This picture of a disillusion such as inevitably follows a "grande passion" of the romantic order, unpleasant as it is, helps us to a realization of one side of Liszt, his cynicism. An ironical bitterness such as often lay just below the saccharine smile of this finished man of the world is one of the most familiar by-products of sentimental romanticism, one which has been made historically famous by the case of Byron. It is the reaction of the enthusiast disappointed in unrealizable ideals, the dreary awakening from overfanciful dreams, the exaggerated contraction of a heart too long artificially expanded, the acidity produced by a diet all of sugar. It sounds unpleasantly enough in certain sayings of Liszt quoted by Janka Wohl: "Women do not believe in a passion which avoids notoriety." "Misunderstood women are generally women who have been too well understood." Madame Moscheles writes, in her reminiscences of Liszt: "His high-flying notions are made more interesting by all the arts of dialectics; but there is a good deal of satire in them, and that satire is like an ill-tuned chord in conversation. The sugared charm of his most excellent French cannot make some of his principles palatable to me."
Closely connected with this cynicism of Liszt is another marked trait of his character which at first sight seems to have little connection with it, but on careful scrutiny is seen to be but another form of reaction against the sentimental interpretation of life with its unsocial lawlessness and its self-defeating egotism. That strong leaning of Liszt's toward the extreme phases of Roman Catholicism, which made him even in boyhood a mystic and a devoted reader of Lamennais, Ballanche, and other ecclesiastical writers, which impelled him later to take orders, and which inspired the exclusively devotional works of his last years, what was it but the perverse impulse to escape from the world of a man whom the world has disappointed? Monasticism is in large part merely the romanticism of the disillusioned. Complete isolation from human pursuits and feelings is in essence quite as antisocial, quite as wilfully individual, as the excesses which carry an exhausted spirit to its threshold. Liszt's passion for religion, which has so often puzzled his critics, was in large degree only the longing for repose of a soul too long overwrought by the religion of passion.