crabbed style of the great
learned musical school of the Bachs, which may almost be called the
algebra or geometry of musical composition, at any rate its higher
mathematics, had certainly challenged a spirit of the most daring
contrast in the young Hungarian prodigy, who electrified Paris, and
carried its severe body of classical critics by storm, with the
triumphant audacity of his brilliant and powerful style. Liszt
became, at the very opening of his career, so immediately a miracle,
and then an oracle, in the artistic and the great world of Paris
that he was allowed to impose his own terms upon its judgment; and
suffering himself the worst consequences of that order of success,
he achieved too early a fame for his permanent reputation. A want of
sobriety, a fantastical seeking after strange effects--in short, the
characteristics of artistic _charlatanerie_--mixed themselves up
with all that he did, and, as is inevitably the case, deteriorated
the fine original gifts of his genius. When I first heard him, he
had already reached the furthest limit of his powers, because they
were exerted in a mistaken direction; and the exaggeration and false
taste which were covered by his marvellous facility and strength
gradually became more and more predominant in his performances, and
turned them almost into caricatures of the first wonderful specimens
of ability with which he had amazed the musical world.

He could not go on being forever more astonishing than he had ever
been before, and he paid the penalty of having made that his
principal aim. His execution and composition alike became by degrees
incoherent acrobatism, in which all that could call itself art was a
mere combination of extraordinary and all but grotesque
difficulties, devised for the sole purpose of overcoming them;
musical convulsions and contortions, that forever recalled Dr.
Johnson's epigram.

In the summer of 1842 Liszt was but on the edge of this descent; his
genius, his youth, his personal beauty, and the vivid charm of his
manner and conversation had made him the idol of society, as well as
of the artistic world, and he was then radiant with the fire of his
great natural gifts, and dazzling with the success that had crowned
them; he was a brilliant creature....

After this I never saw Liszt again until the sum