The life of Liszt necessarily prepared him for this mighty combination. It is a co-ordination of cultures, each of which, singly experienced, might have sufficed for an ordinary mortal. He passed through six such lives in the various parts of his existence. As “petit Litz” he lived the life of a precocious much-loved child; then in Paris he penetrated to the depths of a romantic idealism, which drew closely together the men of that fruitful epoch; next, with the Comtesse d’Agoult he lived for five years the free and productive life of a wandering artist: then he experienced the glories of European renown as a virtuoso; next, he exerted himself in Weimar as the pioneer of the modern style; and finally, in Rome, Buda-Pest, and Weimar, he lived the peaceful life of a ruler, having attained the heights of worldly honour and equally those of that conquest of the world which found its symbol in his priestly robe. Lina Ramann had the courage to make three volumes of biography out of this unparalleled life, in which the unique material is spoilt by doubtful German and uncritical enthusiasm. Liszt is in her books not the subject but the hero of the tale; and the wickedness of women is the theme. The Comtesse d’Agoult receives the same measure as George Sand in Niecks’ “Life of Chopin.” It is remarkable, how in the archives which are arranged after the death of great men, so little is said of humanity and so much of abstract right. Is the moral order of the world so inexorable that even its fairest opponents must be docketed and ticketed in accordance with it?[133] [Illustration: After Dantan’s Caricature of Thalberg.]