George Mathias has sketched Chopin in a few sincere, exquisite strokes.
His alluring, hesitating, gracious, feminine manner and air of
supreme distinction are touched upon, and M. Mathias--dear, charming
old gentleman, how well I remember him in 1879!--speaks of Chopin’s
shoulders, held high after the style of the Poles. Chopin often met
Kalkbrenner, his antipodes in everything but breeding. Chopin’s coat
was buttoned high but the buttons were black; Kalkbrenner’s were
gold. And how Chopin disliked the pompous old pianist, with his airs
and stinginess. As Mathias writes with glee of the idea of Chopin’s
profiting from the instructions of Kalkbrenner:
“Je crois qu’il n’y a eu qu’une leçon de prise,” he adds most
emphatically.
At Louis Viardot’s Chopin met Thalberg, and that great master of the
arpeggio and also of one of the finest singing touches ever heard
on a keyboard, received with haughty humility the Polish pianist’s
compliments, not quite believing in their sincerity. Perhaps he was
right, for Chopin made mock of his mechanical style when his back was
turned; his imitation of the Moïse fantasy being astoundingly funny,
according to Mathias.
“What a jury of pianists,” he cries, “in the old days of the Salle
Erard! Doehler, Dreyschock, Leopold de Meyer, Zimmerman, Thalberg,
Kalkbrenner--how they all curiously examined the Polish black swan,
with his original style and extraordinary technique!” A row over
Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Adelaïde is mentioned.
And Chopin, pianist? He played as he composed--in an absolutely
unapproachable manner. He would doubtless be shocked to hear his
music in the hands of some modern Sandow of the keyboard, torn into
unmelodic splinters, yet every splinter exhaling a melodic sound
under the furious fingers of the misguided pianist. Mathias examines
his rubato and settles the much debated question, although Liszt’s
happy illustration of the unshaken tree with the shimmering leaves,
still holds good. Chopin admired Weber. Their natures were alike
aristocratic. Once after Mathias had played the noble, chivalrous
sonata in A flat Chopin exclaimed:
“Un ange passait dans le ciel.”
Mathias first knew Chopin in 1840 in the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin,
38. The house no longer stands, having been demolished by the cutting
of the rue Lafayette. Later he moved to the rue Tronchet, number 5.
The house is still there. He occupied the rez-de-chaussée. The first
piece Mathias brought him was by Kalkbrenner and called Une Pensée
de Bellini. Chopin regarded it without horror, then gave the boy the
Moscheles studies and the A minor concerto of Hummel. His pupil,
Fontana, gave lessons when the master was sick. One day Chopin was
ill but received his visitors lying on a couch. Mathias noticed the
Carneval of Schumann. It was the first edition, and Chopin on being
asked what he thought of the music answered in icy accents as if the
work were painful even to know. He could not speak well of music where
want of form shocked his classical instincts, so he said as little as
possible. And poor old Robert Schumann down in Leipsic pouring out inky
rhapsodies over Chopin!
Mathias tells us that Chopin was a simple man--“Je ne veux pas dire
simple esprit”--was no critic, was without literary pretensions and not
of the intellectual fibre of Liszt or Berlioz. When the aide-de-camp
of King Louis Philippe asked him why he did not compose an opera he
answered in that small, slightly stifled voice of his: “Ah, M. Le
Comte, let me compose piano music; it’s all I know how to do.”
Bach, Hummel and Field, Mathias says, were his strongest musical
influences. You may well imagine his horror if forced to listen to
the Ring. A tender-souled creature yet with the fire of a hero in his
veins! More masculine, heroic music--free from Liszt’s and Wagner’s
grandiloquence of accent--than the F sharp minor polonaise, some of the
ballades, preludes and études, has yet to be written.
