The young pianist now settled with his mother in Paris, where eight quiet years of piano teaching succeeded the excitement of his adventurous boyhood. His conduct at this crisis illustrates that keen sense of honor which was so agreeable a trait in his character. Considering that the money he had accumulated by his many successful concerts was rightfully his mother's, because of all the sacrifices she had made to his career, he made it over to her in a lump sum, and took up teaching for his own livelihood. It was an act of delicate justice, freely and cheerfully performed. Outwardly Liszt's life now became quite simple and laborious, almost plodding; but inwardly it was developing apace, and ramifying in many directions, under the provocations of this brilliant and complex Paris.
The Paris of 1830 was indeed a surrounding well fitted to encourage the most varied growth in the character of a young man so sensitive to influences, so complex in mental and moral constitution, as Liszt. There was, on the purely musical side, the powerful irritant of a public languid and frivolous, devoted to the showy tinsel of Kalkbrenner, Herz, Pixis, and Pleyel, and so indifferent to real music that Liszt had to coat the pill of a Beethoven Concerto with sugary ornamentation to make it go down. Such a public was a good stolid quarry for the marksmanship of an enthusiastic artist. In general intellectual life there was, on the other hand, a brisk fermentation highly exciting to Liszt's active mind. Paris was a seething pot of ideas, theories, heresies, aspirations, scepticisms, individualities. "Here is a whole fortnight," he writes in 1832, "that my mind and fingers have been working like two lost spirits—Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Châteaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber, are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this I practise four to five hours of exercises.... Ah, provided I don't go mad, you will find an artist in me!"[39] Above all, there was in the French romanticism of 1830 an emotional delirium, a fever of the sentiments, which profoundly affected the high-strung young musician.
French literary romanticism was in essence an extension into the intellectual world of those principles which had received so striking a political embodiment in the French Revolution of 1789. About a generation was required for these principles to propagate themselves from the realm of practice into that of theory; in the Revolution they appeared as crude instincts; romanticism refined and systematized them into self-conscious doctrines. The revolutionary mob murdered the aristocrats who oppressed them; the romanticists proclaimed the effeteness of all arbitrary rules and all traditional ordinances, whether in life or in art. The revolutionists cried, in effect, "Each man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost"; the romanticists asserted, more politely but in as anarchic a spirit, "The individual alone is sacred; his development is of greater import than the welfare of society." And if romanticism had its analogue for the "Liberty" of the famous formula in its emancipation from traditional law, and its own version of the "Equality" as the "sacredness of the individual," it also had its equivalent for "Fraternity" in that somewhat hectic sentiment which usually proved too vaporous to bear the stress of an actual human situation. Both movements, too, were passionate exaggerations; they overshot their mark, and have had to be limited, qualified, and restrained by the saner sense of later generations.
If romanticism had everywhere this general character of revolt against authority, assertion of the individual, and deification of the sentiments, it is notable that while in England it applied its theories chiefly to political and religious life, and in Germany to metaphysical realms, in France it concentrated itself largely upon the relations of the sexes. In such typical romantic documents as Châteaubriand's "René" and George Sand's "Leone Leoni," the traditional bugaboo is marriage (especially the mariage de convenance, which indeed was a fair mark for reformers), the extolled individualism takes the form of free love, and the sentiments deified are the thrills of the amorous heart. The results of the over-enthusiastic application of these romantic ideas to so complex a matter as sexual relations are sometimes bewildering, sometimes absurd, sometimes pathetic. George Sand's utterances on love and friendship, for example, often leave one uncertain whether to laugh or to cry, so generous is her primary impulse, so sophistical and topsy-turvy are the conclusions to which it opens the way. When she writes, "The greater the crime, so much the more genuine the love it accomplishes," our anger at the sophism quickly gives place to pity for the sophist. When we learn that her ideal of friendship between a man and a woman, or, as she called it, camaraderie, involved "unlimited confidential conversations," we know not which to doubt, her insight or her good faith. And in all this she is typical of her age and school, which made a fetich of the "demoniac power of love," and pursued liaisons with a fervor that can only be called religious.
