Music is the only one of the arts that can not be prost.i.tuted 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 G.o.d"s world, and all the men and women in it are His children.
For 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 pa.s.sing 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.
Often for six months they would not meet, he doing his work in his own way, she doing hers, but each ever conscious of the life and love of the other--feeding on the ideal--writing or not writing, but glorying in each other"s triumphs--lives linked first by the love of a third person, cemented by dire calamity, and then fused by a oneness of hope and aspiration.
Brahms" nature was too decidedly masculine, that is to say, one-sided, to exist without the love of woman; Clara Schumann, gentle, generous, motherly, plastic, needed Johannes no less than he needed her.
When Clara"s spirit pa.s.sed away, in May, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-six, Brahms attended her funeral at Frankfort. Hero that he was in body and spirit, the shock unnerved him. No rebound came--every bodily faculty seemed to have lost its buoyancy. The doctors tried to cheer him by telling him that he had no organic ailment, and that twenty years of life and work were before him. He knew better, and told them so. Men do not live any longer than they wish to. "Shall I live to see the anniversary of her death?" asked Brahms of the doctor in March, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-seven. "Oh, undoubtedly--you can live many years if you only will to," was the answer. Three weeks later--on April Third--Max Kalbrech telegraphed to Widmann, this message, "Brahms fell asleep early this morning."
SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT MUSICIANS,"
BEING VOLUME FOURTEEN OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD: EDITED AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, AND PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE IN EAST AURORA, ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, MCMXXII