g, that Pons used to say
that he had found his friend too late for his happiness. Never, perhaps,
did two souls, so much alike, find each other in the great ocean of
humanity which flowed forth, in disobedience to the will of God, from
its source in the Garden of Eden. Before very long the two musicians
could not live without each other. Confidences were exchanged, and in
a week's time they were like brothers. Schmucke (for that was his name)
had not believed that such a man as Pons existed, nor had Pons imagined
that a Schmucke was possible. Here already you have a sufficient
description of the good couple; but it is not every mind that takes
kindly to the concise synthetic method, and a certain amount of
demonstration is necessary if the credulous are to accept the
conclusion.

This pianist, like all other pianists, was a German. A German, like the
eminent Liszt and the great Mendelssohn, and Steibelt, and Dussek, and
Meyer, and Mozart, and Doelher, and Thalberg, and Dreschok, and Hiller,
and Leopold Hertz, Woertz, Karr, Wolff, Pixis, and Clara Wieck--and
all Germans, generally speaking. Schmucke was a great musical composer
doomed to remain a music master, so utterly did his character lack the
audacity which a musical genius needs if he is to push his way to the
front. A German's naivete does not invariably last him through his life;
in some cases it fails after a certain age; and even as a cultivator
of the soil brings water from afar by means of irrigation channels, so,
from the springs of his youth, does the Teuton draw the simplicity which
disarms suspicion--the perennial supplies with which he fertilizes his
labors in every field of science, art, or commerce. A crafty Frenchman
here and there will turn a Parisian tradesman's stupidity to good
account in the same way. But Schmucke had kept his child's simplicity
much as Pons continued to wear his relics of the Empire--all
unsuspectingly. The true and noble-hearted German was at once the
theatre and the audience, making music within himself for himself
alone. In this city of Paris he lived as a nightingale lives among the
thickets; and for twenty years he sang on, mateless, till he met with a
second self in Pons. [See _Une Fille d'Eve_.]

Both Pons and Schmucke were abundantly given, both by heart and
disposition, to the peculiarly German sentimentality which shows itself
alike in childlike ways--in a passion for flowers, in that form of
nature-worship which pro