The effect of such doctrines as these on a young man like Liszt may readily be imagined. Too keen-minded to be really deceived by the current fallacies, but at the same time not austere or independent enough to reject what was so universally accepted, he let himself go with the current, and half-blindly, half-ironically, played the game he saw others playing. Almost before he knew it he found that he had staked nothing less than his honor, and that this game, begun in a mood of dalliance, must be played through in sober earnest. The heroine of his love affair was the Countess d'Agoult, better known by her literary pseudonym of Daniel Stern, a woman of great beauty and fascination, but apparently consumed by vanity and a thirst for power. In 1834, when her connection with the idolized young musician began, she was twenty-eight years old, had been married for six years to the Count d'Agoult, and had had three children. In the following spring, Liszt tried in vain to bring the affair to an end; finding this impossible, he accepted the situation with the best grace he could summon, and entered upon a period of travel with the countess which lasted a decade. Three children resulted from this union, Daniel, Blandine, and Cosima, who became the wife of Von Bülow, and later of Wagner.
It is difficult to arrive at a just conception of Liszt's behavior in this relation, so conflicting are the available accounts of it. The biography by Ramann, for example, states that he offered marriage, which the lady indignantly refused on the score of his inferiority in rank. Janka Wohl, in her "Reminiscences," on the contrary, quotes Liszt's emphatic denial that he ever offered marriage. Again, the very zeal with which his admirers depict the Countess as hurling herself upon him, tend to arouse the suspicion of a judicious reader. One thing is certain, the uncongeniality of the pair was fundamental and cumulative. Liszt himself testifies to this in no uncertain way, and, one may add, with more sarcastic animus than is quite to his credit. He reports a conversation in which she expressed a desire to be his inspirer in art, a desire which he attributes to her vanity. "She wished to be my Beatrice," he says; and continues: "But I told her: 'You are wrong. It is the Dantes who create the Beatrices, and the real Beatrices die at the age of eighteen—that is all.' Louis de Ronchaud was present at the time. 'There's the man,' said I, 'who would have pleased you.'" This was ungallant almost to the verge of brutality. That verge was overpassed when Liszt, to a request for suggestions as to the title of some souvenirs the countess had been writing, proposed "Swagger and Lies." He always spoke of the countess, says Janka Wohl, with irony.
This picture of a disillusion such as inevitably follows a "grande passion" of the romantic order, unpleasant as it is, helps us to a realization of one side of Liszt, his cynicism. An ironical bitterness such as often lay just below the saccharine smile of this finished man of the world is one of the most familiar by-products of sentimental romanticism, one which has been made historically famous by the case of Byron. It is the reaction of the enthusiast disappointed in unrealizable ideals, the dreary awakening from overfanciful dreams, the exaggerated contraction of a heart too long artificially expanded, the acidity produced by a diet all of sugar. It sounds unpleasantly enough in certain sayings of Liszt quoted by Janka Wohl: "Women do not believe in a passion which avoids notoriety." "Misunderstood women are generally women who have been too well understood." Madame Moscheles writes, in her reminiscences of Liszt: "His high-flying notions are made more interesting by all the arts of dialectics; but there is a good deal of satire in them, and that satire is like an ill-tuned chord in conversation. The sugared charm of his most excellent French cannot make some of his principles palatable to me."
Closely connected with this cynicism of Liszt is another marked trait of his character which at first sight seems to have little connection with it, but on careful scrutiny is seen to be but another form of reaction against the sentimental interpretation of life with its unsocial lawlessness and its self-defeating egotism. That strong leaning of Liszt's toward the extreme phases of Roman Catholicism, which made him even in boyhood a mystic and a devoted reader of Lamennais, Ballanche, and other ecclesiastical writers, which impelled him later to take orders, and which inspired the exclusively devotional works of his last years, what was it but the perverse impulse to escape from the world of a man whom the world has disappointed? Monasticism is in large part merely the romanticism of the disillusioned. Complete isolation from human pursuits and feelings is in essence quite as antisocial, quite as wilfully individual, as the excesses which carry an exhausted spirit to its threshold. Liszt's passion for religion, which has so often puzzled his critics, was in large degree only the longing for repose of a soul too long overwrought by the religion of passion.
