6 SEPTEMBER 1957, Page 25

A Romantic Affair

IT is a truism that romantic love, loVe born all of a piece, not growing with knowledge but, in a single mystical-seeming moment, filling in all the gaps of two people's lives, and every difference and inconsistency, does not always, or even oftera, make for successful marriage. People who have experienced romantic love at its highest pitch tend to ignore the spadework of ordinary living ever after. 'We know,' they seem to be saying to the rest of the world; and, of course, in a way they do.

Liszt and Marie d'Agoult are a classic example of lovers of the sort. Each epitomised what the other might, spiritually and psychologically, have been looking for, so that their first meeting, seeming predestined, had an almost eerie fateful-