But Liszt had by this time thought too much and too deeply ever to believe that the technical was the whole or even the most important part of an artist. He appreciates the value of Paganini and the place of technical virtuosity in art, but he writes: ‘The form should not sound, but the spirit speak! Then only does the virtuoso become the high priest of art, in whose mouth dead letters assume life and meaning, and whose lips reveal the secrets of art to the sons of men....’ Finally, note that, amid all this dogma and cocksureness, Liszt understood with true humility that he was not expressing ultimate truth, that he spoke for art in a transition stage, and was the artistic expression of a transitional culture. ‘You accuse me,’ he said to the poet Heine, ‘of being immature and unstable in my ideas, and as a proof you ennumerate the many causes which, according to you, I have embraced with ardor. But this accusation which you bring against me alone, shouldn’t it, in justice, be brought against the whole generation? Are we not unstable in our peculiar situation between a past which we reject and a future which we do not yet understand?’ Thus revolutionary Paris had made of Liszt a conscious instrument in the transition of music. For some ten years Liszt remained the concert pianist. His concert tours took him all over Europe, ‘like a wandering gypsy.’ He even dreamed of coming to America. In 1840 he went to Hungary and visited his birthplace. He rode in a coach, thus fulfilling, in the minds of the villagers, the prophecy of an old gypsy in his youth, that he should return ‘in a glass carriage.’ In his book, ‘The Gypsies and Their Music,’ he gives a highly colored and delightful account of how he was received by the gypsies, how he spent a night in their camp, how he was accompanied on his way by them and serenaded until he was out of sight. The trip made a lasting impression on his mind. He had heard once more the gypsy tunes which had so thrilled him in his earliest childhood, and the Hungarian Rhapsodies were the result. In 1833, in Paris, he was introduced to the Countess d’Agoult, and between the two there sprang up a violent attachment. They lived together for some ten years, concerning which Liszt’s biographer, Chantavoine, says bluntly, ‘the first was the happiest.’ They had three children, one of them the wife of the French statesman, Émile Ollivier, and another the wife of von Bülow and later of Richard Wagner. Eventually they separated.