Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians — Frederic Chopin, Part 1

FREDERIC CHOPIN

Nature does not design like art, however realistic she may be.

She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious.

Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is too limited to reproduce them.

Chopin was a resume of these inconsequences which God alone can allow Himself to create, and which have their particular logic.

He was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full of a legitimate pride which was unconscious of itself.

Hence arose sufferings which he did not reason and which did not fix themselves on a determined object.

--_George Sand in "The Story of My Life"_ FREDERIC CHOPIN

Maybe I am all wrong about it, yet I can not help believing that the spirit of man will live again somewhere in a better world than ours.

Fenelon says, "Justice demands another life in order to make good the inequalities of this."

Astronomers prophesy the existence of stars long before they can see them.

They know where they ought to be, and training their telescopes in that direction they wait, knowing they will find.

Materially, no one can imagine anything more beautiful than this earth, for the simple reason that we can not imagine anything we have not seen;

we may make new combinations, but the whole is all made up of parts of things with which we are familiar.

This great green earth out of which we have sprung, of which we are a part, that supports our bodies, and to which our bodies must return to repay the loan, is very, very beautiful.

But the spirit of man is not fully at home here; as we grow in soul and intellect, we hear, and hear again, a voice which says, "Arise and get thee hence, for this is not thy rest."

And the greater and nobler and more sublime the spirit, the more constant the discontent.

Discontent may come from various causes, so it will not do to assume that the discontented are always the pure in heart, but it is a fact that the wise and excellent have all known the meaning of world-weariness.

The more you study and appreciate this life, the more sure you are that this is not all.

You pillow your head upon Mother Earth, listen to her heart-throb, and even as your spirit is filled with the love of her, your gladness is half-pain and there comes to you a joy that hurts.

To look upon the most exalted forms of beauty, such as a sunset at sea, the coming of a storm on the prairie, the shadowy silence of the desert, or the sublime majesty of the mountains, begets a sense of sadness, an increasing loneliness.

It is not enough to say that man encroaches on man so that we are really deprived of our freedom, that civilization is caused by a bacillus, and that from a natural condition we have gotten into a hurly-burly where rivalry is rife--all this may be true, but beyond and outside of all this there is no physical environment in way of plenty which earth can supply, that will give the tired soul peace.

They are the happiest who have the least; and the fable of the stricken king and the shirtless beggar contains the germ of truth.

The wise hold all earthly ties very lightly--they are stripping for eternity.

World-weariness is only a desire for a better spiritual condition.

There is more to be written on this subject of world-pain--to exhaust the theme would require a book.

And certain it is that I have no wish to say the final word on any topic.

The gentle reader has certain rights, and among these is the privilege of summing up the case.

But the fact holds that world-pain is a form of desire.

All desires are just, proper and right; and their gratification is the means by which Nature supplies us that which we need.

Desire not only causes us to seek that which we need, but is a form of attraction by which the good is brought to us, just as the ameba creates a swirl in the waters that brings its food within reach.

Every desire in Nature has a fixed, definite purpose in the Divine Economy, and every desire has its proper gratification.

If we desire the friendship of a certain person, it is because that person has certain soul-qualities that we do not possess, and which complement our own.

Through desire do we come into possession of our own; by submitting to its beckonings we add cubits to our stature; and we also give out to others our own attributes, without becoming poorer, for soul is not limited.

All Nature is a symbol of spirit, so I believe that somewhere there must be a proper gratification for this mysterious nostalgia of the soul.

The Eternal Unities require a condition where men and women will live to love, and not to sorrow; where the tyranny of things hated shall not ever prevail, nor that for which the heart yearns turn to ashes at our touch.

* * * * * "I believe Stevie is not quite at home here--he'll not remain so very long," said a woman to me in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-five.

Five years have gone by, and recently the cable flashed the news that Stephen Crane was dead.

Dead at twenty-nine, with ten books to his credit, two of them good, which is two good books more than most of us scribblers will ever write.

Yes, Stephen Crane wrote two things that are immortal.

"The Red Badge of Courage" is the strongest, most vivid work of imagination ever fished from an ink-pot by an American.

