One should note also the subtlety with which the regular three-beat meter is gradually resumed after the interregnum (c in the figure). Indeed, to do justice to the plastic beauty of this movement would require nothing less than a measure-by-measure analysis of its charmingly varied phraseology. To play it after the "Abegg Variations" is like passing from a schoolboy's singsong delivery of "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" to the reading of an ode of Shelley or a sonnet of Keats.
In our desire to comprehend how much Schumann gained by his study of Bach and other great masters of composition (such as his contemporary, Mendelssohn, for instance, whose perfection of form he vainly tried to emulate, possibly to the disadvantage of his own originality), we must not fail to note certain indications that his enthusiasm sometimes overleaped itself. A strong will like his easily falls, by the overuse or abuse of special artistic devices, into mannerisms; and he, with his fondness for sequences, inversions, canons, and other contrapuntal traits, did not escape this danger. So long as he used these tools with a certain romantic freedom and geniality, inspired by their spirit rather than enslaved by their letter, as he uses for example the canon in the andante of the piano quartet, the device of diminution in the development section of the first movement of the quintet, and the fugato in the finale of the same, they enriched and guided his fancy. But when he writes canonically throughout a whole movement, as in the scherzo of the D-minor Trio or the third movement of the F-major Trio, when he puts upon his genius the manacles of strict counterpoint, as in the Studies in Canon Form for Pedal Piano, opus 56, and in the Four Fugues, opus 72, above all when he indulges, as in the organ fugues on B-A-C-H, in those inversions and retrogressions of themes dear to the schoolmen, then learning becomes baneful, and music degenerates into a pedantic exercise.
A far more insidious and fatal blight than such occasional pedantry was now, however, beginning to overspread his music. The story of the long, gradual eclipse and final extinction some years before death, by the ravages of physical and mental disease, of a genius which had dawned so brightly and reached its meridian in such ample and yet tempered splendor, is one of the most pathetic chapters in the history of art. The exact nature of the disease was somewhat obscure, but the basis of it seems to have been a tendency, inherited from the mother, toward abnormal activity of the brain, and a resulting congestion, distention of the blood-vessels, and final ossification of cerebral tissue, carrying with it mental paralysis and degeneration. The trouble was no doubt aggravated by overwork and by the constant excitement of musical composition. A peculiar feature was its reaction on Schumann's spirits. Generally this sort of cerebral atrophy is attended by unreasoning high spirits, a baseless self-satisfaction uncanny to observe but merciful to the sufferer. But Schumann's native moral force and mental power were so great that he struggled with his fate as a lesser man would not have done; and the result of the unequal fight was a terrible melancholy, sinking sometimes into a blank lethargy of depression, and rising at other times into acute despair. It was in one of these frenzied moments that, in February, 1854, he attempted to drown himself in the Rhine. Rescued from suicide, he had for safety's sake to be put in an asylum, where after two years of merely vegetative existence, he died on July 29, 1856.
This deep-seated physical disability is responsible for the curious impotence of those compositions which he so restlessly produced all through the afflicted years. Such things as the violin sonata, opus 121, the "Introduction and Allegro Appassionata," opus 92, the Concert Allegro, opus 134, and the overtures "Julius Caesar," "Braut von Messina," and "Hermann und Dorothea," negligible from the artistic standpoint, are as human documents deeply pathetic. In them we see the crippled master in fruitless travail. The intention is always noble, the old fire flashes out now and then, the ideal of expression is the same as ever, but the path from will to act is clogged, the musical fancy is paralyzed; and all that results is page after dreary page of rigidly unchanging rhythms, stagnant harmonies, manufactured melodies, and climaxes that reach no goal. Particularly saddening is it to note the hysterical character of the emotional passages. In the overture to "Manfred," one of his immortal masterpieces, he showed once for all his marvellous power for impassioned expression. Alas! that in the fever of sickness he was goaded to parody his own immortal work in futile replicas that imitate its qualities only to trivialize them.
