Leipzig.—The Russian Tour.— Dresden.— Düsseldorf.—
Tour in Holland.—Attempt at Suicide.—Endenich.—
The Last Agony and the Deliverance

( 1840-56)

WE HAVE DWELT AT SOME LENGTH UPON SCHU-
mann's youth; we shall deal more briefly with his ma-
turity.The fact is that the most intensely interesting
part of Schumann's life, as regards its sentimental, in-
tellectual, and artistic development alike, was his early
manhood.There are some privileged individuals, such
as Goethe, who live each period of their long existence
to the full and are, as it were, a most magnificent in-
carnation of them all, representing with equal genius
the sum total of the experience of childhood, adoles-
cence, maturity, and old age.There are others who are
fully themselves during only one of these periods.
Schumann belonged to the latter class.He was the
very type of the adolescent, with all the vague, unfin-
ished, inchoate quality of that age, but also with all its
promise and all the boundless hopes which surround it,
as it were, with an ideal halo. As an artist, it is as the
creator of Carneval, the Phantasiestucke, the Novel-
letten, and the Phantasie, and of the Lieder of 1840,
that he appears to me most admirable; and similarly,
as a man, it is as the Davidsbundler, the spiritual child

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