"Men who write from the imagination are helpless when in presence of the fact," said James Russell Lowell.

In answer to which I'll point you "The Open Boat," the sternest, creepiest bit of realism ever penned, and Stevie was in the boat.

American critics honored Stephen Crane with more ridicule, abuse and unkind comment than was bestowed on any other writer of his time.

Possibly the vagueness, and the loose, unsleeked quality of his work invited the gibes, jeers, and the loud laughter that tokens the vacant mind; yet as half-apology for the critics we might say that scathing criticism never killed good work; and this is true, but it sometimes has killed the man.

Stephen Crane never answered back, nor made explanation, but that he was stung by the continued efforts of the press to laugh him down, I am very sure.

The lack of appreciation at home caused him to shake the dust of America from his feet and take up his abode across the sea, where his genius was being recognized, and where strong men stretched out sinewy hands of welcome, and words of appreciation were heard, instead of silly, insulting parody.

In passing, it is well to note that the five strongest writers of America had their passports to greatness viséed in England before they were granted recognition at home.

I refer to Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe and Stephen Crane.

Stevie did not know he cared for approbation, but his constant refusal to read what the newspapers said about him was proof that he did.

He boycotted the tribe of Romeike, because he knew that nine clippings out of every ten would be unkind, and his sensitive soul shrank from the pin-pricks.

Contemporary estimates are usually wrong, and Crane is only another of the long list of men of genius to whom Fame brings a wreath and finds her poet dead.

Stephen Crane was a reincarnation of Frederic Chopin.

Both were small in stature, slight, fair-haired, and of that sensitive, acute, receptive temperament--capable of highest joy and keyed for exquisite pain.

Haunted with the prophetic vision of quick-coming death, and with the hectic desire to get their work done, they often toiled the night away and were surprised by the rays of the rising sun.

Both were shrinking yet proud, shy but bold, with a tenderness and a feminine longing for love that earth could not requite.

At times mad gaiety, that ill-masked a breaking heart, took the reins, and the spirits of children just out of school seemed to hold the road.

At other times--and this was the prevailing mood--the manner was one of placid, patient, calm and smooth, unruffled hope; but back and behind all was a dynamo of energy, a brooding melancholy of unrest, and the crouching world-sorrow that would not down.

Chopin reached sublimity through sweet sounds; Crane attained the same heights through the sense of sight and words that symboled color, shapes and scenes.

In each the distinguishing feature is the intense imagination and active sympathy.

Knowledge consists in a sense of values--of distinguishing this from that, for truth lies in the mass.

The delicate nuances of Chopin's music have never been equaled by another composer; every note is cryptic, every sound a symbol.

And yet it is dance-music, too, but still it tells its story of baffled hope and stifled desire--the tragedy of Poland in sweet sounds.

Stephen Crane was an artist in his ability to convey the feeling by just the right word, or a word misplaced, like a lady's dress in disarray, or a hat askew.

This daring quality marks everything he wrote.

The recognition that language is fluid, and at best only an expedient, flavors all his work.

He makes no fetish of a grammar--if grammar gets in the way, so much the worse for the grammar.

All is packed with color, and charged with feeling, yet the work is usually quiet in quality and modest in manner.

Art is born of heart, not head; and so it seems to me that the work of these men whose names I have somewhat arbitrarily linked, will live.

Each sowed in sorrow and reaped in grief.

They were tender, kind, gentle, with a capacity for love that passes the love of woman.

They were each indifferent to the proprieties, very much as children are.

They lived in cloister-like retirement, hidden from the public gaze, or wandered unnoticed and unknown.

They founded no schools, delivered no public addresses, and in their own day made small impress on the times.

Both were sublimely indifferent to what had been said and done--the term precedent not being found within the covers of their bright lexicon of words.

In the nature of each was a goodly trace of peroxide of iron that often manifested itself in the man's work.

The faults in each spring from an intense personality, uncolored by the surroundings, and such faults in such men are virtues.

They belong to that elect few who have built for the centuries.

