Part 7 (1/2)

The best treatment for tantrums is--nothing. The more you let a nervous, impressionable child alone, the better.

When the lad was fourteen years old, we find him setting type in his father's printery. He was working on a book called, ”The World's Celebrities,” and his share of the work dealt with Jean Paul Richter. He grew interested in the copy and stopped setting type and read ahead, as printers sometimes will. The more he read, the more he was fascinated.

He fell under the spell of Jean Paul the Only.

Jean Paul, inspired by Jean Jacques, was the inspirer of the whole brood of young writers of his time. To him they looked as to a Deliverer.

Jean Paul the Only! The largest, gentlest, most generous heart in all literature! The peculiar mark of Richter's style is a.n.a.logy and comparison; everything he saw reminded him of something else, and then he tells you of things of which both remind him. He leads and lures you on, and takes you far from home, but always brings you safely back. Yet comparison proves us false when we deal with Richter himself. He stands alone, like Adam's recollection of his fall, which according to Jean Paul was the one sweet, unforgetable thing in all the life of the First Citizen of his time.

Jean Paul seems to have combined in that mighty brain all feminine as well as masculine attributes. The soul in which the feminine does not mingle is ripe for wrong, strife and unreason. ”It was mother-love, carried one step further, that enabled the Savior to embrace a world,”

says Carlyle.

The sweep of tender emotion that murmurs and rustles through the writing of Jean Paul is like the echo of a lullaby heard in a dream. Perhaps it came from that long partners.h.i.+p when mother and son held the siege against poverty, and the kitchen-table served them as a writing-desk, and the patient old mother was his sole reviewer, critic, reader and public.

For shams, hypocrisy and pretense Jean Paul had a cyclone of sarcasm, and the blows he struck were such as only a son of Anak could give; but in his heart there was no hate. He could despise a man's bad habits and still love the man behind the veneer of folly. So his arms seem ever extended, welcoming the wanderer home.

Dear Jean Paul, big and homely, what an insight you had into the heart of things, and what a flying-machine your imagination was! Room for many pa.s.sengers? Yes, and children especially, for these you loved most of all, because you were ever only just a big overgrown boy yourself. You cried your eyes out before your hair grew white, and then a child or a woman led you about; and thus did you supply Victor Hugo a saying that can not die: ”To be blind and to be loved--what happier fate!”

Yes, Jean Paul used to cry at his work when he wrote well, and I do, too. I always know when I write particularly well, for at such times I mop furiously. However, I seldom mop.

Robert Schumann began to write little essays, and the essays were as near like Jean Paul's as he could make them. He read them to his mother, just as Jean Paul used to write for his mother and call her ”my Gentle Reader”--he had but one.

Robert's mother believed in her boy--what mother does not? But her love was not tempered by reason, and in it there was a sentimental flavor akin to the maudlin.

The father wanted the lad to take up his own business, as German fathers do, but the mother filled the lad's head with the thought that he was fit for something higher and better. She was not willing to let the seed ripen in Nature's way--she thought hothouse methods were an improvement.

Such a mother's ambition centers in her son. She wants him to do the thing she has never been able to do. She thirsts for honors, applause, publicity, and all those things that bring trouble and distress and make men old before their time.

So we find the boy at eighteen packed off to Heidelberg to study law, with no special preparation in knowledge of the world, of men or books.

But old father antic, the law, was not to his taste. Robert liked music and poetry better. His fine, sensitive, emotional spirit found its best exercise in music; and at the house of Professor Carus he used to sing with the professor's wife. This Professor Carus, by the way, is, I believe, directly related to our own Doctor Paul Carus, of whom all thinking people in America have reason to be proud. I am told that when a boy of eighteen or nineteen mingles his voice several evenings a week with that of a married lady aged, say, thirty-five, and they also play ”four hands” an hour or so a day, that the boy is apt to surprise the married lady by falling very much in love with her. Boys are quite given to this thing, anyway, of falling in love with women old enough to be their mothers--I don't know why it is. Sometimes I am rather inclined to commend the scheme, since it often brings good results. The fact that the woman's emotions are well tempered with a sort of maternal regard for her charge holds folly in check, dispels that tired feeling, promotes digestion, and stimulates the action of the ganglionic cells.

It was surely so in this instance, for Madame Carus taught the youth how to compose, and fired his mind to excel as a pianist. He wrote and dedicated small songs to her, and their relations.h.i.+p added cubits to the boy's stature.

From a boy he became a man at a bound. Just as one single April day, with its showers and suns.h.i.+ne, will transform the seemingly lifeless twigs into leafy branches, so did this young man's intellect ripen in the suns.h.i.+ne of love.

As for Professor Carus, he was too busy with his theorems and biological experiments to trouble himself about so trivial a matter as a youngster falling in love with his accomplished wife--here the Professor's good sense was shown.

Jean Paul Richter lighted his torch at the flame of Jean Jacques Rousseau. In a letter to Agnes Carus, Schumann has acknowledged his obligation to Richter, in a style that is truly Richteresque.

Says Robert:

Dear Lady:--I read from Jean Paul last night until I fell asleep and then I dreamed of you. It was at the torch of Jean Paul that I lighted my tallow dip, and now he is dead and these eyes shall never look into his, nor will his voice fall upon my ears. I cry salt tears to think that Jean Paul never knew you. If I could only have brought you two together and then looked upon you, realizing, as I would, that you had both come from High Olympus! Blissful are the days since I knew you, for you have brought within my range of vision new constellations, and into my soul has come the clear, white light of peace and truth. With you I am purified, freed from sin, and harmony fills my tired heart. Without you--why, really I have never dared think about it, for fear that reason would topple, and my mind forget its 'customed way--let's talk of music. * * *

Professor Carus kept his ear close to the ground for a higher call, and when the call came from Leipzig, he moved there with his family.

It was not many weeks before Robert was writing home, explaining that lawyers were men who get good people into trouble, and bad folks out; and as for himself he had decided to cut the business and fling himself into the arms of the Muse.

This letter brought his mother down upon him with tears and pleadings that he would not fail to redeem the Schumanns by becoming a Great Man.

Poetry was foolishness and all musicians were poor--there were a hundred of them in Zwickau who lived on rye-bread and wienerwurst.