humiliated his
own love, and greatly undermined the romance, which crumpled absolutely
when he learned that she was not the baron's own daughter, but only an
adopted child, and of an illegitimate birth at that. He had not learned
these facts from her; indeed she had practised elaborate deceptions
upon him. But the breaking of the engagement--a step almost as serious
as divorce in the Germany of that day--he seems to have conducted with
his characteristic gentleness and tact; for Ernestine did not cease to
be his friend and Clara's. Later, when he was accused of having severed
the ties with Ernestine, he wrote:

"You say something harsh, when you say that I broke the engagement with
Ernestine. That is not true; it was ended in proper form with both
sides agreeing. But concerning this whole black page of my life, I
might tell you a deep secret of a heavy psychic disturbance that had
befallen me earlier. It would take a long time, however, and it
includes the years from the summer of 1833 on. But you shall learn of
it sometime, and you will have the key to all my actions and my
peculiar manner."

That explanation, however, does not seem to be extant; all we can know
is that Ernestine and he parted as friends, and that six years later he
dedicated to her a volume of songs (Opus 13). Three years after the
separation she married, to become Frau von Zedtwitz; but her husband
did not live long, nor did she survive him many years.

Aside from the disillusionment that had taken the glamour from
Ernestine, Schumann had been slowly coming more and more under the
spell of Clara Wieck. The affair with Ernestine seemed to have been
only a transient modulation, and his heart like a sonata returned to
its home in the original key of "carissima Clara, Clara carissima."
Clara, who had found small satisfaction in her fame out-of-doors, since
she was defeated in her love in her home, had the joy of seeing the
gradual growth in Schumann's heart of a tenderness that kept increasing
almost to idolatry. Her increasing beauty was partly to blame for it,
but chiefly it was the nobility yet exuberant joy of her soul, and her
absolute sympathy with his ideals in music, criticism, literature, and
life.

To both of them, art was always a religion; there was no philistinism
or charlatanism in the soul or the career of either. At this time, when
Schumann found it difficult to get any attention paid to his
compositions, Clara, from childhood, was