Part 11

There is in the "Lettres Parisiennes" of Madame de Girardin a description of a _soirée_ at Madame de Courbonne's, which brings this whole nauseous atmosphere with painful vividness under our very nostrils. "It was for passionate admirers," writes Madame de Girardin, "the torment of Tantalus to see Chopin going about a whole evening in a _salon_, and not to hear him. The mistress of the house took pity on us; she was indiscreet, and Chopin played, sang his most delicious songs; we set to these joyous or sad airs the words which came into our heads; we followed with our thoughts his melodious caprices. There were some twenty of us, sincere amateurs, true believers, and not a note was lost, not an intention was misunderstood; it was not a concert, it was intimate, serious music such as we love; he was not a virtuoso who comes and plays the air agreed up and then disappears; he was a beautiful talent, monopolized, worried, tormented, without consideration and scruples, whom one dared to ask for the most beloved airs.... Madame So-and-so said, 'Please, play this pretty nocturne dedicated to Mdlle. Stirling.'--The nocturne which I called the dangerous one.--He smiled, and played the fatal nocturne. 'I,' said another lady, 'should like to hear once played by you this mazurka, so sad and so charming.' He smiled again, and played the delicious mazurka. The most profoundly artful among the ladies sought expedients to attain their ends: 'I am practising the grand sonata which commences [_sic_] with this beautiful funeral march,' and 'I should like to know the movement in which the finale ought to be played.' He smiled a little at the stratagem, and played the finale of the grand sonata."

Decidedly, there is too sickly a flavor of the boudoir about the _salons_ in which "this beautiful talent ... whom one dared to ask for the most beloved airs" deigned to spend his time. We cannot wonder that in such a hothouse atmosphere the ugly weeds of his character throve almost as well as the delicate flowers, that under such long-continued coddling he grew vain, captious, pettily egotistical. It is distressing to note how much he is willing to ask of his friends Fontana and Grzymala, in the way of laborious and disagreeable commissions--errands to tailors, landlords, paper-hangers, and furniture-makers, and bickerings with publishers--and how he is content to repay them with a few perfunctory protestations of regard, nicely proportioned, in each case, to the magnitude of the favor exacted. Nor does he hesitate to speak slightingly, behind their backs, of such associates as Pleyel the publisher, Leo the banker, and even his fellow-countryman Matuszynski, at the same time that he is addressing them directly in the most cordial and even affectionate language. In short, it is impossible to deny that he was exacting, ungenerous, and disingenuous in his relations with comrades and friends.

In the more casual relations the same shortcomings revealed themselves in a malicious wit which was quite devoid of the magnanimity and exuberance of humor. His description of Thalberg, his rival as a virtuoso, is a little masterpiece of irony: "He is younger than I, pleases the ladies very much, makes potpourris on 'Masaniello,' plays the _forte_ and _piano_ with the pedal but not with the hand, takes tenths as easily as I do octaves, and wears studs with diamonds." When Liszt, who in the consciousness of his splendor was inclined to patronize, volunteered to write a review of one of his concerts, he said, "He will give me a little kingdom in his empire." To a wealthy Philistine who invited him to dinner, and as soon as the coffee was removed requested him to play, he responded sweetly, "Ah, but I have eaten so little!" Obviously Liszt is right in describing him as "a fine connoisseur in raillery and an ingenious mocker."

