ROBERT SCHUMANN
From a painting by E. Bendemann
III
ROBERT SCHUMANN
In the year 1830, in the old German university town of Heidelberg, Robert Schumann, then a youth of twenty, a reluctant student of law, and a devoted lover of music, was making the most momentous decision of his life. For us, to whom his music is a fait accompli, it is easy enough to see the way his genius pointed; for him it was a time of self-searching, of beckoning hopes and haunting fears, of long hesitation before the final courageous adventure into an unknown land. "My whole life," he writes his mother, "has been a twenty years' struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so, Music and Law. Now I am standing at the crossroads, and am scared at the question 'Which way to choose.'" "Let me draw a parallel," he continues. "Art says: 'If you are industrious, you may reach the goal in three years.' Jurisprudence says: 'In three years you may perhaps be an "Accessist," earning sixteen groschen a year.' Art continues: 'I am as free as air; the whole world is open to me.' Jurisprudence shrugs her shoulders, and says: 'I am nothing but red tape, from the clerk to the judge, and always go about spick-and-span, and hat in hand.' Art goes on to say: 'Beauty and I dwell together, and my whole world and all my creations are in the heart of man. I am infinite and untrammelled, and my works are immortal.' Jurisprudence says, with a frown: 'I can offer you nothing but bumpkins and lawsuits, or at the utmost a murder, but that is an unusual excitement. I cannot edit new Pandects.' My beloved mother, I can but faintly indicate the thoughts which are surging through my brain. I wish you were with me now, and could look into my heart. You would say: 'Start on your new career with courage, industry, and confidence, and you cannot fail.'"[3]
Certainly there was little enough in the legal profession to attract a youth such as these early letters reveal, ardent, imaginative, romantically intolerant of the humdrum and the prosaic. From the first we see him, in this clear mirror of his own words, marked for a life of artistic expression and free creation. He has all the artist's susceptibility to impressions, both sensuous and intellectual, as we gather from his rhapsodies over the landscapes, peasant maidens, and wines of the Rhine Valley, and from his interest in the individualities of his travelling companions. He is a creature of moods, plunged in a day from heights of joy into abysses of melancholy. He is impetuous, generous, and volatile in his boyish friendships and love affairs; an affectionate but inconsiderate son, an ardent but desultory worker, a voluminous but irregular correspondent, irresponsible in money matters, impatient of social usages, inconstant in almost everything but his devotion to beauty. The idol of his boyish hero worship is Jean Paul Richter, that curiously German compound of sentimentality, mysticism, and wayward humor; he wishes that all mankind might read Richter and become "better and more unhappy;" and he often favors his mother with Jean-Paulish apothegms, reflections, and fantasies, in which platitude and sincerity are mixed as only enthusiastic boyhood can mix them. Byron, Heine, and the other romantic poets of the day he reads, too, with avidity, and imitates them in erotic ballads and plays about picturesque robbers. And all along, music is the language of his deepest moods, and he spends hours communing with his piano in rhapsodic improvisation, and devotes his leisure to composing musical character-sketches of his friends.
By such a youth the choice between law and music could hardly be decided but in one way. He persuaded his mother and his guardian to allow him six months in Leipsic, under the teaching of Friedrich Wieck, to show what he could make of himself as a pianist. His letters during this period of the first steady labor he had known, when the reaction necessarily following the feverish weeks of decision plunged him into a dull and relaxed state, show the sterling side of his meteoric nature. They complete the picture of one of the most lovable of youths. "I just keep jogging on," he writes in May, 1831. "It is the fault of all vivid young minds that they aspire to too much at once; it only makes their work more complicated, and their spirit more restless.... If only I could do one thing well, instead of many things badly, as I have always done! Still, the principal thing for me to keep in mind is to lead a pure, steady, sober life. If I stick to that, my guardian angel will not desert me; he now sometimes almost possesses me for a little." A few months later he continues, more tranquilly: "If one has at last come to a conclusion, and is quiet and satisfied in one's own mind, the ideas of honor, glory, and immortality, of which one dreams, without doing anything toward their accomplishment, all resolve themselves into gentle rules, only to be learned from time, life, and experience. To bring to light anything great and calmly beautiful, one ought only to rob Time of one grain of sand at a time; the complete whole does not appear all at once, still less does it drop from the sky. It is only natural that there should be moments when we think we are going back, while in reality we are only hesitating in going on. If we let such moments pass, and then set to work again quickly and bravely, we shall get on all right."