He was deeply religious—although he never knew it. All music is a hymn of praise, a song of thanksgiving, a chant of faith. Music is a making manifest to our dull ears the divine harmony of the universe, and thus all music is sacred music, and all true musicians are priests, for by their ministrations we are made to realize our Oneness with the Whole. Through music we read the Universal.
Music is the only one of the arts that can not be prostituted to a base use. We hear of bad books, of the "Index Expurgatorius," and in every State there are laws against the publication of immoral books and indecent pictures. We also hear of orders issued by the courts requiring certain statues to be removed or veiled, but no indictment can be brought against music. It is the only one of the arts that is always pure.
Brahms realized this and felt the dignity of his office, holding high the standard; and yet he knew that the toilers in the fields were doing a service to humanity, just as necessary as his own. And possibly this is why he uncovered, walking with bared head. All is holy, all is good—it is all God's world, and all the men and women in it are His children.
or forty-two years Brahms was the devoted friend of Clara Schumann. She was thirteen years his senior, yet their spirits were as children together. From the first he was to her, "Johannes," and she was "Clara" to him. A few of their letters have been published in the "Revue des deux Mondes," and this woman, who was a great-grandmother, and had sixty years before captured a world, then in her seventy-fifth year, wrote to her "Dear Johannes" with all the gentle fervor of a girl of twenty, congratulating him on some recent success. In reply he writes back to his "Dear Clara" in gracious banter; mentions rheumatism in his legs as an excuse for bad penmanship; hopes she is keeping up her practise; tells of a "Steinway Grand" that some one has sent him, and regrets that she does not come to try it "four hands," as he has failed utterly to get out of it alone the melody that he knows is there.
Brahms never married—the bond between himself and Clara was too sacred to allow another to sever or share it. And yet the relationship was so high, so frank, so openly avowed, that no breath of scandal has ever smirched it.
The purity and excellence of it all has been its own apology, as love ever should be its own excuse for being.
For about three months every year these two friends dwelt near each other. Together they worked, composed, sang, read, wrote and roamed the woods. "None of Madame Schumann's children is as young as she is," wrote Doctor Hanslick, when Clara was sixty and Johannes was forty-seven. "With the hope of passing for her father, Brahms is cultivating a patriarchal beard," continues Hanslick.
In his essay on "Friendship," Emerson speaks of the folly of forcing our personal presence on the friend we love best, and of the faith that ideality brings. Something of this thought is shown in the letters of Madame Schumann to Brahms, and in his to her.