The influence of Chopin, beyond that of other composers, is alive today, and moves unconsciously, but profoundly, every music-maker; the seemingly careless style of Crane is really lapidaric, and is helping to file the fetters from every writer who has ideas plus, and thoughts that burn.

Mother Nature in giving out energy gives each man about an equal portion.

But that ability to throw the weight with the blow, to concentrate the soul in a sonnet, to focus force in a single effort, is the possession of God's Chosen Few.

Chopin put his affection, his patriotism, his wrath, his hope, and his heroism into his music--as if the song of all the forest birds could be secured, sealed and saved for us!

* * * * * The father of Chopin was a Frenchman who went up to Poland seeking gain and adventure.

He became a soldier under Kosciusko and arose to rank of Captain.

He found such favor with the nobility by his gracious ways that he became a teacher of French in the family of Count Frederic Skarbek.

In the family group was a fair young dependent of nervous temperament--slight, active, gentle and intelligent.

She was descendent from a line of aristocrats, but in a country where revolutions have been known to begin and end before breakfast, titles stand for little.

Nicholas Chopin, ex-soldier, teacher of French and Deportment, married this fine young girl, and they lived in one of Count Skarbek's straw-thatched cottages at the little village of Zelazowa-Wola, twenty-nine miles from Warsaw.

Here it was that Frederic Chopin was born, in Eighteen Hundred Nine--that memorable year when Destiny sent a flight of great souls to the planet Earth.

The country was bleak and battle-scarred; it had been drained of its men and treasure, and served as a dueling-ground and the place of skulls for kings and such riffraff who have polluted this fair world with their boastings of a divine power.

The struggle of Poland to free herself from the grip of the imperial succubi has generated an atmosphere of ultramarine, so we view the little land of patriots (and fanatics) through a mist of melancholy.

The history of Poland is written in blood and tears.

Go ask John Sobieski, who saw his father hanged by order of Ferdinand Maximilian, and child though he was, realized that banishment was the fate of himself and mother; and then ten years after, himself, stood death-guard over this same Maximilian in Mexico, and told that tyrant the story of his life, and shook hands with him, calling it quits, ere the bandage was tied over the eyes of the ex-dictator and the sunlight shut out forever.

Go ask John Sobieski!

The woes of Poland have produced strange men.

Under such rule as she has known relentless hate springs up in otherwise gracious hearts from the scattered dragons' teeth; and in other natures, where there is not quite so much of the motive temperament, a deep strain of sorrow and religious melancholy finds expression.

The exquisite sensibility, delicate insight, proud reserve and brooding world-sorrow of Frederic Chopin were the inheritance of mother to son.

This mother's mind was saturated with the wrongs her people had endured: she herself had suffered every contumely, for where chance had caused fact to falter, imagination had filled the void.

It is easy to say that Chopin's was an abnormal nature, and of course it was, but when disease divides this world from another only by the thinnest veil, the mind has been known to see things with a clearness and vividness never before attained.

With Chopin the strands of life were often taut to the breaking-point, but ere they snapped, their vibration gave forth to us some exquisite harmonies.

Curiously enough, this power to see and do is often the possession of dying men.

The life flares up in a flame before it goes out forever.

The passion of the consumptive Camille, as portrayed by Dumas, is typical--no healthy woman ever loved with that same intense, eager and almost vindictive desire.

It was a race with Death.

Perfect health brings unconsciousness of body, and disease that almost relieves the spirit of this weight of flesh produces the same results.

Again we have the Law of Antithesis.

That such a youth as Frederic Chopin should seek in music a surcease from his world-sorrow is very natural.

A stricken people turns to music;

it forms a necessary part of all religious observance, and the dirge of mourners, the wail of the "keener," and the songs of the banshee evolve naturally into being wherever the heart is sore oppressed.

It was the slave-songs that made slavery bearable; and in the long ago, exiles in Babylon found a solemn joy by singing the songs of Zion.

Chopin drank in the songs of Poland with his mother's milk, and while yet a child began to give them voice in his own way.

In the meantime his father's fortunes had mended a bit, and the family had moved to Warsaw, where Nicholas Chopin was Professor of Languages at the Lyceum.

