Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [82]
And why does the dictionary of pain have so many alphabets, and that of delight and love so few pages? Only a tear, a pressing hand and a singing voice did the spirit of love and delight give us, and say: “Speak with these!”62
He wrote down words of Zacharias Werner, “Truly for us, when some try to make a sensation, it troubles us in a time like this, when everything in the world only crawls and sneaks.” Next to that entry Brahms wrote the names Liszt, Berlioz. (Later, maybe years later with history weighing on him, he struck out the names.)63 From Friedrich Schlegel he copied this verse,
Music is the art of love,
conceived in the depths of the soul
out of inflamed yearning
with the humility of holy compulsions.64
To his favored sages Brahms added new voices, completing his connection to the founders of musical Romanticism. There are long quotes from W. H. Wackenroder and from Herder, and a series of aphorisms from Schumann, among them:
“It has pleased, or it has not pleased,” people say. As if there were nothing better than to please people.
To send light into the depths of the human heart—that is the artist’s calling!65
At the same time, in his notebooks Brahms copied down ideas less lyrical, more caustic, in the form of misogynistic sermons. The longest is from Friedrich Sallet’s Contrasts and Paradoxes:
Perhaps a primary reason that women are so often shallow and senseless is exactly their superior talent for the external, which shows itself in their earliest childhood ability quickly and sharply to grasp and imitate things. One sees with what comical verisimilitude little girls play brides, wives, and mothers.… But it is a pity that most of them thereby let things go … [and] hardly trouble themselves over the core and deeper meaning of things.… Many grown women experience romance and carry it off with a convincing show of sincerity, but in fact it is nothing more than a reiteration of their children’s games … until in their imaginations it is as if they really felt passion … without their deeper being having the slightest conception of it. If however this superficial performance gets to be an accustomed game and a need, then it becomes coqueterie, and many a goodhearted woman in this way, little by little … becomes a treacherous harlot, without her even being aware of it.… A[n individual] woman may be worthy of admiration, but a group of women is worthy only of disdain and ridicule, something unpalatable to anyone with the least appetite for thought.66
Notations of that drift continue. A collection of German proverbs begun in the following year includes, “No dress is more becoming to a woman than silence.”67 Still later, in his copy of the Koran, Brahms carefully underlined passages chastening and reproving women. That hostility, bequeathed Brahms by German culture and distilled in Hamburg’s whorehouses, endured even as he idolized Clara Schumann, and persisted through his lifelong devotion to women who had talent and ideas and realized them forcefully, and whom he honored and supported. His relations with women would be the great paradox of Brahms’s life.
Beyond this paradox so dismal and inexplicable to a later time, his misogyny surely amounted to something else too: a refuge from women, especially a refuge from the feelings they aroused in him—the sexual, but also the tender and devoted. Degradation in erotic life. In Brahms’s instincts women were corrupted by the sins of the brothel and its dark carnality. To preserve himself, he had to escape. The only way he could salvage some women, some of the time, from the taint was to keep his hands off them. At least then, for him, they could be eternally chaste. Brahms had written Joachim, “I think I can no longer love an unmarried girl.” Thus, impasse: he would not sleep with a married one either. When lust called, there were always whores to whom lust belonged, and in return for their favors they demanded of him only a few talers.
Respectable women were the siren call of