the measure of a man is the measure of his impress upon the world, not solely and of necessity the world of his day, but, in fact, the world of all days henceforth to be. should we define that impress as something outwardly apparent like his doing who delves in the mine, or ploughs in the field, the statement is inadequate and even false. our world is a manifold condition wherein, as one ascends, things material eventuate in things mental and things spiritual.
this globe, vast and teeming with life; this total of mundane consciousness, is, in its imponderable aspect, subdivided into many and diverse worlds, each wholly sphered, each sufficing for its adapted dwellers.
what a variety of living! behold the world of the musician, bright and beautiful as a loka of the buddhist heaven! a flexible world close-touching and almost blending with that of the artist or the poet. behold the world of the philosopher which, like the world of the astronomer, seems to its denizen but an islet in the ocean of mind-baffling immensity. quite apart from these revolves the solid and well-defined, but somewhat narrow, world of the man of mercantile pursuits, and more remote, under monotonous skies, the dull world of the unthinking, drear as a desert save here and there some little turf of almost withered green.
however, the world of the musician claims our attention; let us look with his eyes; hear with his ears; understand with his intuitions. all else shut out, his world is subdivisible: within it is discovered another. lured on by the shine of golden wings, and the delicate cantabile of angel voices ineffably sweet and pure, we enter where dwells the soul of a true tone-poet, the soul of frederic chopin.
in chopin, the subject of this study, the blood of two nations met and mingled. the france of his father, and the poland of his mother, could each with equal justice claim him as its own. chopin was born in the vicinity of warsaw, on march 1, 1809, and in the capital city of the grand duchy, created by napoleon, he was educated musically until the age of twelve, an age when the average musician enters upon his pupilage. then it was deemed best by his professors that he be left to the self-development of his unique individuality.
naturally our precocious child, our future composer sui generis, was now the pet of the aristocracy; the plaything of that class which, as a whole, not only in warsaw, but also in pretty much the world over, lived, as now it lives, to be amused and served by those who, in a land of democratic opportunities, would soon be its acknowledged superiors.
for an artist wholly unique, a smoothing and polishing to the many exactions of polite society is an undertaking questionable indeed. to come into outward conformity with mere convention is to imperil the freedom of his inner individuality. the actual effect of such a course on the genius of chopin cannot be determined; that it survived the ordeal is proof enough of its virility and tenacity of purpose.
as we have hinted, the world of the musician, unlike that of the severely practical man, has no fixed diameter; elastic, it widens at his will; at the bidding of his sympathies it stretches until co-extensive with the globe. thus it gathers into its circumference every land where live and labor his brethren in the art. and so we find our youthful composer looking beyond the limits of his warsaw, looking and longing for physical contact with that with which his heart was already in rapport; dresden and prague and berlin, but chiefly vienna the renowned, the rich and glorious with the memories and bequeathings of haydn and mozart and beethoven and schubert. there could be heard, in its unfading loveliness, the ?freischütz? of weber in whom romanticism first wakened like a rose at dawn. there such pianists as czerny and hummel would discover to chopin his failings, or prove his merits to be all his own. and then, far off as the horizon of his daydreams, upgrew the sumptuous city on the seine, the siren city sweet of voice and fair of form; the heartless, hope-wrecking city beneath whose mocking eye the unheard wagner in after years must chafe and struggle and starve and almost cease to be.
chopin was instinctively and wholly a romanticist. though deemed ultra by many a contemporary critic, to us he stands revealed the great tone-poet of the piano; the keats, or rather the shelley of musicians; the inimitable modern from whom the groping and straining virtuoso-producers of to-day have much retrograded.
as a pianoforte writer, chopin has only beethoven as compeer, but each in his way is supreme. the supremacy of beethoven is that of the symphonist in whose brain the orchestra sounds ever a multitudinous variety of tone color. the piano was his dearest friend, the orchestra his great heart's love not to be shut out, not to be forgotten, because of friendship's closest, warmest hour; and so the orchestra would crowd and cramp itself in the piano. on the other hand, his chosen instrument was to chopin his all of abiding friendship and passionate, absorbing love, and every height and every deep of his being is therein contained; his every unclouded gem, set in ornate and exquisite workmanship, his every matched and strung pearl, finds there a golden casket. chopin made of his erard, or his pleyel, a novel instrument. no longer of uniform tint, its tone colors were yet unlike those from the orchestral blending of wood and metal and string.