But just as the sneer is physiologically the incipient uncovering of the teeth, in self-defence, of the animal at bay, so Chopin's sarcasms are the retaliations of a man constantly harassed, upon a dull and cruel world. He had to resort to innuendo because he was too fragile for rougher warfare. The needles of his wit had to be sharply pointed and dipped in venom, to make any impression on people accustomed to fight with sledge-hammers. All his weaknesses of character, indeed,--his malice, his extreme caution, his secretiveness, his vanity, even his snobbishness,--are in large measure but the necessary reflexes of inherent weaknesses of constitution, and may be explained, if not altogether condoned, as the normal reactions of a too sensitive nature, placed without protection in a sordid, difficult, phlegmatic world. Never, surely, was human being more delicately adjusted than Chopin to receive painful impressions at every point. His senses were so keen that as a child he cried at the mere sound of music; disease made him shrink from minute changes of temperature or slightly unfavorable conditions of weather, of which ordinary people are unconscious; imperious pride made him similarly susceptible to his social climate; and his high artistic ideal condemned him to constant disappointment even with his work. Peculiarly pathetic is the story of the last year of his life, when, unable to compose or to teach, almost penniless, and so weak that he had to be carried upstairs by his valet, he undertook an ill-fated concert tour in Scotland and England. It was a sad jest of destiny to bring this subtle artist, dying of consumption, into contact with a Manchester audience, in a large hall which his tone could not fill. He begged his friend Osborne not to be present--"My playing will be lost in such a large room, and my compositions will be ineffective." Hueffer describes a similar scene in London, a Grand Polish Ball, at which "the people, hot from dancing, who went into the room where he played, were but little in the humor to pay attention, and anxious to return to their amusement. He was in the last stage of exhaustion, and the affair resulted in disappointment." It was an excusable bitterness with which, on the way back to Paris, pointing at the cattle by the wayside, he murmured "Ça a plus d'intelligence que les Anglais." But, alas! to a temperament, like his, too delicately strung, the whole world, always and everywhere, is somewhat British.

The single, but perhaps sufficing, good fortune in Chopin's in many ways unhappy lot was that he was able to find a refuge from the irritations, failures, and disappointments of everyday existence in artistic expression. However stubborn an aspect life presented to him, in art at least he was successful. The great law of compensation never wrought more subtly than when it made the very qualities which defeated him in the one realm the sources of his joyful conquest in the other. The keenness of sense which found in the hurly-burly of the world so many painful impressions, also discovered, as we have seen, wonderful new possibilities of tonal coloring in pianoforte music. The minute discrimination which made him unpleasantly conscious of all that was vulgar, crude, and ugly in human nature, also enabled him to winnow out unerringly, from his musical resources, all trite formulæ, all hackneyed conventional progressions, all threadbare adornments, and so to attain a marvellous individuality and distinction of style. The very exclusiveness which condemned the man to solitude, safeguarded the artist against dissipation of energy and futile eclecticisms of method. Finally, his ideal of perfection, a cruel autocrat to serve in a world so imperfect, proved the best of guides in the less refractory medium of art, and led him near to the verge of complete realization. In a word, the paradox of Chopin is that his fastidious taste--the radical, fundamental trait of his nature--plunges him, as a human being, into a jungle of distresses, but guides him, as a musician, to a mountain-top of commanding superiority.

The unfailing interest of the analysis of his music lies in the recognition, at every turn, of this fineness of nature, this mental and spiritual high-breeding, this exquisitely sensitive taste, and in the detection of the various kinds of excellence it produces. One easily traces it through several planes of achievement, in an ascending series. On the first and lowest plane it appears merely as an inimitable finesse in the execution of light, playful, and even frivolous designs: no one has brought so delicate and yet firm a touch, and so sure an instinct for dainty elegance of style, to the treatment of the _salon_-piece (a _genre_ for which we find perhaps the best parallel in the paintings of Watteau or the verses of Mr. Austin Dobson) as the Chopin of the waltzes, the mazurkas, many of the études and preludes, and even of the more old-fashioned concert fantasias and "_variations_ _brillantes_." Weber is as polished, but less subtle; Schubert is as spontaneous, but by no means so distinguished. Schumann exerts the same fascination, but with less ingratiation, less _politesse_; Liszt's musical garment is equally sparkling, but it is gemmed with rubies rather than with diamonds. The technical sources of Chopin's success in this _genre_ are his graceful, smoothly-moulded melodies, frequently recalling those of Bellini and other Italians, with whom he had much in common; his simple, transparent harmonies, built up always with an unfailing sense of tone-color; and his lambent, coruscating ornamentation, which always seems to effloresce spontaneously from the melody. In all these matters he is the supreme model of purity and felicity in this style.