V
In the city of Boston, January 19, 1809, a son was born to David
and Elizabeth Poe. On March 1, 1809, in the little village of
Zelazowa-Wola, twenty-eight miles from Warsaw, in Poland, a son was
born to Nicholas and Justina Chopin. The American is known to the world
as Edgar Allan Poe, the poet; the Pole as Frederic François Chopin,
the composer. October 7, 1849, Edgar Poe died neglected in Washington
Hospital at Baltimore, and October 17, 1849, Frederic Chopin expired
in Paris surrounded by loving friends. Poe and Chopin never knew of
each other’s existence yet--a curious coincidence--two supremely
melancholy artists of the beautiful lived and died almost synchronously.
It would be a strained parallel to compare Chopin and Poe at many
points yet the chronological events referred to, are not the only
comparisons that might be made without the fear or flavor of
affectation. There are parallels in the soul-lives as well as in the
earth-lives of these two men--Poe and Chopin seem ever youthful--that
may be drawn without extravagance. True, the roots of Chopin’s culture
were more richly nurtured than Poe’s, but the latter, like a spiritual
air plant, derived his sustenance none know how. Of Poe’s forbears we
may hardly form any adequate conception; his learning was not profound,
despite his copious quotations from almost forgotten and recondite
authors; yet his lines to Helen were written in boyhood. The poet
in his case was indeed born, not made. Chopin, we know, had careful
training from the faithful Elsner; but who could have taught him to
write his opus 2, the variations over which Schumann rhapsodized, or
even that gem, his E flat nocturne--now, alas! somewhat stale from
conservatory usage?
Both these men, full fledged in their gifts, sprang from the Jovian
brain and, while they both improved in the technics of their art, their
individualities were at the outset as sharply defined as were their
limitations. Read Poe’s To Helen, and tell me if he made more exquisite
music in his later years. You remember it:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy naïad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
I refrain from giving the third verse; but are not these lines
remarkable in beauty of imagination and diction when one considers they
were penned by a youngster scarcely out of his teens!
Now glance at Chopin’s earlier effusions, his opus 1, a rondo in
C minor; his opus 2 already referred to; his opus 3, the C major
polonaise for ’cello and piano; his opus 5, the Rondeau à la Mazur in
F; his opus 6, the first four mazourkas, perfect of their kind; opus
7, more mazourkas; opus 8, the G minor trio, the classicism of which
you may dispute; nevertheless it contains lovely music. Then follow the
nocturnes, the concerto in F minor, the latter begun when Chopin was
only twenty, and so on through the list. Both men died at forty--the
very prime of life, when the natural forces are acting freest, when the
overwrought passions of youth had begun to mellow and yet there were
several years before the close, a distinct period of decadence, almost
deterioration. I am conscious of the critical claims of those who taste
in both Poe’s and Chopin’s later music the exquisite quality of the
over-ripe, the savor of morbidity.
Beautiful as it is, Chopin’s polonaise-fantaisie opus 61, with its
hectic flush--in its most musical, most melancholy cadences--gives us
a premonition of death. Composed three years before he died, it has
the taint of the tomb about it and, like the A minor mazourka, said by
Klindworth to be Chopin’s last composition, the sick brain is heard in
the morbid insistence of the theme, of the weary “wherefore?” in every
bar. Is not this iteration like Poe’s in his last period? Read Ulalume
with its haunting, harrowing harmonies:
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober,
As the leaves that were crisped and sere--
As the leaves that were withering and sere.
* * * * *
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust--
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust--
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.
This poem, in which sense swoons into sound, has all the richness of
color, the dangerous glow of the man whose brain is perilously near the
point of unhingement.
Poe then, like Chopin, did not die too soon. Morbid, neurotic natures,
they lived their lives with the intensity that Walter Pater declares is
the only true life. “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame,”
he writes “to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to
form habits.”
