This was possible because Liszt was a developed artistic nature, who did not fall in with the established scheme, was by everybody differently understood, differently loved, differently hated. We can distinguish three types of artists. The one is the rapid composer, whose new thoughts readily find their new suitable form. The second class is that of the artists of the will—great innovators, like Manet and Degas among the painters, who worked not so much by their visible productiveness, as by their personal influence, exerted from day to day; an influence which after their death seems almost inconceivable. The third consists of the compilers, classics in the historical sense, who form a synthesis of all the constituent parts, a unity of opposites, into which history continually diverges, a conjunction of all begun and severed paths, the complete culture of a time made living. Liszt belongs to none of these types; he belongs to the last two together. The union of the innovator and the classic forms his essence; and in understanding this lies the complete comprehension of him. He possessed a double power, which influenced the world as it did, because the world never saw the one half of his nature before the other.
Liszt the revolutionary cast his seed wide into the world. His system of patronage, founded on artistic feeling, not merely smoothed the way for Wagner and Berlioz, but assured to every suppliant the preservation of a modicum of self-respect and a modicum of hope. He pointed out to the modern musical development, in a kind of theoretical praxis peculiar to himself, the paths which led from the revolutionary principles of Berlioz to the popular musical realism of to-day. He scattered over both hemispheres the seeds of intimate personal instructions, of great and small disclosures; so that even now eternal gratitude to this most kind-hearted of all artists is felt over the world.
Title-page of Hofmeister’s Edition of Liszt’s Op. 1.
Liszt the compiler is a new Liszt. Here the revolutionary remained apart, and the new Liszt came forth, who rushed in undreamed-of splendour through real and imagined worlds. He gathers cultures, a princely collector, with the crown of rare desert upon his head. The world did not know that this same man could pass through times of quiet creation and thought. He is a man of the world of the highest savoir faire, a writer of bewitching elegance, a conqueror who makes nought of the boundaries of peoples, a king despising kings, a demigod as conductor of tumultuous musical festivals, and in his works, which seem to appear daily in countless, uncontrollable numbers, a classical combiner of that which is and that which has been. It was he who united composition and interpretation, music and poetry, romance and virtuosity, Olympian and Titan, Beethoven and Paganini. Everything that the piano had experienced, the mystic longings of the old counterpoint, the love of variation of Bird and Bull, the ornamentation of Couperin and Rameau, the sensuous delight in sound of Scarlatti, the absolute art of Bach, the charm and formal beauty of Mozart, the pain of Beethoven crying for release, the intellectual confessions of the unique triumvirate, Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin—the rays of all met in him. A true combiner, he did not jumble these cultures in a learned and academic fashion together in himself, but he developed their common medium, in which they could test their mutual effects, with ever new charms.
Liszt in his youth. Lithograph by Kriehuber.
The life of Liszt necessarily prepared him for this mighty combination. It is a co-ordination of cultures, each of which, singly experienced, might have sufficed for an ordinary mortal. He passed through six such lives in the various parts of his existence. As “petit Litz” he lived the life of a precocious much-loved child; then in Paris he penetrated to the depths of a romantic idealism, which drew closely together the men of that fruitful epoch; next, with the Comtesse d’Agoult he lived for five years the free and productive life of a wandering artist: then he experienced the glories of European renown as a virtuoso; next, he exerted himself in Weimar as the pioneer of the modern style; and finally, in Rome, Buda-Pest, and Weimar, he lived the peaceful life of a ruler, having attained the heights of worldly honour and equally those of that conquest of the world which found its symbol in his priestly robe. Lina Ramann had the courage to make three volumes of biography out of this unparalleled life, in which the unique material is spoilt by doubtful German and uncritical enthusiasm. Liszt is in her books not the subject but the hero of the tale; and the wickedness of women is the theme. The Comtesse d’Agoult receives the same measure as George Sand in Niecks’ “Life of Chopin.” It is remarkable, how in the archives which are arranged after the death of great men, so little is said of humanity and so much of abstract right. Is the moral order of the world so inexorable that even its fairest opponents must be docketed and ticketed in accordance with it?[133]