Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/196

334 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS teen, grave, serious, often pre-occupied, already a little tired of praise, and exces- sively tired of being called " le petit Liszt." His vision began to take a wider sweep. The relation between art and religion exercised him. His mind was naturally devout. Thomas a Kempis was his constant companion. " Rejoice in nothing but a good deed ; " " Through labor to rest, through combat to victory ; " '• The glory which men give and take is transitory," these and like phrases were already deeply engraven on the fleshly tablets of his heart. Amid all his glow- ing triumphs he was developing a curious disinclination to appear in public ; he seemed to yearn for solitude and meditation. In 1827 he again hurried to England for a short time, but his father's sudden illness drove them to Boulogne, where, in his forty-seventh year, died Adam Liszt, leaving the young Franz for the first time in his life, at the early age of sixteen, unprotected and alone. Rousing himself from the bodily prostra- tion and torpor of grief into which he had been thrown by the death of his father, Franz, with admirable energy and that high sense of honor which always dis- tinguished him, began to set his house in order. He called in all his debts, sold his magnificent grand " Erard," and left Boulogne for Paris with a heavy heart and a light pocket, but not owing a sou. He sent for his mother, and for the next twelve years, 1 828-1 840, the two lived together, chiefly in Paris. There, as a child, he had been a nine days' won- der, but the solidity of his reputation was now destined to go hand in hand with his stormy and interrupted mental and moral development. Such a plant could not come to maturity all at once. No drawing-room or concert-room success sat- isfied a heart for which the world of human emotion seemed too small, and an intellect piercing with intuitive intelligence into the " clear-obscure " depths of religion and philosophy. But Franz was young, and Franz was poor, and his mother had to be sup- ported. She was his first care. Systematically, he labored to put by a sum which would assure her of a competency, and often with his tender genial smile he would remind her of his own childish words, " God will help me to repay you for all that you have done for me." Still he labored, often wofully against the grain. " Poverty," he writes, " that old mediator between man and evil, tore me from my solitude devoted to meditation, and placed me before a public on whom not only my own but my own mother's existence depended. Young and over-strained, I suffered painfully under the contact with external things which my vocation as a musician brought with it, and which wounded me all the more intensely that my heart at this time was filled entirely with the mystical feelings of love and religion." Of course the gifted young pianist's connection grew rapidly. He got his twenty francs a lesson at the best houses ; he was naturally a welcome guest, and from the first seemed to have the run of high Parisian society. His life was feverish, his activity irregular, his health far from strong ; but the vulgar tempta- tions of the gay capital seemed to have little attraction for his noble nature. His heart remained unspoiled. He was most generous to those who could not