The title of the office fills the mouth in a very satisfying way, but the emoluments attached hardly afforded such a gratification.

In Warsaw there was much misery, for the plunderer had worked conscription and seizure to its furthest limit.

Want and destitution were on every hand, but still this brave people maintained their University and clung to its traditions.

The family of the Professor of Languages consisted of himself, wife, three daughters and the son Frederic.

Their income for several years was not over fifteen dollars a month, but still they managed to maintain an appearance of decency, and by the help of the public library, the free museum and the open-air concerts, they kept abreast of the times in literature, art and music.

There was absolute economy required, every particle of food was saved, and when cast-off dresses were sent from the home of the Count it was a godsend for the mother and girls, who measured and patched and pieced, making garments for themselves, and for Frederic as well; so while their raiment was not gaudy nor expressed in fancy, it served.

Chopin once said to George Sand, "I never can think of my mother without her knitting-needles!"

And George Sand has recorded, "Frederic never had but one passion and that was his mother."

Into all of her knitting this mother's flying needles worked much love.

The entire household was one of mutual service, and gentle, trusting affection.

The weekly letters of Chopin to his mother from Paris, and the cold sweat on his forehead at the thought of his parents knowing of his relationship with George Sand, are credit-marks to his character.

There is a sweet recompense in mutual deprivation where trials and difficulties only serve to cement the affections; and who shall say how much the wondrous blending of strength and delicacy in the music of Chopin is due to the memory of those early days of toil and trial, of strength and forbearance, of hope and love?

To be born into such a family is a great blessing.

The value of the environment is shown in that all three of the sisters became distinguished in literature.

Two of them married men of intellect, wealth and worth, and through the collaboration of these sisters, books were produced that did for the plain people of Poland what Harriet Martineau's books on sociology did for the people of England.

Frederic played and practised at the Lyceum where his father taught, and the ambition of his parents was that he should grow up and take the place of Professor of Music in the Lyceum.

Adalbert Zevyny, one of the leading pianists in the city, became attracted to the boy and took him as a pupil, without pay.

The teacher soon became a little boastful of his precocious pupil, and when there came a public concert for the benefit of the poor, we find reference made to Chopin thus, "A child not yet eight years of age played, and connoisseurs say he promises to replace Mozart."

In reality the boy was nearer twelve than eight, but his size and looks suggested to the management the idea of plagiarizing, in advance, our honored countryman, Phineas T. Barnum.

Hence the announcement on the programs.

But now the nobility of the neighborhood began to send carriages for the fair-haired lad, so he could play for their invited guests.

Then came snug little honorariums that soon replaced his patched-up wardrobe for something more fashionable.

Frederic took all the applause quite as a matter of course, and on one occasion, after he had played divinely, he asked a proud lady this question, "How do you like my new collar?"

He was to the manner born, and the gentle blood of his mother formed him as a fit companion for aristocrats.

These occasional musicales at the houses of the great made money matters easier, and Frederic began to take lessons from Joseph Elsner, who taught him the science of composition, and introduced him into the deeper mysteries of music-making.

Elsner, it was, more than any other man, who forced the truth upon Chopin that he must play to satisfy himself, and in composition be his own most exacting critic.

In other words, Elsner developed and strengthened in Chopin the artistic conscience--that impulse which causes an artist to scorn doing anything save his best.

From little excursions to neighboring towns and country houses about Warsaw, Chopin now ventured farther away from home, chaperoned by his friend, Prince Radziwill.

He visited Berlin, Venice, Prague, Heidelberg, and mingled on an absolute equality with the nobility.

If they had titles, he had talents.

And his talents often made their decorations sing small.

His modesty was witching, and while in public concerts his playing was not pronounced enough to capture the gallery, yet in small gatherings he won all hearts, and the fact that he played his own compositions made him an added object of enthusiasm to the elect.

Chopin arrived in Paris when he was twenty-two years of age.

It was not his intention to remain more than a few weeks, but Paris was to be his home for eighteen years--and then Pere la Chaise.