, before his marriage, learning of his financial troubles, she
had offered to pay him well for a composition. He had said he could not
conscientiously degrade his art for a price. So she paid his debts to
the extent of three thousand roubles. This he could accept. These
theories of art!

It was to her that he unburdened in his letters the wild scheme of his
marriage. It was to her that he poured out his soul in endless letters
not yet publishable entire. Their life apart seems to have been
continued to the end. During his last years, after a period of travel,
he lived almost a hermit, dying in 1893, only three years over fifty.
Whatever posterity may do with his music, he has left a life-story of
strange perplexities, in which apparent frenzies of effeminacy and
hysteria, of passionate terror and helplessness at self-control fall in
strange contrast with the temper of his music, which at its gentlest is
masculinely gentle and at its fiercest is virile to the point of the
barbaric.

I am haunted by the vision of that poor Antonina Ivanovna, helpless to
keep silence in her love, and winning her bridegroom only to find, like
Elsa, that her Lohengrin could not give her his Heart. And almost more
harrowing is the vision of the composer, with womanish generosity,
giving himself to the one that asked, and finding that love cannot
follow the mere placing of a wedding-ring. So he stands in the icy
river, and its gloom and cold are no more bitter than the despair in
his own mad heart. It is Abelard and Heloise without the love of
Abelard or the joy Heloise knew for a while at least.

CHAPTER IV.

THE HEART OF A VIOLINIST

"From this did Paganini comb the fierce
Electric sparks, or to tenuity
Pull forth the inmost wailing of the wire?--
No catgut could swoon out so much of soul!"

--_Browning, "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_."

Many people have based their idea of the moral status of musicians and
the moral effects of music upon a certain work by Tolstoi, who is no
more eminent as a crusader in the fields of real life and real fiction,
than he is incompetent as a critic of art. His novel, "The Kreutzer
Sonata," is musically a hopeless fallacy. And Tolstoi's claim, that
Beethoven must have written it under the inspiration of a too amorous
mood, is pretty well answered by the fact that Beethoven, who was so
liberal of his dedications to women, whenever they had inspired him,
dedicated this work to