I
The measure of a man is the measure of his impress upon the world,
not solely and of necessity the world of his day, but, in fact, the
world of all days henceforth to be. Should we define that impress as
something outwardly apparent like his doing who delves in the mine, or
ploughs in the field, the statement is inadequate and even false. Our
world is a manifold condition wherein, as one ascends, things material
eventuate in things mental and things spiritual.
This globe, vast and teeming with life; this total of mundane
consciousness, is, in its imponderable aspect, subdivided into many and
diverse worlds, each wholly sphered, each sufficing for its adapted
dwellers.
What a variety of living! Behold the world of the Musician, bright
and beautiful as a loka of the Buddhist heaven! a flexible world
close-touching and almost blending with that of the Artist or the
Poet. Behold the world of the Philosopher which, like the world of
the Astronomer, seems to its denizen but an islet in the ocean of
mind-baffling immensity. Quite apart from these revolves the solid
and well-defined, but somewhat narrow, world of the man of mercantile
pursuits, and more remote, under monotonous skies, the dull world of
the unthinking, drear as a desert save here and there some little turf
of almost withered green.
However, the world of the Musician claims our attention; let us look
with his eyes; hear with his ears; understand with his intuitions.
All else shut out, his world is subdivisible: within it is discovered
another. Lured on by the shine of golden wings, and the delicate
cantabile of angel voices ineffably sweet and pure, we enter where
dwells the soul of a true tone-poet, the soul of Frederic Chopin.
In Chopin, the subject of this study, the blood of two nations met
and mingled. The France of his father, and the Poland of his mother,
could each with equal justice claim him as its own. Chopin was born in
the vicinity of Warsaw, on March 1, 1809, and in the capital city of
the Grand Duchy, created by Napoleon, he was educated musically until
the age of twelve, an age when the average musician enters upon his
pupilage. Then it was deemed best by his professors that he be left to
the self-development of his unique individuality.
Naturally our precocious child, our future composer _sui generis_, was
now the pet of the aristocracy; the plaything of that class which, as
a whole, not only in Warsaw, but also in pretty much the world over,
lived, as now it lives, to be amused and served by those who, in a land
of democratic opportunities, would soon be its acknowledged superiors.
For an artist wholly unique, a smoothing and polishing to the many
exactions of polite society is an undertaking questionable indeed. To
come into outward conformity with mere convention is to imperil the
freedom of his inner individuality. The actual effect of such a course
on the genius of Chopin cannot be determined; that it survived the
ordeal is proof enough of its virility and tenacity of purpose.
As we have hinted, the world of the Musician, unlike that of the
severely practical man, has no fixed diameter; elastic, it widens
at his will; at the bidding of his sympathies it stretches until
co-extensive with the globe. Thus it gathers into its circumference
every land where live and labor his brethren in the art. And so we
find our youthful composer looking beyond the limits of his Warsaw,
looking and longing for physical contact with that with which his
heart was already in rapport; Dresden and Prague and Berlin, but
chiefly Vienna the renowned, the rich and glorious with the memories
and bequeathings of Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert. There
could be heard, in its unfading loveliness, the «Freischütz» of Weber
in whom Romanticism first wakened like a rose at dawn. There such
pianists as Czerny and Hummel would discover to Chopin his failings, or
prove his merits to be all his own. And then, far off as the horizon
of his daydreams, upgrew the sumptuous city on the Seine, the siren
city sweet of voice and fair of form; the heartless, hope-wrecking city
beneath whose mocking eye the unheard Wagner in after years must chafe
and struggle and starve and almost cease to be.
Chopin was instinctively and wholly a romanticist. Though deemed
ultra by many a contemporary critic, to us he stands revealed the
great tone-poet of the piano; the Keats, or rather the Shelley of
musicians; the inimitable modern from whom the groping and straining
virtuoso-producers of to-day have much retrograded.
As a pianoforte writer, Chopin has only Beethoven as compeer, but
each in his way is supreme. The supremacy of Beethoven is that of the
symphonist in whose brain the orchestra sounds ever a multitudinous
variety of tone color. The piano was his dearest friend, the orchestra
his great heart's love not to be shut out, not to be forgotten, because
of friendship's closest, warmest hour; and so the orchestra would
crowd and cramp itself in the piano. On the other hand, his chosen
instrument was to Chopin his all of abiding friendship and passionate,
absorbing love, and every height and every deep of his being is therein
contained; his every unclouded gem, set in ornate and exquisite
workmanship, his every matched and strung pearl, finds there a golden
casket. Chopin made of his Erard, or his Pleyel, a novel instrument.
No longer of uniform tint, its tone colors were yet unlike those from
the orchestral blending of wood and metal and string.
Ere long our composer-virtuoso has met and measured many of his
renowned contemporaries, and, by fair comparison, he knows to a nicety
his own status; already he anticipates the acclaim of a just future.
