Part 4

The Sonata should be the outpouring of a heart attuned to every chord of life; a heart capable of universal sympathies. Nevertheless, the supreme expression of that heart is joy, a prophecy hopeful as a Christmas greeting to the world. Let us turn to a consideration of op. 35 in B flat minor, for there, as nowhere else, Chopin betrays the defects of his qualities.

The four vague introductory measures, «Grave,» attempt the expression of unutterable woe whose painful fullness is yet relieved by this anguished cry. During the next four measures the soul, still overburdened, meditates a more adequate expression, and, at the Agitato, again attempts its story in what proves but an interrupted and broken eloquence of grief whose poignancy soon softens to tender, sweet regret. This presently swells to passionate longing as for some far-off good. But alas for expectance! Alas for every looked-for happiness gilded by the sunlight of a day that shall not be! This last mood, so characteristic of Chopin, ends the first section of the first movement, and then suddenly but inevitably come back the old brooding and the tearful, sob-choked utterance. And now a calmer moment for, as from the Sun of all being, a ray of heaven-born cheer finds the darkened chambers of the heart; but whatsoever of hope is there enkindled, is, by sorrow's unstayable fountain, soon made cold again.

In almost no one succeeding bar of the four movements comprised in this so-called Sonata, does a note of real joy leap forth from the funereal throng. Even the più lento of the Scherzo seems to say, «Whatever we feel, let us be outwardly cheerful!» Ah yes! But then this outwardness misleads no observer, for the suffused eye betrays the smiling lips, and laughter is the adroit but ineffectual turning of a sigh.

The Presto was abhorrent to Mendelssohn. A normal, happy being, he was born into the sunshine and green of a happy world, and his heart had not been plowed and harrowed, and then planted with the black-berried nightshade and all the baneful things of death. So he turned from this «Dark tarn of Auber» to the Chopin of meads and banks where no bird of midnight mood is croaking and the wholesome winds blow never from the «ghoul haunted woodland of Weir,» and the lithe branches are waving æolian at eve.

In the Sonata op. 26 in A flat, Beethoven rightly placed amidst a contrasting environment the immortal «Marcia funebre sulla morte d'un Eroe.» Amidst the almost unmitigated gloom of the B flat minor Sonata, Chopin has inserted a commemoration worthy of many heroes. But who were the heroes inspiring the Polish composer to one of his grandest thoughts, the unsurpassable Funeral March? Yes, who in truth were those dedicated heroes? Surely not the great achievers whom the wide world esteems, but rather those losing heroes hopeful in a hopeless cause; those fallen patriots of Polish blood whose mangled forms the iron hoofs of war had trampled in the mire of battle.

In the prevailing key of his Sonata, the key of B flat minor, one of the most sombre in all the realms of tone, Chopin's Funeral March at once reveals itself as no chapter of private sorrows; the mourning of a multitude is in its deep-voiced chords telling the burial of a people's loss. Fit for the final pageant of emperors and kings, yet little varied as the monotone of some grave discourse, the weighty measures move majestically and slow while everywhere bared heads are bending, and the dull, despondent look is downward for now the dust shall hide yon poor reminder of a vanished life. Ah, how those earth-bound chords, for less than two brief measures, struggle free and lift us on their glorious, upward wings! Alas, they falter ere yet they attain, and then, in feebler soaring, turn and sink exhausted to the very charnel place of Death. Once more with mighty final strength the massive chords are mounting only to falter and attempt and fall again even to the dismal housing of the dead. Then, suddenly unto that comfortless abode a song of heaven is wafted from her angel choir. At once complaining Doubt is dumb, and Sorrow hath her respite, and Hope her sweet uplooking to the rest of heroes from their finished days. Long afterward, when acute grief has changed to pensive musing, that song in tones of unforgettable beauty steals upon the silence of the soul; a tender message from the never-dying dead.

But whatever of balm in such serene outpouring, the torn heart must look for ease to Time the great healer, and so the deep wounds reopen, the insurmountable doubt and grief again are undergone, and in this wise the sublime march, so masterfully epitomizing certain human experiences, draws to its pathetic close and ends on the sombre chord which characterized its beginning.

IV

During this study of Frederic Chopin, the musician, certain incidents in his career, those favorably or unfavorably affecting his artistic development, have been touched on. Notable among them was his friendship with Liszt; but we have now to record the effects of another coming together, that of Chopin and George Sand. This latter was not the marriage of two minds musically preëminent, but, in fact, the result of the drawing near, until under one sky, of two related worlds: that of the musician, and that of the poet, for such, in fact, was the world of the imaginative French novelist. From this meeting and blending of abodes resulted a drama, and, for Chopin, a final tragedy; therefore a word in regard to the two distinguished actors.

Chopin's bodily appearance was marked by an entire absence of the robust; his features indicated delicate and refined feeling; his tastes were fastidious; his manner smooth and faultless with the last polish. This much created an impression as of a feminine personality, but the real, virile man was there, well-hidden beneath his mask. «George Sand,» as that nom de plume would indicate, claimed for herself almost every masculine prerogative. With manly daring and physical vitality, she overleaped convention as but the walls of a prison-pen fit only for the shutting in of little minds. And yet, before some noble and deep nature, a softest fire would mount to those dark eyes of hers, and voice and mien revealed the «Eternal Womanly,» which often outlined and sometimes portrayed itself upon her most tender, soulful pages. From trustworthy accounts we conclude that Chopin was at first repelled, not by any physical lack, for Madame Dudevant had just and ample claims to comeliness, but rather from his inability to divine at once the basic affinity which afterwards drew and held him despite external dissimilarities. Not so with the great novelist to whose feminine insight much of the analytical, masculine mind was added. She at once divined Chopin, and whatever was defective in him the glamour of sex made good; so she desisted not until she had made him her own.

The beauty and symmetry and fragrance of the flower is the complete expression of a life simple because low in the scale of evolution; but the beauty and symmetry of the masculine human form, together with every endowment of the characteristic masculine mind, only half expresses the rounded whole of the complex human soul, itself sexless because above sex. What is true of man is equally so of woman. The man and the woman of genius each recognizes in the other the riches and worth of that hemisphere of the soul adequately revealed only by that other. This perception of a mutual need is the prompter of love between men and women high in the scale of human evolution; it is in fact the cause of love even in the most unthinking; those whom only the wisdom of Nature enlightens.

Like Beethoven, who sighed for his «Immortal Beloved,» Chopin himself had loved and more than once. That half of his being which, because a man, he failed to realize as an inward belonging, he had projected as an ideal clothed with the grace and beauty of womankind. That ideal had looked into his eyes with tender recognition, or a glance almost of scorn had wholly told his poor unworth. But, favoring or reproving, that ideal had vanished utterly and forever, and now his heart indeed was lone save in brief, exalted moments of genius. Then the soul in its entirety would assert itself, and amidst that fullness he needed no other company.

Chopin, now twenty-eight years of age, had reached the early maturity which hastens to the precocious genius into whose brief but brilliant years are crowded the doings of an ordinary lifetime. In subject matter, at least, he had from the first shown an originality almost unimpressed by any great contemporary or predecessor. Conscious of ability to stand alone, he shunned rather than sought the friendship of renowned composers and virtuosi. A tone poet most essential to the romantic movement, he cared not for the Romanticism of Schumann. The eccentricities of Berlioz repelled him, and, strange in an admirer of Hummel and Field, he could not or would not condone what he deemed commonplace in the bulk of Mendelssohn's work. As for Liszt, to whose interpretation he accorded deserved praise, he had with secret disdain penetrated to the somewhat small kernel of original and worthy ideas in that author's early virtuoso pieces.

From this much, and more that might be added, it is evident that Chopin's glance was chiefly introspective. Moreover, it is evident that his inner world was not that of other musicians.

What then was the influence of George Sand upon our composer, now at the zenith of his powers? Evidently that of a projected ideal the image of the half of his soul life which Goethe calls the Eternal Feminine. In the searching light of our everyday world, the personality of George Sand betrays many defects. This of itself forbade a union like that of the Brownings; and to such a union other objections existed. The physical ailments of Chopin, which even in youth had menaced, and in a gradual approach had now seized upon him, were never wholly to loosen their grasp, so the chronic invalid became at times an exacting and by no means patient sufferer. On the other hand, George Sand was a woman of wide outlook and varied interests. Certain chimeras in the guise of political and social reform were leading the temperamental novelist far afield; but in these matters the composer shared not her enthusiasm, neither would he be indoctrinated as she herself had been. Knowing where his strength lay, he remained faithful to his muse, his lavish endower. While Chopin sought the smiles of princesses, and the applause of the fashionable salon, the Sand remained aloof. Conscious of her superb mental equipment, she no doubt believed that the brightest of all that gay company could add not a single thought to her ever-overflowing store. No wonder that as time wore on our musician more and more failed to fulfill the requirements of her ideal.

The affair with De Musset should have warned Chopin, but what warning, what philosophy, what asceticism, could offset the fascinations of one who at will swayed the hearts of her immense public? Besides, Chopin was not a philosopher save that unconscious one which an analysis of his deepest tone-poems reveals. Still less was he an ascetic this highly-developed emotional nature, this virile yet frail man of genius.

Of Chopin it must be admitted that he remained true to his attachment, true despite indubitable proof of the other's infidelity; true even till the shutting of the door wherewith eventually she barred her heart forever from his own; true even then he remained, nursing in secret the sorrows of a bruised and broken life, while, from this episode in her own career, but the finale in that of her lover, the woman, like Faust and Wilhelm Meister, emerged into other and varied experiences.

But, to repeat our former question, what was the effect of George Sand on the ten years of productive effort which measured the beginning and the end of this affaire du cœur? We hold that effect the most important of everything extraneous on the body of our composer's works during that rich decade. Nevertheless that effect is not local; the finger cannot be placed upon it, nor is it determinable as a fixed quantity. Rather it is nourishment assimilated, chemically changed to blood and bloom and beauty by a process whereof genius alone has the secret.

Of the work of these memorable years it may well be said that, beneath their various dedications, the name of George Sand was written in the warm and ruddy life of the heart of Frederic Chopin. Had the novelist been another Clara Schumann rendering for the composer those great fortissimos, and those loud and brilliant passages to which his delicate physique was unequal, or even had Chopin himself been, like Liszt, a man of literary tastes and capabilities, how much happier the outcome! How that mutual happiness, triumphing over the depressing power of a dread disease--as afterwards in the case of Heinrich Heine--would have infused a more luminous color into the prevailing sombreness of his tone poetry! But, thankful for our rich heritage, we grieve not over what might have been.

V

Because of the superabundance of producers in every department of art and literature, and because the actual needs of the world are small in proportion to the total output, a sifting results whereby is preserved only that most typical of its kind. Thus of a thousand melodies popular in their hour, one is added to a people's treasury of song. A stirring, national anthem, or a perfect poem of tender feeling or contagious flame, may alone preserve the memory of a prolific author. Much of what the world once deemed great in art, as in all else, has gone to the limbo of little things. Of the surprising bulk of poems which Byron at thirty-six left behind him, most of the «Childe Harold,» displaying the range and fire of his yet undimmed imagination, and the freshness and amplitude of his characteristic, eloquent description, will live; but «Lara» and «Cain» and such must mingle with the trodden dust. So in the domain of music; many old-time authors of supposed masterpieces are superceded by others of like calibre and claim. Only of him who in his department creates a new type, or perfects an old one, can anything approaching longevity be predicted.

To but one popular poet was it given to interpret in a hundred lyrics the heart of his peasant Scotland. To but one English dramatist to create for our sympathy Lear, Cordelia, Othello and Desdemona, and to evoke from his fecund brain the philosophical musings of Hamlet, the whimsical humor of Falstaff, the gossamer beauties of «Midsummer Night's Dream,» and the terrible realism of Macbeth and Richard. To but one epic poet was it given to breathe a quickening breath into the pale shades of those mighty dead, Hector, Agamemnon, Achilles, and many an otherwise forgotten hero. To but one musician was it given to perfect in «The Well-tempered Clavichord» the great organ Fugue, to but one master of his art to show the attainable in those purely classical forms, the Symphony and the Sonata.

But what in a summary are the features of Chopin warranting his present vogue, and assuring his future fame? They are many, and each is an unimpeachable witness to his worth.

Prior to his day, Bach and Beethoven had explored the known world of harmony. They knew the geography of its vast continents, the choreography of its countries, the topography of its mountains and valleys and plains. They had measured its waterways, had sounded its seas, had sailed by its limiting shores; and then Ludwig Spohr, suspecting other lands beyond the uncharted west, had ventured as from Gibraltar even to the Azores, or the Canaries, the Fortunate Islands of old. Schumann had gone even farther, but not to the utmost of daring for this was the deed of Chopin. He, the Columbus of composers, gave to Harmony a new world. He, and he alone, first dreamed and then beheld its isles of Paradise, tropic and enticing, embowered and restful, fit for lone and pensive musing till suddenly the sun is darkened, the winds make wail, and a dread note of thunder foretells the bursting storm. Many times a voyager, many times an explorer, he brought continually, for the world's wonder and delight, the fantastic, the weird, the exquisite. Ah! his was no haphazard sailing on the ocean of sound; no rudderless drifting with wind and tide! Every appliance of the skilled navigator, the quadrant, the sextant, the compass, were his guides. In day or in night he knew the altitude of the sun or else of the polar star. He had calculated to a nicety the deflections of the needle. Though seemingly lost was he on the limitless waves, latitude and longitude, to the fraction of a degree, were clear to his never-beclouded mind. He it was who opened the way for all future discoverers and, inevitably, for rash and turbulent adventurers, even for Richard Strauss that Cortes, that Pizarro of them all.

An erudite originality, and the passionate abandon of the author of «Norma,» characterize Chopin the melodist. In the new world by him discovered, his own before-mentioned world of the ideal, were birds of rare and differing plume, winged with the delicate greens of half-grown forest leaves, or breasted with the morn's red kindling ere the sun, or throated with the orange of the fading eve, or mottled with the melancholy grey which tells the night. And some there were a purity of white more spotless than the farthest, feathery cloud; and some whose tufty blue was borrowed from no sky like ours. Of these creatures of the composer's realm, each was vocal with the mood whereof his beauty was the symbol. Amidst the morning wood, one lifted to the sun a brief yet brilliant song of transport; another's notes were cadenced from beside the splash of shaded waterfalls when noon was burning all the fields. Another at the day's down-sinking breathed a tender plaint, or trembled forth a melancholy, sweet farewell; and when the round and tropic moon had touched the listening groves to silver, a rarer than the nightingale would warble from the branching palms.

These all were the teachers that made Chopin a melodist; but he was more than a melodist, more than the harmonist we have indicated; he was a great, national tone-poet whose romantic measures characterized his Poland better than did the lines of her chiefest versifiers. The individuality of Chopin the composer was distinguishable as that of Beethoven and Wagner. He was above the mere perfector of types. His Scherzos, his Preludes, his Ballades, his Fantaisies are original conceptions. On the rhythm of the Polish dance he reared his dainty Mazurkas. Graceful and ethereal, they yielded like the slender pine to every swaying wind. Framed to endure, no blast could overthrow them. On the same national foundation uprose his Polonaises, an architecture of his own devising. Fantastic but not grotesque, uniquely and wholly expressive, those solid structures argued immovability, but the tempest proved them pliant and yet enduringly based as the deep-rooted giants of the wood.

The master of the mechanical difficulties of Bach and Clementi, must encounter others quite different in the Etudes of Chopin. The mind of such a one follows not swiftly the odd and rapid chromatics swarming through certain of them. His muscles tire in the midst of extended and unusual chords filling whole pages. His fingers, trained to anticipate conventional harmonic successions in the passage work, are here hindered by the unusual become the usual, the exception become the universal rule; and yet the musical worth of these intractable measures, whose like abounds everywhere in Chopin, compels the pianist of our day to conquer them.

But, more important than the mechanical, there is in Chopin a mental technique peculiar to himself. It informed his playing with an ineffable charm which haunted the memory of pupils and listeners, and yet lives, a tradition of the old Paris days.

Unlike Shakespeare and Beethoven, the Pole was not privileged to sound the harp of universal life; therefore the universal note is denied him, and therefore his chief interpreters may not be chosen from the gifted of every nation. It cannot be denied that for the music of the vehement, unreasoning passion which in an instant transforms the shaft of love to the stiletto, the Italian temperament is alone adequate. It is acknowledged that for the rendition of the semi-barbaric native rhythms, the wild, lawless onrushings and the tearful, or dreamy, or voluptuous lingerings of Hungarian music, the blood of the Magyars must surge from the heart to the finger tips.

These examples prove that the mental technique of our composer, a matter of phrasing and pedaling and accent, and, most intangible of requirements, the Chopin rubato, is most easily and completely mastered by the Slav genius. Of the world's goodly company of virtuosi, only a few exponents of the Polish musician wholly reveal his invaluable contributions to art.

In her own eyes the Amazonian Sand towered a genius in every way superior to the sickly and effeminate-mannered Chopin, but she attained not to the duty of a great novelist. No permanent types have sprung from her ambitious and busy pen. Those fretting, fuming, shadow-chasing Byronic heroes and heroines have lived their mortal days, and discriminating Time denies them an immortality vouchsafed the works of the man she abandoned.

Chopin's career as composer ends with the Sand affair. Of what followed little remains to be told. An unimportant visit to London and Edinburgh where broken health and spirits were serious obstacles to brilliant artistic success. A few friendships formed, a few old ones cemented, then back to Paris which first he entered a sojourner. Yes, back to Paris, the gay and frivolous and cynical Paris, that dances to the waiting grave and laughs and scoffs until the sad receiving of the tomb.

And now at last the untimely end. He who had blended the sheen of stars with the rainbow mist of waterfalls; he who had swung the forging hammer, and rivalled the delicate, meshy gold of Vulcan; he who had prisoned the loud thunder, the swift lightning, the angry, the plaintive, the whispering wind; he who had outridden the ocean's fury, and slept on the polished breast of mountain lakes; he, the Endymion of melancholy groves beloved of Luna; he, the portrayer of battles dread with the doings of conquering foes, was himself to yield, leaving for our musical heritage the gloom and glory of his works.

Let us draw near, but not to the concert hall, and the applauding crowd greeting the advent of the young Polish virtuoso. Yes, let us draw near, but not to the dazzling salon and yonder listening group, the elite of fashion and culture and fame, gathered around the Erard. Let us draw nearer than these; nearer than the studio of the composer, and the wrapt company of the inner circle: Sand and Hiller and Heine and Meyerbeer and Delacroix and Liszt, who himself has described the scene. Ah, let us, with hushed hearts and noiseless foot-fall, approach and enter, for this is the place of parting where human angels neglect no ministration of love and soothing song as a finished life sinks, like the master's diminuendo, to waken and swell and rush and thunder, filled with the vigor of immortal day.

Far from the charm of English vales and meadows; far from the skylark and the cloud he saw and loved above their freshening green; afar from all the sweet allurements of his native isle he sleeps, the English Shelley, where the blue of Italy is bending o'er the ruined olden, and the risen new whose ancient and eternal name is Rome. And close beside, where Winter spreads the flowers of northern June, is lying Adonais, poet wept in tearful poesy, the youthful Keats whom Beauty, in the guise of Death, drew to her own enamoured breast.