It is a relief to turn from the sorry spectacle of these galvanic twitchings of the once so virile intellect to the one happy episode that lightens this period of gloom. This was the coming of Brahms in 1853. In order to understand fully what the apparition of a youth of so pure and high a genius meant to Schumann, we must remember the depth and unselfishness of his love for art, the lifelong labors he had undertaken in order to purify public taste, the grim and often single-handed battle he had waged against Philistinism and mediocrity. Composition, the service of the gods of music at their inmost shrine, had been only one aspect of his life; the other side had been his literary and editorial labors, in which, like a true priest, he had gone forth to spread the faith among heretics and idolaters. The New Journal of Music, which he founded in 1834, had for its object, in his own words, "the elevation of German taste and intellect by German art, whether by pointing to the great models of old time, or by encouraging younger talents." "The musical situation," he wrote some years afterwards, "was not then very encouraging. On the stage Rossini reigned, at the pianoforte nothing was heard but Herz and Hünten; and yet but a few years had passed since Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert had lived amongst us. One day the thought awakened in a wild heart, 'Let us not look on idly; let us also lend our aid to progress, let us bring again the poetry of art to honor among men.'" The proposal thus made, in a spirit of altruistic devotion to art unhappily too rare among creative musicians, was faithfully carried out in a series of appreciative, generally discriminating, and always entertaining articles on such men as Mendelssohn, Gade, Bennett, Franz, Henselt, Heller, Berlioz, Liszt, Thalberg, and Moscheles, alternating with others of a more historical or general character, always wise, fair, suggestive, and pleasantly pointed with humor, wit, and the play of that irresponsible fancy which revelled in Jean Paul and created the Davidsbund.
One of the most touching features of the New Journal, to a reader of to-day, is the almost too generous kindliness of its judgments, the eager enthusiasm with which it proclaims the advent of geniuses who have already fallen into oblivion. Its editor proceeded so heartily on the principle that it is wiser to encourage the good than to discourage the bad that he often "discovered" nonentities only to have them left helpless on his hands. The experience must have been disappointing to the most sanguine. Seldom as he condemns, too, he must frequently have had the petty egotists swarming and buzzing about him, black flies and gnats in human form, such as will beset the stanchest crusader. To one engaged in so humane and disinterested a task, and pursuing it through such annoyances, the advent of a true genius like Brahms must have been the most joyful of events. Schumann at once recognized and welcomed it. When Brahms, then a tow-headed, high-voiced boy of twenty, arrived from Hamburg with a parcel of manuscripts, he gave him, in the famous article, "New Paths," the most royal greeting a neophyte has ever received from a brother musician. "He has come, the chosen youth, over whose cradle the Graces and the Heroes seem to have kept watch. May the Highest Genius help him onward! Meanwhile another genius—that of modesty—seems to dwell within him. His Comrades greet him at his first step in the world, where wounds may perhaps await him, but also the bay and the laurel." "It is a fitting reward," says Mr. Hadow, "that the voice which had so often been raised in commendation of lesser men should devote its last public utterance to the honor of Johannes Brahms."
Indeed, despite the struggles of his youth, the hardships and disappointments of his manhood, and the cruel affliction that maimed and killed him before his time, Schumann's destiny, look at it with but sufficient largeness, was a happy one. It is not given to men to attain their ideals; and in this respect, as in so many others, he was most human. His life, in its mere actualities, is, like all lives, a thing of incomplete beginnings, disappointed hopes, defeated or unrealized aspirations. But to look at the individual is to see but a partial, and therefore a distorted and misleading, picture. Only in his relations to others, in his service to the common good, in the seeds of social benefit which he plants and the ways of social progress which he discovers, is his true life to be found. If he has wrought faithfully, purely, single-mindedly, his work will suggest and imply more than it attains; and it will partake by virtue of this suggestion in all future attainment of the same kind. All Schumann's work tends in the direction of what is highest and most beautiful in music. Much he achieved, but much more he realized only as an ideal realizes that to which it points, and in some sense gives it solid reality in the world. Whenever and wherever men pursue what is pure, high, fresh, noble, and fair in music, there the spirit of Schumann will be at work.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] "Early Letters of Robert Schumann," trans. by M. Herbert, London, 1888, pp. 113, 118.