ho is
incidentally the chief virtuoso of the world, dashes off a gorgeous
composition, and in the first warmth of enthusiasm plays it to his
companion. She, desirous of asserting her importance, listens to it
with that frame of mind which makes it easy to criticise any work of
art ever created--the desire to find fault. Benevolent and sincere as
her intentions may have been, the criticisms of this shallow and
musically untrained woman must have driven Liszt to desperation.

It is a rare musician that can tolerate the faintest disapproval of
even his poorest work, and frequently a critic lauds to the skies all
of the composer's works except one or two, and then, in order to give
his eulogy an appearance of discrimination and remove the taste of
unadulterated gush, inserts a mild implication that this one or these
two compositions are not the greatest works in existence--that unhappy
critic is practically sure to find that his eulogy has been accepted as
a mere matter of course, and his criticism bitterly resented as a
gratuitous and unwarranted assault upon beautiful creations which his
small skull and hickory-nut heart are unable to grasp.

Liszt was never especially philosophical under fault-finding, and to
have a fireside critic after him, nagging him day and night, must have
soured all the milk of human kindness in his heart. The comtesse was
stubborn in her views, and her artistic conferences with Liszt
degenerated into violent brawls. The young French poet, De Rocheaud,
"assisted," as the French say, at one of these combats between an
hysterical woman and a thin-skinned musician. The poet believed in
Muses and such things, using as an argument that beautiful fable which
Dante built on the most slender foundations.

"Think of Dante and Beatrice," exclaimed De Rocheaud. "Think how the
divine poet listened to her words as to revelations. Be thou Dante, and
she Beatrice." "Bah, Dante! bah, Beatrice!" cried Liszt, "the Dantes
create the Beatrices. The genuine die when they are eighteen years
old."

At length the gipsy spirit moved Liszt to make a long continental tour
to complete the depletions in his purse. He did not care to take the
comtesse and the children with him. With much difficulty he persuaded
her to go to Paris and live with his mother, since she was on bad terms
with her own family. Later he succeeded in reconciling the comtesse
with these, also. After the death of her mother, the comtesse inherited
a