It is one of the curiosities of the psychology of temperament that this new mood of Liszt's, the mood of mystical passion, found its aspirations crystallizing, no less than those of the earlier worldly passion had done, in a woman. If paganism had for a time summed itself for him in the person of the Countess d'Agoult, the monastic Christianity to which he now reacted found its avatar and priestess in the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, a remarkable woman with whom he lived in intimate but what are called platonic relations from 1847 on. The daughter of a Polish nobleman, and the wife of a Russian field marshal of erratic character whom, after thrice refusing, she married without love at seventeen, she had suffered much, and like many other sufferers had found her consolation in religion. The story of her relation with Liszt is a pathetic one. She deserted her husband to follow him to Weimar, where he settled as a conductor and composer in 1847, after his many years of wandering as a virtuoso; for thirteen years she was his secretary, friend, and adviser; in 1860 she succeeded in getting a divorce from her husband, whose infidelities were notorious, only to have it retracted at the last moment by the Pope. Her spirit was so broken by this cruel freak of fate that, although Prince Wittgenstein died four years later, she never married Liszt. She died in Rome in 1887, only six weeks after Liszt, leaving in manuscript a treatise in twenty-four volumes entitled "Des Causes Intérieures de la Faiblesse Extérieure de l'Église," with directions that it should not be printed for twenty-five years. The subject is one on which she may well have written with passion; but it is sad to think of this woman consoling herself, by twenty-four volumes of literary discussion, for a vital tragedy.
During the fourteen years that Liszt spent in Weimar as Music-Director to the Grand Duke, he accomplished an extraordinary amount of work, in musical and literary composition, in teaching, and in making propaganda for struggling composers by performing their works. His cordial interest in other artists, perhaps the finest trait of his character, was at this time most strikingly evinced. His baton, his pen, and his powerful personal influence were constantly employed in the service of young musicians of merit striving to make themselves known. His efforts in Wagner's behalf, especially, have become famous. By his performance of "Lohengrin" at Weimar in 1850, by his articles on four of the music-dramas, and by his financial aid to the struggling composer during many years, he did more than any other one man to secure this uncompromising genius a foothold in the world. Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Raff, Franck, Saint-Saëns, and a host of less gifted men also owed much to Liszt; and his leaving Weimar was the indirect result of his zealous championship of an unpopular opera by his friend Peter Cornelius. It is true that even this benevolence was not quite unalloyed by his besetting egotism. In our mental image of Liszt dispensing his artistic charity there is always a trace of that bland smile of the professional philanthropist. Saint-Saëns suggests that Liszt contemplated, in his relations with Wagner, a sort of alliance of two men of genius, in which Wagner should represent the hero of music-drama, and himself the hero of instrumental music. His rupture with Brahms, who did not appreciate his piano sonata,[40] suggests an inability to forget the first person, excusable perhaps in one so long used to constant adulation, but still not to be neglected in a delineation of his character. Tschaïkowsky's testimony on the point is very blunt. "Liszt, the old Jesuit," he writes in a letter, "speaks in terms of exaggerated praise of every work which is submitted to his inspection. He is at heart a good man, one of the very few great artists who has never known envy; but he is too much of a Jesuit to be frank and sincere." And again: "Liszt was a good fellow, and ready to respond to every one who paid court to him. But as I never toadied to him, or any other celebrity, we never got into correspondence." But if the great man had thus his petty vanities, if he liked to take a toll of self-satisfaction, so to speak, out of the gifts he so lavished upon others, this human weakness did not, happily, destroy the efficacy of his many services to music.