Meanwhile, however, the narrow selfishness of the father, Friedrich Wieck, was raising all sorts of obstacles to this union. His daughter being, by her playing in public, a source of financial gain to him, he steadily opposed a marriage, as unfavorable to his interests. He forbade the lovers to meet, circulated false and damaging stories of Schumann, and when the couple, goaded to despair by his insensate obstinacy, had resolved to take matters into their own hands, thwarted even so radical a step by pretending to yield, but imposing conditions that could not possibly be carried out. On the whole, considering his impulsive temperament, Schumann bore this persecution with admirable patience, though not without an occasional plaint. "Your father calls me phlegmatic? 'Carnaval' and phlegmatic! F-sharp minor Sonata and phlegmatic! Being in love with such a girl and phlegmatic! And you can listen calmly to all this? He says that I have written nothing in the _Journal_ for six weeks. In the first place, it is not true; secondly, even if it were, how does he know what other work I have been doing? Up to the present the _Journal_ has had about eighty sheets of my own ideas, not counting the rest of my editorial work, besides which, I have finished ten great compositions in two years, and they have cost me some heart's blood. To add to all this, I have given several hours' hard study every day to Bach and Beethoven, and to my own work, and conscientiously managed a large correspondence. I am a young man of twenty-eight, with a very active mind, and an artist to boot; yet for eight years I have not been out of Saxony, and have been sitting still, saving my money, without a thought of spending it on amusement or horses, and quietly going my own way, as usual. And do you mean to say that all my industry and simplicity, and all that I have done, is quite lost upon your father?"
But all these difficulties and disappointments, all these occasions for patience, tact, industry, loyalty, and self-control, painful as they were to experience, were slowly transforming the capricious and dreamy youth into a man of mature will and seasoned resourcefulness. "No man is any use," says Stevenson, "until he has dared everything." Some such conviction must have been in Schumann's mind when at last, early in 1840, he resolved to avail himself of the law of Saxony that when parents withhold their consent to a marriage without good reason, the consent of the courts may be substituted. For such a man, so public a step in so sacredly private a matter must have been doubly difficult; to decide upon it must have involved a long mental turmoil. But he did finally take his case to the courts, and eventually married Clara Wieck, with the sanction of the law, in September, 1840. With this manly and courageous action his youth may be said to have ended, and the responsibilities, anxieties, labors, and sober joys of his manhood to have commenced.