Leopold Hertz, Woertz, Karr, Wolff, Pixis, and Clara Wieck —­and all Germans, generally speaking.  Schmucke was a great musical composer doomed to remain a music master, so utterly did his character lack the audacity which a musical genius needs if he is to push his way to the front.  A German’s naivete does not invariably last him through his life; in some cases it fails after a certain age; and even as a cultivator of the soil brings water from afar by means of irrigation channels, so, from the springs of his youth, does the Teuton draw the simplicity which disarms suspicion—­the perennial supplies with which he fertilizes his labors in every field of science, art, or commerce.  A crafty Frenchman here and there will turn a Parisian tradesman’s stupidity to good account in the same way.  But Schmucke had kept his child’s simplicity much as Pons continued to wear his relics of the Empire—­all unsuspectingly.  The true and noble-hearted German was at once the theatre and the audience, making music within himself for himself alone.  In this city of Paris he lived as a nightingale lives among the thickets; and for twenty years he sang on, mateless, till he met with a second self in Pons. [See Une Fille d’Eve.]

Both Pons and Schmucke were abundantly given, both by heart and disposition, to the peculiarly German sentimentality which shows itself alike in childlike ways—­in a passion for flowers, in that form of nature-worship which prompts a German to plant his garden-beds with big glass globes for the sake of seeing miniature pictures of the view which he can behold about him of a natural size; in the inquiring turn of mind that sets a learned Teuton trudging three hundred miles in his gaiters in search of a fact which smiles up in his face from a wayside spring, or lurks laughing under the jessamine leaves in the back-yard; or (to take a final instance) in the German craving to endow every least detail in creation with a spiritual significance, a craving which produces sometimes Hoffmann’s tipsiness in type, sometimes the folios with which Germany hedges the simplest questions round about, lest haply any fool should fall into her intellectual excavations; and, indeed, if you fathom these abysses, you find nothing but a German at the bottom.

Both friends were Catholics.  They went to Mass and performed the duties of religion together; and, like children, found nothing to tell their confessors.  It was their firm belief that music is to feeling and thought as thought and feeling are to speech; and of their converse on this system there was no end.  Each made response to the other in orgies of sound, demonstrating their convictions, each for each, like lovers.