ages.

She never married again, but devoted her long widowhood to his memory
personally as well as artistically. She edited his works and published
his letters in 1885, with a preface, saying that her desire was to make
him known for himself as well as he was loved and honoured in his
artistic importance. As she had written in 1871, "the purity of his
life, his noble aspirations, the excellence of his heart, can never be
fully known except through the communication of his family and
friends."

In return for her devotion he never made genius an excuse for
infidelity or selfishness. It seems actually and beautifully true, as
Reissman says, that "Schumann's devotions were as chaste and devout as
those of the soul of a pure woman."

Such a love, such a courtship, and such a wedlock as that of Robert and
Clara Schumann ennoble not only the art and history of music, but those
as well of humanity.

CHAPTER VII.

MUSICIANS AS LOVERS

"Et le cortege chantait quelque chose de triste des oh! et des
ah!"--ZOLA, _L'Assommoir_.

And now at the end of all this gossip, to see if it has served any
purpose, and if the multitude of experiences totals up into any
definite result:

Of course, as you were just going to say, he said, "If music be the
food of love." But then you must not fail to remember that in another
play he hedged by saying, "Much virtue in an 'if.'" For music is not
the food of love, any more than oatmeal or watermelons. And yet in a
sense, music is a love-food--in the sense I mean, that there is
love-nourishment in tubes of paint, which can perpetuate your beauty,
my fair readeress; or in ink-bottles all ebon with Portuguese sonnets
and erotic rondeaux; or in tubs of plaster of Paris, or in
bargain-counterfuls of dress goods to add the last word to a woman's
beauty. In such a sense, indeed, there is _materia amorofica_ in music,
for with music one can--or at least one did--show forth the very rhythm
of Tristanic desire, and another portrayed in unexpurgated harmonies
the garden-mood of Faust and Marguerite.

But as there are in those same tubes of oozy paint horrific visions
like Franz Stuck's "War," or portraits of plutocrats by Bonnat, and as
there are in ink-bottles sad potencies of tailors' bills and scathing
reviews of this very book, so it is possible under the name of music to
write fugues and five-finger exercises, and yet more settings of
"Hiawatha," or "_Du bist wie eine Blume_"

Now, t