But the same punctilious taste which guided him so safely among the pitfalls of virtuosity and bravura soon led him beyond this entire scheme of art, which is, after all, based on the somewhat frivolous ideal of ostentation, up to the higher level of lyrical expression, based on quiet and deep personal feeling. The virtuoso was transformed into the poet. In the nocturnes, some of the études and preludes, portions even of the ballades and polonaises, and most strikingly of all in the slow movements of the concertos and sonatas, his object is no longer to dazzle his audience, but to portray subjective emotion, often of a profound earnestness and spiritual beauty. If in his early pieces he was the prestidigitator, the brother-in-art of Thalberg and Liszt, here he is the dreamer, the rhapsodist, and his nearest of kin is Robert Schumann. The largo of the B-minor Sonata is Schumannesque in its contemplativeness, its _innigkeit_, its marked note of mysticism; the funeral march in the B-flat minor Sonata equals that of the great quintet in poignancy and dignity, though it is a feminine version of what in the German composer we find expressed with more virile force. In the nocturnes the feminine quality is even more evident. Their tender beauty has a pallor, a fragility, almost an emaciation, which has often brought upon them the charge of morbidity. It is certain that in the pieces of this type Chopin has carried his fastidiousness a stage farther than in the display pieces, attaining an even greater distinction and a rarer individuality. The nocturnes and preludes, the larghettos of the two concertos, the largo of the Sonata in B-minor, and a few other things of the same sort constitute one of the few perfect manifestations of the romantic spirit in music.

There is still a third phase of Chopin's work, which some will probably consider as much higher than the lyrical phase as that is higher than the decorative. This may be called the heroic or epic phase, and is exemplified in the polonaises, the ballades, the Fantaisie, opus 49, the twelfth étude, the thirteenth nocturne, and the finale of the Sonata in B-minor.[27] A study of these works will open the eyes of any one who knows Chopin only through his virtuoso or lyrical pieces to the scope and many-sidedness of his genius. There is about them a largeness of utterance, a sustainment of mood, an intensity of emotion hardly ever degenerating into the hysterical or the sentimental, which it is strange to find in the graceful _salon_ writer, the delicate miniaturist. Yet this final quality, too, by which Chopin proves himself akin to Beethoven as well as to Thalberg and Schumann (an oddly assorted trio), is, like the others, due to his characteristic fineness of nature. It is the heroism of high breeding, the vigor of intelligence, the dignity of impeccable taste. It bespeaks a strength rather subtle than brutal--the strength of the mettlesome thoroughbred, not that of the stolid dray-horse. It is a spiritual superiority (like the technical and emotional superiority) born of distinction and nourished by exclusiveness. Even in the most virile of the polonaises, with the possible exception of the so-called "Military Polonaise," which is unique in its fresh, open-air athleticism, we feel that the power which surges through them is a nervous rather than a muscular power. Thus when he is heroic, no less than when he is gay or introspective, Chopin remains true to his slender, aquiline, subtle, aristocratic self.

It is interesting to examine the evolution of technique that went hand in hand with his growth in emotional earnestness. In the first place the Bellini-like tunefulness, illustrated in the theme of the Rondeau, opus 1, with its agile turns and trills and its skipping staccato movement, gives place in the maturer works to a freer, more chromatic, more impassioned and rhapsodic type of melody. It recrudesces, to be sure, here and there, as in the ninth nocturne, the larghetto of the E-minor concerto, the moderato cantabile of the "Fantaisie Impromptu"; for the languid southern luxuriousness was once for all a part of Chopin's temperament. But the deeper and more intimate the mood he is trying to express, the broader and less trammelled becomes his melodic curve. How sinuous the line, how gradual the climax, how deliberate the subsidence, of this theme from the fourteenth nocturne (_a_, in Figure XX):