ere long our composer-virtuoso has met and measured many of his renowned contemporaries, and, by fair comparison, he knows to a nicety his own status; already he anticipates the acclaim of a just future. such seership is necessary to the man of genius. foreknowledge is his saving rock amidst the merciless seas of ridicule. clinging to that stay, he awaits the spent fury of the storm, the lulling of winds, the leveling of waves.
for the sake of comparison let us, from the vantage ground of this present, glance at the chief musical celebrities contacted by chopin in the years of his youthful activity. thalberg, smooth and faultless executant, delight of the dilettante and the superficial amateur, was throwing off a series of showy but withal empty transcriptions of which his ?mosè in egitto? may be held the best. as a moulder of musicians, notably liszt, and as a developer of technique, the hardworking czerny was proving of immense value, but as a composer he was too diligent, not waiting for that inspiration which cannot be forced. of hummel, much over-rated in those days, the best thing sayable is that he influenced the shaping of chopin's concertos, the least faulty of his larger works. moscheles, the tutor of mendelssohn, was a musician much esteemed by chopin who deemed it a privilege to play the bass to the composer's treble in his chief pianoforte works. unlike certain of our modern pianists, kalkbrenner was no muscular virtuoso venting his rage upon the keyboard. he was, on the contrary, a performer of refinement and precision; one who could claim certain excellencies akin to those of chopin. but alas for human vanity! his great show pieces, the cause of much self-gratulation, have vanished from every concert repertory and every musical collection save that of the antiquary. mendelssohn, despite his eminence, had the backward-looking eye; much in his matter had already been sung and played, but not with the grace and charm of that accomplished scholar. and yet is the ?elijah? a triumph, a thing enduring, an epitome of all his powers. oak-ribbed, wealth-laden voyager on the sea of time, how bravely it breasts the waves that long have whelmed the wrecks of mediocre talent and seeming genius and empty pretence! schumann, discoverer of the genius of chopin, was a musician and thinker, an ever-broadening cosmopolitan, a radical in the van of ?sthetic progress and, inevitably, the soul of the new musical romanticism.
almost any page, almost any stanza of shelley—most ethereal of word-poets—would indicate an unobstructed outpouring which the first drafts of even his wholly sustained inspirations quite disprove. beethoven's collected sketch-books are a study in the evolution of themes afterward impressed with the seal of spontaneity. we are told by one who ought to know, that chopin's every opus was born only after soul-travail both long and sore. against these curious facts can be set this apparent contradiction: facility is the rule among the merely talented, and many such have with ease dashed off their best efforts, of which doing they are wont to boast because, to the popular way of thinking, facility is proof of genius. now why should shelley and beethoven and chopin wrestle with the idea, and pollok and czerny and their kind be so easily victorious?
as we have said, our human world is subdivisible into manifold states of consciousness, each a world to its dwellers. the world of the man of talent may be, and usually is, but a step inward from the world of the multitude; hence few obstacles hinder communication between these nearly-related worlds. the ideas of the inner are with ease translated to the understanding of the outer. evidently this is untrue of those inmost worlds where dwell the deep- and high-dreaming poet and musician whose respective domains are almost outside of time and space, those limitations wherewith the human mind divides the known from the unknown, the sensible from the super-sensible, the finite from the infinite. having in them little or nothing of the quantitative, the ideas of those worlds elude the mental grasp of all save the finely-organized man of genius.
how to come into touch with the great, common world by giving fixed form to that which is formless and by rendering tangible the intangible, making seen the unseen, felt the unfelt, and heard the unheard, is the problem of genius. it was the problem of michel angelo before the unchiselled ?david?; the problem of raphael musing upon the madonnaless canvas; the problem of the absorbed beethoven when, in his seemingly aimless meanderings, the trees by the roadside and in the forest would prompt him to solution with their whispered ?holy! holy!? and it was the problem of chopin as in the quiet of his study, apart from the roar of the great city, the empty page tormented him with the thought of unwritten and perhaps unwritable beauties.
that within the space of twenty-four days, handel penned the notes of his most glorious work, proves nothing but his enormous powers of mental concentration, and the endurance of a brain supported by a vigorous body; but to the vital question: how long had ?the messiah? been maturing in him? history affords no conclusive answer. rossini was no doubt a facile composer, yet from what soul-deep his operas came is proved by his deliberate estimate of their longevity. he believed that as an entirety nothing but ?il barbiere? would survive.
the well-attested fact that beethoven and chopin, those cautious and self-critical composers, were both extempore performers par excellence, goes far toward proving the impromptu inferior to the finished after-product. and does not all this favor our view that from the birth-throes, and not from the painlessness of genius, are born the masterpieces of every art?
