How did the Paris of 1830, and particularly the temper of Parisian life, affect Liszt? ‘Monsieur Mignet,’ he said, ‘teach me all of French literature.’ Here is a new thing in music--a musician who dares take all knowledge to be his province. He writes, about this time: ‘For two weeks my mind and my fingers have been working like two of the damned: Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are about me. I study them, meditate them, devour them furiously.’ He conceived a huge admiration for Hugo’s _Marion de Lorme_ and Schiller’s _Wilhelm Tell_. Be sure, too, that he was busy reading the artistic theories of the romanticists and translating them into musical terms. The revolution of 1830 had immediate concrete results in his music; he sketched a Revolutionary Symphony, part of which later became incorporated into his symphonic poem, _Heroïde Funèbre_. He made a brilliant arrangement of the _Marseillaise_ and wrote the first number of his ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ on the insurrection of the workmen at Lyon.
The early manifestations of modern socialistic theory were then in the making--in the cult of Saint-Simon--and Liszt was drawn to them. For many years it was supposed that he was actually a member of the order, though he later denied this. The Saint-Simonians had a concrete scheme of communistic society, and a sort of religious metaphysic. This latter, if not the former, impressed Liszt deeply, especially because of the place given to art as expressing the ideal toward which the people--the whole people--would strive. But a still stronger influence over Liszt was that of the revolutionary abbé, Lamennais. Lamennais was a devout Catholic, but, like many of the priesthood during the first revolution, he was also an ardent democrat. He took it as self-evident that religion was for all men, that God is no respecter of persons. He was pained by the rôle of the Catholic Church in the French Revolution--its continual siding with the ministers of despotism, its readiness to give its blessing and its huge moral influence to any reactionary government which would offer it material enrichment. He felt it was necessary--no less in the interest of the Church than in that of the people--that the Catholic Church should be the defender of democracy against reactionary princes. He was doing precisely what such men as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are trying to do in England to-day. His influence in Paris was great and he became the rallying point for the liberal party in the Church. Perhaps if his counsel had prevailed the Church would not have become in the people’s minds the enemy of all their liberties and would have retained its temporal possessions in the war for Italian unity forty years later. Liszt had always been a Catholic, and in his earlier youth had been prevented from taking holy orders only by his father’s express command. Now he found Lamennais’ philosophy meat to his soul, and Lamennais saw in him the great artist who was to exemplify to the world his philosophy of art. In 1834 Liszt published in the _Gazette Musicale de Paris_ an essay embodying his social philosophy of art.