Never has Paris, the Mecca of European art, genius, and culture,
presented a more brilliant social spectacle than it did in 1832. Hither
ward 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
civilization.
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 fireplace. The guests gather around informally as the piano sighs,
moans, murmurs, or dreams under the fingers of the player. Hein-rich
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
mediaeval 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 color 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, Nierncewicz 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 recognize, 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 Mme.
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
recognized 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 organization of Chopin, and
he loved once and forever, with a passion that consumed him; for in Mme.
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.