Such seership is necessary to the man of genius. Foreknowledge is his
saving rock amidst the merciless seas of ridicule. Clinging to that
stay, he awaits the spent fury of the storm, the lulling of winds, the
leveling of waves.
For the sake of comparison let us, from the vantage ground of this
present, glance at the chief musical celebrities contacted by Chopin
in the years of his youthful activity. Thalberg, smooth and faultless
executant, delight of the dilettante and the superficial amateur, was
throwing off a series of showy but withal empty transcriptions of which
his «Mosè in Egitto» may be held the best. As a moulder of musicians,
notably Liszt, and as a developer of technique, the hardworking Czerny
was proving of immense value, but as a composer he was too diligent,
not waiting for that inspiration which cannot be forced. Of Hummel,
much over-rated in those days, the best thing sayable is that he
influenced the shaping of Chopin's concertos, the least faulty of his
larger works. Moscheles, the tutor of Mendelssohn, was a musician much
esteemed by Chopin who deemed it a privilege to play the bass to the
composer's treble in his chief pianoforte works. Unlike certain of our
modern pianists, Kalkbrenner was no muscular virtuoso venting his rage
upon the keyboard. He was, on the contrary, a performer of refinement
and precision; one who could claim certain excellencies akin to those
of Chopin. But alas for human vanity! his great show pieces, the cause
of much self-gratulation, have vanished from every concert repertory
and every musical collection save that of the antiquary. Mendelssohn,
despite his eminence, had the backward-looking eye; much in his matter
had already been sung and played, but not with the grace and charm
of that accomplished scholar. And yet is the «Elijah» a triumph, a
thing enduring, an epitome of all his powers. Oak-ribbed, wealth-laden
voyager on the sea of Time, how bravely it breasts the waves that long
have whelmed the wrecks of mediocre talent and seeming genius and
empty pretence! Schumann, discoverer of the genius of Chopin, was a
musician and thinker, an ever-broadening cosmopolitan, a radical in the
van of æsthetic progress and, inevitably, the soul of the new musical
romanticism.
Almost any page, almost any stanza of Shelley--most ethereal of
word-poets--would indicate an unobstructed outpouring which the first
drafts of even his wholly sustained inspirations quite disprove.
Beethoven's collected sketch-books are a study in the evolution of
themes afterward impressed with the seal of spontaneity. We are told
by one who ought to know, that Chopin's every opus was born only after
soul-travail both long and sore. Against these curious facts can be
set this apparent contradiction: facility is the rule among the merely
talented, and many such have with ease dashed off their best efforts,
of which doing they are wont to boast because, to the popular way of
thinking, facility is proof of genius. Now why should Shelley and
Beethoven and Chopin wrestle with the idea, and Pollok and Czerny and
their kind be so easily victorious?
As we have said, our human world is subdivisible into manifold states
of consciousness, each a world to its dwellers. The world of the man
of talent may be, and usually is, but a step inward from the world
of the multitude; hence few obstacles hinder communication between
these nearly-related worlds. The ideas of the inner are with ease
translated to the understanding of the outer. Evidently this is untrue
of those inmost worlds where dwell the deep- and high-dreaming Poet
and Musician whose respective domains are almost outside of time and
space, those limitations wherewith the human mind divides the known
from the unknown, the sensible from the super-sensible, the finite from
the Infinite. Having in them little or nothing of the quantitative,
the ideas of those worlds elude the mental grasp of all save the
finely-organized man of genius.
How to come into touch with the great, common world by giving
fixed form to that which is formless and by rendering tangible the
intangible, making seen the unseen, felt the unfelt, and heard the
unheard, is the problem of Genius. It was the problem of Michel Angelo
before the unchiselled «David»; the problem of Raphael musing upon the
Madonnaless canvas; the problem of the absorbed Beethoven when, in his
seemingly aimless meanderings, the trees by the roadside and in the
forest would prompt him to solution with their whispered «Holy! Holy!»
and it was the problem of Chopin as in the quiet of his study, apart
from the roar of the great city, the empty page tormented him with the
thought of unwritten and perhaps unwritable beauties.
That within the space of twenty-four days, Handel penned the notes
of his most glorious work, proves nothing but his enormous powers of
mental concentration, and the endurance of a brain supported by a
vigorous body; but to the vital question: How long had «The Messiah»
been maturing in him? history affords no conclusive answer. Rossini was
no doubt a facile composer, yet from what soul-deep his operas came is
proved by his deliberate estimate of their longevity. He believed that
as an entirety nothing but «Il Barbiere» would survive.
The well-attested fact that Beethoven and Chopin, those cautious and
self-critical composers, were both extempore performers par excellence,
goes far toward proving the impromptu inferior to the finished
after-product. And does not all this favor our view that from the
birth-throes, and not from the painlessness of Genius, are born the
masterpieces of every art?