Never has Paris, the Mecca of European art, genius, and culture,
presented a more brilliant social spectacle than it did in 1832.
Hitherward came pilgrims from all countries, poets, painters, and
musicians, anxious to breathe the inspiring air of the French capital,
where society laid its warmest homage at the feet of the artist. Here
came, too, in dazzling crowds, the rich nobles and the beautiful women
of Europe to find the pleasure, the freedom, the joyous unrestraint,
with which Paris offers its banquet of sensuous and intellectual
delights to the hungry epicure. Then as now the queen of the
art-world, Paris absorbed and assimilated to herself the most
brilliant influences in civilisation.
In all of brilliant Paris there was no more charming and gifted circle
than that which gathered around the young Polish pianist and composer,
Chopin, then a recent arrival in the gay city. His peculiarly original
genius, his weird and poetic style of playing, which transported his
hearers into a mystic fairy-land of sunlight and shadow, his strangely
delicate beauty, the alternating reticence and enthusiasm of his
manners, made him the idol of the clever men and women, who courted
the society of the shy and sensitive musician; for to them he was a
fresh revelation. Dr. Franz Liszt gives the world some charming
pictures of this art-coterie, which was wont often to assemble at
Chopin's rooms in the Chaussée d'Antin.
His room, taken by surprise, is all in darkness except the luminous
ring thrown off by the candles on the piano, and the flashes
flickering from the fire-place. The guests gather around informally as
the piano sighs, moans, murmurs, or dreams under the fingers of the
player. Heinrich Heine, the most poetic of humorists, leans on the
instrument, and asks, as he listens to the music and watches the
firelight, "if the roses always glowed with a flame so triumphant? if
the trees at moonlight sang always so harmoniously?" Meyerbeer, one of
the musical giants, sits near at hand lost in reverie; for he forgets
his own great harmonies, forged with hammer of Cyclops, listening to
the dreamy passion and poetry woven into such quaint fabrics of sound.
Adolphe Nourrit, passionate and ascetic, with the spirit of some
mediæval monastic painter, an enthusiastic servant of art in its
purest, severest form, a combination of poet and anchorite, is also
there; for he loves the gentle musician, who seems to be a visitor
from the world of spirits. Eugène Delacroix, one of the greatest of
modern painters, his keen eyes half closed in meditation, absorbs the
vague mystery of colour which imagination translates from the harmony,
and attains new insight and inspiration through the bright links of
suggestion by which one art lends itself to another. The two great
Polish poets, Niemcewicz and Mickiewicz (the latter the Dante of the
Slavic race), exiles from their unhappy land, feed their sombre
sorrow, and find in the wild, Oriental rhythms of the player only
melancholy memories of the past. Perhaps Victor Hugo, Balzac,
Lamartine, or the aged Chateaubriand, also drop in by-and-by, to
recognise, in the music, echoes of the daring romanticism which they
opposed to the classic and formal pedantry of the time.
Buried in a fauteuil, with her arms resting upon a table, sits Mdme.
George Sand (that name so tragically mixed with Chopin's life),
"curiously attentive, gracefully subdued." With the second sight of
genius, which pierces through the mask, she saw the sweetness, the
passion, the delicate emotional sensibility of Chopin; and her
insatiate nature must unravel and assimilate this new study in human
enjoyment and suffering. She had then just finished "Lelia," that
strange and powerful creation, in which she embodied all her hatred of
the forms and tyrannies of society, her craving for an impossible
social ideal, her tempestuous hopes and desires, in such startling
types. Exhausted by the struggle, she panted for the rest and luxury
of a companionship in which both brain and heart could find sympathy.
She met Chopin, and she recognised in the poetry of his temperament
and the fire of his genius what she desired. Her personality,
electric, energetic, and imperious, exercised the power of a magnet on
the frail organisation of Chopin, and he loved once and forever, with
a passion that consumed him; for in Mdme. Sand he found the blessing
and curse of his life. This many-sided woman, at this point of her
development, found in the fragile Chopin one phase of her nature which
had never been expressed, and he was sacrificed to the demands of an
insatiable originality, which tried all things in turn, to be
contented with nothing but an ideal which could never be attained.
About the time of Chopin's arrival in Paris the political
effervescence of the recent revolution had passed into art and
letters. It was the oft-repeated battle of Romanticism against
Classicism. There could be no truce between those who believed that
everything must be fashioned after old models, that Procrustes must
settle the height and depth, the length and breadth of art-forms, and
those who, inspired with the new wine of liberty and free creative
thought, held that the rule of form should always be the mere
expression of the vital, flexible thought. The one side argued that
supreme perfection already reached left the artist hope only in
imitation; the other, that the immaterial beautiful could have no
fixed absolute form. Victor Hugo among the poets, Delacroix among the
painters, and Berlioz among the musicians, led the ranks of the
romantic school.
Chopin found himself strongly enlisted in this contest on the side of
the new school. His free, unconventional nature found in its teachings
a musical atmosphere true to the artistic and political proclivities
of his native Poland; for Chopin breathed the spirit and tendencies of
his people in every fibre of his soul, both as man and artist. Our
musician, however, in freeing himself from all servile formulas,
sternly repudiated the charlatanism which would replace old abuses
with new ones.
Chopin, in his views of his art, did not admit the least compromise
with those who failed earnestly to represent progress, nor, on the
other hand, with those who sought to make their art a mere profitable
trade. With him, as with all the great musicians, his art was a
religion--something so sacred that it must be approached with
unsullied heart and hand. This reverential feeling was shown in the
following touching fact:--It was a Polish custom to choose the
garments in which one would be buried. Chopin, though among the first
of contemporary artists, gave fewer concerts than any other; but,
notwithstanding this, he left directions to be borne to the grave in
the clothes he had worn on such occasions.