Volume II Part 10 (2/2)

”If you were present, I would press your hand even without your father's leave Then I ht express a hope that the union of our naht foreshadow the union of our ideas in the future A poor fellow like myself cannot offer you o we drove to Schleusig, how sorry I am that I spoiled your pleasure on that occasion”

Of this last, we can only iine some too ardent compliment, or perhaps some subjection to one of his dense melancholies In the very midst of his short infatuation with Ernestine von Fricken, he is still corresponding with Clara Their tone is very cordial, and, knowing the sequel, it is hard not to read into them perhaps more than Schumann meant The letters could hardly have seemed to him to be love letters, since he writes to Clara that he has been considering the publication of their correspondence in his ”Zeitschrift,” though he was probably not serious at this, seeing that he also plans to fill a balloon with his unwritten thoughts and send it to her, ”properly addressed with a favourable wind”

”I long to catch butterflies to bemy letters posted in Paris, so as to arouse your curiosity and reat many quaint notions came to my head and have only just been dispersed by a postilion's horn; the fact is, dear Clara, that the postilion has ne”

Here is perhaps the secret ofhis ”fingers chase the pen, and the pen chase the ink” The aroma of the ink-bottle has run aith how many brains

He wants to send her ”perfect bales of letters,” he prefers to write her at the piano, especially in the chords of the ninth and the thirteenth He paints her a pleasant portrait of herself in a letter which, he says, is written like a little sonata, ”na part”

Clara seeht of her to exercise over hi amusement He portrays her vividly to herself in such words as these:

”Your letter was yourself all over You stood beforefro with your veil In short, the letter was Clara herself, her double”

All these expressions of tenderness and fascinations were ground enough for the child Clara to build Spanish hopes upon, but in the very same letter Schumann could refer to that torment of Clara's soul, Ernestine, and speak of her as ”your old coht star which we can never appreciate enough”

A change, however, seems to have come over Ernestine Clara found her taciturn and mistrustful, and when the Baron von Fricken came for her, Wieck himself wrote in the diary, ”We have not er in our house; she had lost completely her lovable and frank disposition” He compares her to a plant, which only prospers under attention, but withers and dies when left to itself He concludes, ”The sun shone too sharply upon her, _ie_, Herr Schumann”

But the sun see her absence, Ernestine wrote to Schumann many letters, chiefly rerammar To a man of the exquisite sensibility of Schumann, and one who took literature so earnestly, this must have been a constant torture It hureatly 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 hiement--a step almost as serious as divorce in the Germany of that day--he seeentleness 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 soement with Ernestine That is not true; it was ended in proper for this whole black page of ht tell you a deep secret of a heavy psychic disturbance that had befallentime, 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 volus (Opus 13) Three years after the separation she married, to beco, nor did she survive him many years

Aside frola 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 hoinal 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 horowth in Schu al 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 theion; there was no philistinism or charlatanism in the soul or the career of either At this tiet any attention paid to his compositions, Clara, from childhood, was able both to conquer their difficulties and to express their deepand a wide reputation by publishi+ng the praises of other coeniuses, and revealing their nored and uncootten At this tiirl of brilliant fa, by the public; and yet devoted to the soul and the art of the fellow pupil of her father Even before he broke his engagement with Ernestine, he found Clara's char in 1834, and in Schumann's diary after his name stands the entry: ”Clara's eyes and her love” And later, ”The first kiss in Nove on Clara, and when it caht hier from himself or from her; he declared his love then and there But she reminded him of Ernestine, and, with that trivial perjury to which lovers are always apt, he infored to some one else There was no further resistance, but nearly a serious accident The kiss that set their hearts afire ca the same effect upon the house As Clara wrote afterward:

”When you gave

Before ht you, I could hardly hold”

Schuebrochen” Schu that he did Ernestine no wrong, for it would have been a greater and more terrible misery had they married ”Earlier or later ain, and then what ht well that she had first driven you out of my heart, that I loved you before I knew Ernestine”

Ernestine herself wrote him often

”I always believed that you could love Clara alone, and still believe it”

In January, 1836, the engagement with Ernestine was formally broken

Shortly after this, Robert's loom He said to Clara simply, ”Bleib mir treu,” and she nodded her head a little, very sadly How she kept her word! Two nights later he wrote: