Chopin: The Man and His Music | Page 9

remain settled in
one place bore a pathological impress,--consumptives are often so.
The Paris of 1831, the Paris of arts and letters, was one of the most
delightful cities in the world for the culture-loving. The molten tide of
passion and decorative extravagance that swept over intellectual
Europe three score years and ten ago, bore on its foaming crest Victor
Hugo, prince of romanticists. Near by was Henri Heine,--he left
Heinrich across the Rhine,--Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and
gall, who sneered and wept in the same couplet. The star of classicism
had seemingly set. In the rich conflict of genius were Gautier,

Schumann, and the rest. All was romance, fantasy, and passion, and the
young men heard the moon sing silvery--you remember De
Musset!--and the leaves rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers.
"Away with the gray- beards," cried he of the scarlet waistcoat, and all
France applauded "Ernani." Pity it was that the romantic infant had to
die of intellectual anaemia, leaving as a legacy the memories and work
of one of the most marvellous groupings of genius since the Athens of
Pericles. The revolution of 1848 called from the mud the sewermen.
Flaubert, his face to the past, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote
an epic of the French bourgeois. Zola and his crowd delved into a
moral morass, and the world grew weary of them. And then the faint,
fading flowers of romanticism were put into albums where their purple
harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight
forgetfulness. Berlioz, mad Hector of the flaming locks, whose
orchestral ozone vivified the scores of Wagnerand Liszt, began to
sound garishly empty, brilliantly superficial; "the colossal nightingale"
is difficult to classify even to-day. A romantic by temperament he
unquestionably was. But then his music, all color, nuance, and
brilliancy, was not genuinely romantic in its themes. Compare him with
Schumann, and the genuine romanticist tops the virtuoso. Berlioz, I
suspect, was a magnified virtuoso. His orchestral technique is supreme,
but his music fails to force its way into my soul. It pricks the nerves, it
pleases the sense of the gigantic, the strange, the formless, but there is
something uncanny about it all, like some huge, prehistoric bird, an
awful Pterodactyl with goggle eyes, horrid snout and scream. Berlioz,
like Baudelaire, has the power of evoking the shudder. But as John
Addington Symonds wrote: "The shams of the classicists, the spasms of
the romanticists have alike to be abandoned. Neither on a mock
Parnassus nor on a paste- board Blocksberg can the poet of the age now
worship. The artist walks the world at large beneath the light of natural
day." All this was before the Polish charmer distilled his sugared
wormwood, his sweet, exasperated poison, for thirsty souls inmorbid
Paris.
Think of the men and women with whom the new comer associated--
for his genius was quickly divined: Hugo, Lamartine, Pere
Lamenais,--ah! what balm for those troubled days was in his "Paroles
d'un Croyant,"--Chateaubriand, Saint-Simon, Merimee, Gautier, Liszt,

Victor Cousin, Baudelaire, Ary Scheffer, Berlioz, Heine,--who asked
the Pole news of his muse the "laughing nymph,"- -"If she still
continued to drape her silvery veil around the flowing locks of her
green hair, with a coquetry so enticing; if the old sea god with the long
white beard still pursued this mischievous maid with his ridiculous
love?"--De Musset, De Vigny, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Auber,
Sainte-Beuve, Adolphe Nourrit, Ferdinand Hiller, Balzac, Dumas,
Heller, Delacroix,--the Hugo of painters,--Michelet, Guizot, Thiers,
Niemcevicz and Mickiewicz the Polish bards, and George Sand: the
quintessence of the Paris of art and literature.
The most eloquent page in Liszt's "Chopin" is the narrative of an
evening in the Chaussee d'Antin, for it demonstrates the Hungarian's
literary gifts and feeling for the right phrase. This description of
Chopin's apartment "invaded by surprise" has a hypnotizing effect on
me. The very furnishings of the chamber seem vocal under Liszt's
fanciful pen. In more doubtful taste is his statement that "the glace
which covers the grace of the elite, as it does the fruit of their
desserts,...could not have been satisfactory to Chopin"! Liszt, despite
his tendency to idealize Chopin after his death, is our most trustworthy
witness at this period. Chopin was an ideal to Liszt though he has not
left us a record of his defects. The Pole was ombrageux and easily
offended; he disliked democracies, in fact mankind in the bulk stunned
him. This is one reason, combined with a frail physique, of his inability
to conquer the larger public. Thalberg could do it; his aristocratic
tournure, imperturbability, beautiful touch and polished mechanism
won the suffrage of his audiences. Liszt never stooped to cajole. He
came, he played, he overwhelmed. Chopin knew all this, knew his
weaknesses, and fought to overcome them but failed. Another