Certainly Chopin and Poe fulfilled in their short existences these
conditions. They burned ever with the flame of genius and that flame
devoured their brains as surely as paresis. Their lives, in the
ordinary Philistine or Plutus-like sense, were failures; uncompromising
failures. They were not citizens after the conjugal manner nor did
they accumulate pelf. They certainly failed to form habits and, while
the delicacy of the Pole prevented his indulging in the night-side
Bohemianism of the American, he nevertheless contrived to outrage
social and ethical canons. Poe, it is said, was a drunkard, though
recent researches develop the fact that but one glass of brandy
drove him into delirium. Possibly like Baudelaire, his disciple and
translator, he indulged in some deadly drug or perhaps congenital
derangement, such as masked epilepsy, or some cerebral disorder,
colored his daily actions with the semblance of arrant dissipation and
recklessness.
There are two Poes known to his various friends. A few knew the one,
many the other; some knew both men. A winning, poetic personality,
a charming man of the world, electric in speech and with an eye of
genius--a creature with a beautiful brain, said many. Alas! the other;
a sad-eyed wretch with a fixed sneer, a bitter, uncurbed tongue that
lashed alike friend and foe, a sot, a libertine, a gambler--God!
what has not Edgar Allan Poe been called! We all know that Griswold
distorted the picture, but some later critics have declared that Poe,
despite his angelic treatment of his cousin-wife Maria Clemm, was not a
man of irreproachable habits.
This much I have heard; at the time Poe lived in Philadelphia, where he
edited a magazine for Burton or Graham--I forget which--my father met
him several times at the houses of Judge Conrad and John Sartain, the
latter the steel engraver. Poe, my father has repeatedly told me, was a
slender, nervous man, very reticent, very charming in manner, though,
like Chopin, disposed to a certain melancholy hauteur; both men were
probably poseurs. But after one glass of wine or spirits Poe became
an uncontrollable demon;--his own demon of perversity; and poetry and
blasphemy poured from his lips. John Sartain has told of a midnight
tramp he took with Poe, in the midst of a howling storm, in Fairmount
Park, Philadelphia, to prevent him from attempting his life. This
enigmatic man, like Chopin, lived a double life, but his surroundings
were different and this particular fact must be accented.
America was not a pleasant place for an artist a half century ago.
William Blake the poet-seer wrote: “The ages are all equal but
genius is always above its age.” Poe was certainly above his age--a
trafficking time in the history of the country, when commerce ruled
and little heed was given to the beautiful. N. P. Willis, Poe’s best
friend, counsellor and constant helper, wrote pale proper verse while
Poe made a bare living by writing horrific tales wherein his marvellous
powers of analysis and description found play and pay. But oh! the
pity of it all! The waste of superior talent--of absolute genius. The
divine spark that was crushed out, trampled in the mud and made to do
duty as a common tallow dip! One is filled with horror at the thought
of a kindred poetic nature also being cast in the prosaic atmosphere
of this country; for if Chopin had not had success at Prince Valentine
Radziwill’s soirée in Paris in the year 1831 he would certainly have
tried his luck in the New World, and do you not shudder at the idea of
Chopin’s living in the United States in 1831?
Fancy those two wraiths of genius, Poe and Chopin, in this city
of New York! Chopin giving piano lessons to the daughters of
wealthy aristocrats of the Battery, Poe encountering him at some
conversazione--they had conversaziones then--and propounding to him
Heine-like questions: “Are the roses at home still in their flame-hued
pride?” “Do the trees still sing as beautifully in the moonlight?”
They would have understood one another at a glance. Poe was not a whit
inferior in sensibility to Chopin. Balzac declared that if Chopin
drummed on a bare table, his fingers made subtle-sounding music. Poe,
like Balzac, would have felt the drummed tears in Chopin’s play, while
Chopin in turn could not have failed to divine the tremulous vibrations
of Poe’s exquisitely strung nature. What a meeting it would have been,
but again, what inevitable misery for the Polish poet!
A different tale might be told if Poe had gone to Paris and enjoyed
some meed of success! How the fine flower of his genius would have
bloomed into fragrance if nourished in such congenial soil! We
would probably not have had, to such a desperate extent the note of
melancholia, so sweetly despairing or despairingly sweet, that we
now enjoy in his writings--a note eminently Gothic and Christian.
