We have now glanced at three distinct phases in the life of this protean spirit, three rôles successively assumed by him in his triumphal progress across the stage of European society. First there was the infant prodigy, the boy virtuoso, "_le petit Litz_," electrifying vast audiences by his piano playing, and after his concerts "making the round of the boxes." Then came the slender, romantic youth, Monsieur Liszt the piano teacher in the Paris of 1830, with his polished manners, his attractive irony, his devotion to his mother, and a thousand suspected gallantries to make him interesting to the ladies. And then--the third phase--Liszt without the Monsieur, Liszt of Weimar, the conductor and propagandist, the composer of symphonic poems, the prophet of "poetic" instrumental music, the patron and almoner of Wagner, the teacher to whom pupils flocked from all over the world. But now we come to a fourth phase, stranger, more seizing to the imagination (especially the feminine imagination) than any of the others: we behold the former man of the world seated in pious solitude in the monastery of Monte Mario, near Rome, his personable figure swathed in the long black robe of an ecclesiastical order, his ingratiating smile touched with a celestial joy, his thronging thoughts transferred from Paris to Paradise. Here he sits, in rapt devotion, for seven years. He has thrown aside the secular pen, and writes only masses and oratorios. He has become, in two words, the Abbé Liszt.
From his retirement, however, he again reappears in the arena of his early triumphs, in 1868; and from this time until his death in 1886, at one of those Bayreuth festivals which but for him could not have existed, we see him in a sort of apotheosis, making a triumphal progress each year from Rome to Weimar and from Weimar to Pesth, the beloved teacher, the admired composer, the revered abbé, the distinguished gentleman. Phase five, in which he is named simply "The Master," is thus a sort of composite and bright blending of all the other incarnations. Hear the description, by an eye-witness, of his appearance at this time:[41] "He is the most interesting and striking man imaginable, tall and slight, with deep-set eyes, shaggy eyebrows, and iron-gray hair. He wears a long abbé's coat, reaching nearly to his feet. His mouth turns up at the corners, which gives, when he smiles, a most crafty and Mephistophelean expression. His hands are very narrow, with long, slender fingers, which look as if they had twice as many joints as other people's. They are so flexible and supple that it makes you nervous to look at them. Anything like the polish of his manners I never saw. When he got up to leave his box, for instance, after his adieus to the ladies, he laid his hand on his heart and made his final bow, with a quiet courtliness which made you feel that no other way of bowing to a lady was right or proper. His variety of expression is wonderful. One moment his face will look dreamy, shadowy, tragic, the next insinuating, amiable, ironic, sarcastic. All Weimar adores him. When he goes out, every one greets him as if he were a king."