but no indictment can be
brought against music. It is the only one of the arts that is always
pure.

Brahms realized this and felt the dignity of his office, holding high
the standard; and yet he knew that the toilers in the fields were doing
a service to humanity, just as necessary as his own. And possibly this
is why he uncovered, walking with bared head. All is holy, all is
good--it is all God's world, and all the men and women in it are His
children.

* * * * *

For forty-two years Brahms was the devoted friend of Clara Schumann. She
was thirteen years his senior, yet their spirits were as children
together. From the first he was to her, "Johannes," and she was "Clara"
to him. A few of their letters have been published in the "Revue des
deux Mondes," and this woman, who was a great-grandmother, and had sixty
years before captured a world, then in her seventy-fifth year, wrote to
her "Dear Johannes" with all the gentle fervor of a girl of twenty,
congratulating him on some recent success. In reply he writes back to
his "Dear Clara" in gracious banter; mentions rheumatism in his legs as
an excuse for bad penmanship; hopes she is keeping up her practise;
tells of a "Steinway Grand" that some one has sent him, and regrets that
she does not come to try it "four hands," as he has failed utterly to
get out of it alone the melody that he knows is there.

Brahms never married--the bond between himself and Clara was too sacred
to allow another to sever or share it. And yet the relationship was so
high, so frank, so openly avowed, that no breath of scandal has ever
smirched it.

The purity and excellence of it all has been its own apology, as love
ever should be its own excuse for being.

For about three months every year these two friends dwelt near each
other. Together they worked, composed, sang, read, wrote and roamed the
woods. "None of Madame Schumann's children is as young as she is,"
wrote Doctor Hanslick, when Clara was sixty and Johannes was
forty-seven. "With the hope of passing for her father, Brahms is
cultivating a patriarchal beard," continues Hanslick.

In his essay on "Friendship," Emerson speaks of the folly of forcing our
personal presence on the friend we love best, and of the faith that
ideality brings. Something of this thought is shown in the letters of
Madame Schumann to Brahms, and in his to her.

Often for six months they would not meet, he doing his work in hi