Goethe’s “Nur wer die Sehnsucht Kennt” is as true of Poe as of Heine,
of Baudelaire, of Chopin, of Schumann, of Shelley, of Leopardi, of
Byron, of Keats, of Alfred de Musset, of Senancour, of Amiel--of all
that choir of lacerated lives which wreak themselves in expression.
One is well reminded here of Baudelaire who wrote of the ferocious
absorption in the pursuit of beauty, by her votaries. Poe and Chopin
all their lives were tortured by the desire of beauty, by the vision
of perfection. Little recked they of that penalty which must be paid by
men of genius, and has been paid from Tasso to Swift and from Poe and
Baudelaire to Guy de Maupassant.
Frederic Chopin’s culture was not necessarily of a finer stamp
than Edgar Poe’s, nor was his range wider. Both men were narrow in
sympathies though intense to the point of poignancy and rich in
mood-versatility. Both were born aristocrats; purple raiment became
them well and both were sadly deficient in genuine humor--the Attic
salt that conserves while mocking itself. Irony both possessed to a
superlative degree and both believed in the rhythmical creation of
lyrical beauty and in the charm of evanescence. Poe declared, in his
dogmatic manner, that a long poem could not exist. He restricted the
poetical art in form and length, and furthermore insisted that “Beauty
of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites a
sensitive soul to tears.” The note of melancholy was to him the one
note worthy the singing. And have we not a parallel in Chopin’s music?
He is morbid, there is no gainsaying it and, like Poe, is at his
best in smaller art forms. When either artist spreads his pinions
for symphonic flights, we are reminded of Matthew Arnold’s poetical
description of Shelley “beating in the void his luminous wings in
vain.” Poe and Chopin mastered supremely, as Henry James would say,
their intellectual instruments. They are lyrists and their attempts at
the epical are usually distinguished failures.
Exquisite artificers in precious cameos, these two men are of a
consanguinity because of their devotion to Our Ladies of Sorrow, the
Mater Lachrymarum, the Mater Suspiriorum and the Mater Tenebrarum of
Thomas De Quincey. If the Mater Malorum--Mother of Evil--presided over
their lives, they never in their art became as Baudelaire, a sinister
“Israfel of the sweet lute.” Whatever their personal shortcomings, the
disorders of their lives found no reflex beyond that of melancholy.
The notes of revolt, of anger, of despair there are, but of impurity,
no trace whatsoever. Poe’s women--those ethereal creatures whose slim
necks, willowy figures, radiant eyes and velvet foot-falls, encircled
in an atmosphere of purity--Poe’s women, while not being the womanly
woman beloved of William Wordsworth, are after all untainted by any
morbidities.
Poe ever professed in daily life, whatever he may have practised, the
highest reverence for “das ewig Weibliche” and not less so Chopin, who
was fastidious and a very stickler for the more minute proprieties of
life. Am I far fetched in my simile when I compare the natures of Poe
and Chopin! Take the latter’s preludes for example, tiny poems, and
parallel them to such verse of Poe’s as the Haunted Palace, Eulalie,
Annabel Lee, Eldorado, The Conquered Worm or that incomparable bit,
Israfel:
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
Whose heart-strings are a lute
None sing so wildly well
As the Angel Israfel.
Poe’s haunting melodies, his music for music’s sake, often remind us of
Chopin. The euphonious, the well sounding, the wohlklang, was carried
almost beyond the pitch of endurance, by both artists. They had however
some quality of self-restraint as well as the vices of their virtues;
we may no longer mention The Raven or The Bells with equanimity, nor
can we endure listening to the E flat nocturne or the D flat valse. In
the latter case repetition has dulled the ears for enjoyment; in the
former case the obvious artificiality of both poems, despite their many
happy conceits, jars on the spiritual ear. The bulk of Chopin’s work
is about comparable to Poe’s. Neither man was a copious producer and
both carried the idea of perfection to insanity’s border. Both have
left scores of imitators but in Poe’s case a veritable school has been
founded; in Chopin’s the imitations have been feeble and sterile.
