*

"Musicians?" said Wieck, "I raise them!"

And so he did. He proved the value of his theories by making great
performers of Maria and Clara, his daughters--two sisters more gifted in
a musical way have never been born. Germany excels in philosophy and
music--a seeming paradox. Music is supposed to be a compound of the
stuff that dreams are made of--hazy, misty, dim, intangible feelings set
to sounds--we close our eyes and they take us captive and carry us away
on the wings of melody. And so it may be true that music is born of
moonshine, and fragrant memories, and hopes too great for earth, and
loves unrealized; yet its expression is the most exacting of sciences. A
Great Musician has not only to be a poet and a dreamer, but he must also
be a mathematician, cold as chilled steel, and a philosopher who can
follow a reason to its lair and grapple it to the death. And that is why
Great Musicians are so rare, and that is also why, perhaps, there are no
great women composers. "Women of genius are men," said the De Goncourts.
A Great Musician is a paradox, a miracle, a multiple-sided man--stern,
firm, selfish, proud and unyielding; yet sensuous as the ether, tender
as a woman, innocent as a child, and as plastic as potters' clay. And
with most of them, let us frankly admit it, the hand of the Potter
shook. When people write about musicians, they seldom write moderately.
The man is either a selfish rogue or an angel of light--it all depends
upon your point of view. And the curious part is, both sides are right.

Wieck was very fond of his daughters, and like good housewives who are
proud of their biscuit, he apologized for them. "He never quite forgave
our mother because we were girls," said Clara once, to Kalkbrenner.
Wieck, the good man, was a philosopher, and he had a notion that the
blood of woman is thinner than that of man--that it contains more white
serum and fewer red corpuscles, and that Nature has designed the body of
a woman to nourish her offspring, but that man's energy goes to feed his
brain. Yet his girls were so much beyond average mortals that they would
set men a pace in spite of the handicap.

Fortunate it is for me that I do not have to act as the court of last
appeal on this genius business. The man who decides against woman will
forfeit his popularity, have his reputation ripped into carpet-rags, and
his good name worked up into crazy-quilts by a thousand Woman's Clubs.

But certain it is th