Part 15

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.

We have now glanced at three distinct phases in the life of this protean spirit, three rôles successively assumed by him in his triumphal progress across the stage of European society. First there was the infant prodigy, the boy virtuoso, "_le petit Litz_," electrifying vast audiences by his piano playing, and after his concerts "making the round of the boxes." Then came the slender, romantic youth, Monsieur Liszt the piano teacher in the Paris of 1830, with his polished manners, his attractive irony, his devotion to his mother, and a thousand suspected gallantries to make him interesting to the ladies. And then--the third phase--Liszt without the Monsieur, Liszt of Weimar, the conductor and propagandist, the composer of symphonic poems, the prophet of "poetic" instrumental music, the patron and almoner of Wagner, the teacher to whom pupils flocked from all over the world. But now we come to a fourth phase, stranger, more seizing to the imagination (especially the feminine imagination) than any of the others: we behold the former man of the world seated in pious solitude in the monastery of Monte Mario, near Rome, his personable figure swathed in the long black robe of an ecclesiastical order, his ingratiating smile touched with a celestial joy, his thronging thoughts transferred from Paris to Paradise. Here he sits, in rapt devotion, for seven years. He has thrown aside the secular pen, and writes only masses and oratorios. He has become, in two words, the Abbé Liszt.

From his retirement, however, he again reappears in the arena of his early triumphs, in 1868; and from this time until his death in 1886, at one of those Bayreuth festivals which but for him could not have existed, we see him in a sort of apotheosis, making a triumphal progress each year from Rome to Weimar and from Weimar to Pesth, the beloved teacher, the admired composer, the revered abbé, the distinguished gentleman. Phase five, in which he is named simply "The Master," is thus a sort of composite and bright blending of all the other incarnations. Hear the description, by an eye-witness, of his appearance at this time:[41] "He is the most interesting and striking man imaginable, tall and slight, with deep-set eyes, shaggy eyebrows, and iron-gray hair. He wears a long abbé's coat, reaching nearly to his feet. His mouth turns up at the corners, which gives, when he smiles, a most crafty and Mephistophelean expression. His hands are very narrow, with long, slender fingers, which look as if they had twice as many joints as other people's. They are so flexible and supple that it makes you nervous to look at them. Anything like the polish of his manners I never saw. When he got up to leave his box, for instance, after his adieus to the ladies, he laid his hand on his heart and made his final bow, with a quiet courtliness which made you feel that no other way of bowing to a lady was right or proper. His variety of expression is wonderful. One moment his face will look dreamy, shadowy, tragic, the next insinuating, amiable, ironic, sarcastic. All Weimar adores him. When he goes out, every one greets him as if he were a king."

"All Weimar adores him,"--let us confess, for we can no longer blink the fact, that there is something nauseous about the atmosphere in which Liszt lived, and that we cannot acquit him of a liking for it. Does not every man choose, at least within certain limitations set by fate, his own environment? Was Liszt entirely indifferent to the attentions of the Polish countess who received him in a boudoir spread ankle-deep with rose leaves, or of the four celebrated beauties who had their portraits painted as Caryatides supporting his bust?[42] Was it the sleep of boredom, or of comfortable self-satisfaction, that swathed him on that occasion when he was "discovered sitting on a high platform surrounded by all sorts of pianos and harmoniums, and in full view of six or eight ladies, several of whom were busy fixing his striking features on canvas?"[43] Was it pure kindness to a young literary woman that prompted him to invite Janka Wohl to his house to partake of "_un répas très appétissant_," and to read aloud to him afterwards "_l'article biographique sur F. L. que nous avons commencé hier_"? If this same Janka Wohl, who by the way was one of those flattering friends from whom the proverb prays Heaven to preserve us, had said to Beethoven, or Schumann, or Brahms what she said to Liszt: "The others play pieces beautifully, but you always play the soul, the thoughts, and the sentiments of Liszt. You transport us into a world which will die with you, and of which we shall have nothing left but the paradise of recollection--a paradise out of which, as the poets say, we cannot be driven"--would these great self-forgetful artists have given her such an answer as Liszt's: "Come, come, it is you who are the poet, dear child; but perhaps there is some truth in what you say"? No, if the idealist in Liszt was often smothered and drugged into lethargy by this miasma of flattery, it was still within his power to seek a clearer, more inspiring air. And it was because he did not do so that there grew up beside the idealist in him that other ego of the poseur and charlatan; and it is his fault as well as his misfortune that posterity will see him, as a youth, posturing in Schaffer's studio, and, as an old man, laying his hand on the left lapel of his abbé's coat as he bows to the ladies in his box.

These grimaces and airs, thin masks as they are to the heart of the man, have unfortunately projected themselves over into his music, and what is more surprising, have imposed upon countless listeners, and even trained critics, who have somehow failed to discern their artificiality. They are traceable chiefly in the fundamental themes; for however skilfully a musician may master his technic, however much he may learn to make of his original ideas by a clever treatment, he cannot materially alter these ideas themselves, which are, so to speak, the instinctive thoughts of his mind; in them he stands revealed for what he finally and essentially is. Now, despite all the mental virtuosity with which Liszt develops his ideas, a virtuosity as astounding, and possibly as deceptive, as the physical virtuosity for which he is more famous, the ideas themselves are for the most part commonplace. They are not spontaneous expressions of his own feeling, but studied efforts to impress his audience. They strut and maunder before us just as "The Master" strutted and maundered, tossed his hair, fixed his eyes on heaven, threw his hands in air, crouched over the keys, smiled and almost wept, before his audience. They are written, not from the heart, but "to the gallery"; their magniloquence is rhetoric, their sparkle is of tinsel, their sentiment is sentimentality. Liszt does not alternate, like Beethoven, Schumann, Tschaïkowsky, or any composer who is profoundly in earnest, between manly force and feminine tenderness; he alternates between empty pomposity and equally empty mawkishness.