Following Poe we have unquestionably Algernon Charles Swinburne, who
is doubly a reflection of Poe, for he absorbed Poe’s alliterative
system, and from Charles Baudelaire his mysticism, plus Baudelaire’s
malificence, to which compound he added the familiar Swinburnian
eroticism. Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning felt Poe’s
influence, if but briefly, while in France and Belgium he has produced
a brood of followers beginning with the rank crudities of Gaboriau, in
his detective stories, modelled after The Murder in the Rue Morgue;
the Belgian Maeterlinck, who juggles with Poe’s motives of fear and
death, Baudelaire, a French Poe with an abnormal flavor of Parisian
depravity super-added and latterly that curious group, the decadents,
headed by Verlaine, and Stephen Mallarmé. Poe has made his influence
felt in England too, notably upon James Thomson, the poet of The City
of Dreadful Night and in Ireland, in the sadly sympathetic figure of
James Clarence Mangan. Of Chopin’s indirect influence on the musical
world I would not care to dilate fearing you would accuse me of
exaggeration. Liszt would not have been a composer--at least for the
piano, if he had not nested in Chopin’s brain. As I said before, I
certainly believe that Wagner profited greatly by Chopin’s discoveries
in chromatic harmonies, discoveries without which modern music would
yet be in diatonic swaddling clothes.
On one point Poe and Chopin were as dissimilar as the poles; the point
of nationality. Poe wrote in the English tongue but beyond that he was
no more American than he was English. His milieu was unsympathetic,
and he refused to be assimilated by it. His verse and his prose depict
character and situations that belong to no man’s land--to that region
East of the moon and West of the sun. In his Eldorado he poetically
locates the country wherein his soul dramas occur. Thus he sings:
“Over the mountains
Of the moon
Down the valley of the shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The shade replied,
“If you seek for Eldorado.”
His creations are mostly bodiless and his verse suggests the most
subtile imagery. Shadow of shadows, his prose possesses the same
spectral quality. Have you read those two perfect pastels--Silence and
Shadow? If not, you know not the genius of Edgar Allan Poe. Chopin is
more human than Poe, inasmuch as he is patriotic. His polonaises are,
as Schumann said, “cannons buried in flowers.” He is Chopin and he is
also Poland though Poland is by no means Chopin. In his polonaises,
in his mazourkas, the indefinable Polish Zãl lurks, a drowsy perfume.
Chopin struck many human chords; some of his melodies belong to that
Poe-like region wherein beauty incarnate reigns and is worshipped for
itself. This then is the great dissimilarity between the artist in tone
and the artist in words. Poe had no country; Chopin had Poland. If
Chopin’s heart had been exposed “Poland” might have been found blazoned
upon it.
But, if Poe lacked political passion he had the passion for the
beautiful. Both men resembled one another strangely, in their intensity
of expression. Both had the power of expressing the weird, the
terrific, and Chopin in his scherzi, thunders from heights that Poe
failed to scale. The ethical motif was, curiously enough, absent in
both and both despised the “heresy of instruction.” Art for art’s sake,
beauty for beauty’s sake alone, was their shibboleth.
Will the music of Chopin ever age? Louis Ehlert thinks that music
ages rapidly like the beauty of Southern women, and Baudelaire says,
“Nothing here below is certain, no building on strong hearts, both
love and beauty go.” An English critic, Mr. Vernon Blackburn, puts the
case plainly: “I do not merely and baldly mean,” he writes, “that an
artistic production, like man, like the flowers, like the sun, grows
older as the years go; I mean that those years do actually steal from
it an absolute quality which it once possessed.”
Much of the early Chopin has become faded, but the greater Chopin, like
Bach and Beethoven, will last as long as the voice of the piano is
heard throughout the land.
Frederic Chopin is as Robert Schumann declared, “the proudest poetic
spirit of his time.”