Chopin: The Man and His Music - James Huneker (open ebook .TXT) 📗

thought in terms of the piano, and only the piano. So when we see Chopin’s orchestral music or Wagner’s music for the piano we realize that neither is talking his native tongue—the tongue which nature fitted him to speak.” Speaking of “Chopin and the Sick Men” Mr. Runciman is most pertinent: “These inheritors of rickets and exhausted physical frames made some of the most wonderful music of the century for us. Schubert was the most wonderful of them all, but Chopin runs him very close. … He wrote less, far less than Schubert wrote; but, for the quantity he did write, its finish is miraculous. It may be feverish, merely mournful, cadavre, or tranquil, and entirely beautiful; but there is not a phrase that is not polished as far as a phrase will bear polishing. It is marvellous music; but, all the same, it is sick, unhealthy music.”

 

“Liszt’s estimate of the technical importance of Chopin’s works,”

writes Mr. W.J. Henderson, “is not too large. It was Chopin who systematized the art of pedalling and showed us how to use both pedals in combination to produce those wonderful effects of color which are so necessary in the performance of his music. … The harmonic schemes of the simplest of Chopin’s works are marvels of originality and musical loveliness, and I make bold to say that his treatment of the passing note did much toward showing later writers how to produce the restless and endless complexity of the harmony in contemporaneous orchestral music.”

 

Heinrich Pudor in his strictures on German music is hardly complimentary to Chopin: “Wagner is a thorough-going decadent, an off-shoot, an epigonus, not a progonus. His cheeks are hollow and pale—but the Germans have the full red cheeks. Equally decadent is Liszt. Liszt is a Hungarian and the Hungarians are confessedly a completely disorganized, self-outlived, dying people. No less decadent is Chopin, whose figure comes before one as flesh without bones, this morbid, womanly, womanish, slip-slop, powerless, sickly, bleached, sweet-caramel Pole!” This has a ring of Nietzsche—Nietzsche who boasted of his Polish origin.

 

Now listen to the fatidical Pole Przybyszewski: “In the beginning there was sex, out of sex there was nothing and in it everything was. And sex made itself brain whence was the birth of the soul.” And then, as Mr.

Vance Thompson, who first Englished this “Mass of the Dead”—wrote: “He pictures largely in great cosmic symbols, decorated with passionate and mystic fervors, the singular combat between the growing soul and the sex from which it fain would be free.” Arno Holz thus parodies Przybyszewski: “In our soul there is surging and singing a song of the victorious bacteria. Our blood lacks the white corpuscles. On the sounding board of our consciousness there echoes along the frightful symphony of the flesh. It becomes objective in Chopin; he alone, the modern primeval man, puts our brains on the green meadows, he alone thinks in hyper-European dimensions. He alone rebuilds the shattered Jerusalem of our souls.” All of which shows to what comically delirious lengths this sort of deleterious soul-probing may go.

 

It would be well to consider this word “decadent” and its morbid implications. There is a fashion just now in criticism to over-accentuate the physical and moral weaknesses of the artist.

Lombroso started the fashion, Nordau carried it to its logical absurdity, yet it is nothing new. In Hazlitt’s day he complains, that genius is called mad by foolish folk. Mr. Newman writes in his Wagner, that “art in general, and music in particular, ought not to be condemned merely in terms of the physical degeneration or abnormality of the artist. Some of the finest work in art and literature, indeed, has been produced by men who could not, from any standpoint, be pronounced normal. In the case of Flaubert, of De Maupassant, of Dostoievsky, of Poe, and a score of others, though the organic system was more or less flawed, the work remains touched with that universal quality that gives artistic permanence even to perceptions born of the abnormal.” Mr. Newman might have added other names to his list, those of Michael Angelo and Beethoven and Swinburne. Really, is any great genius quite sane according to philistine standards? The answer must be negative. The old enemy has merely changed his mode of attack: instead of charging genius with madness, the abnormal used in an abnormal sense is lugged in and though these imputations of degeneracy, moral and physical, have in some cases proven true, the genius of the accused one can in no wise be denied. But then as Mr. Philip Hale asks: Why this timidity at being called decadent? What’s in the name?

 

Havelock Ellis in his masterly study of Joris Karl Huysmans, considers the much misunderstood phenomenon in art called decadence. “Technically a decadent style is only such in relation to a classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further specialization, the homogeneous in Spencerian phraseology having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts.” Then he proceeds to show in literature that Sir Thomas Browne, Emerson, Pater, Carlyle, Poe, Hawthorne and Whitman are decadents—not in any invidious sense—but simply in “the breaking up of the whole for the benefit of its parts.” Nietzsche is quoted to the effect that “in the period of corruption in the evolution of societies we are apt to overlook the fact that the energy which in more primitive times marked the operations of a community as a whole has now simply been transferred to the individuals themselves, and this aggrandizement of the individual really produces an even greater amount of energy.” And further, Ellis: “All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes. Decadence suggests to us going down, falling, decay. If we walk down a real hill we do not feel that we commit a more wicked act than when we walked up it….Roman architecture is classic to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and St. Mark’s is the perfected type of decadence in art. … We have to recognize that decadence is an aesthetic and not a moral conception. The power of words is great but they need not befool us. … We are not called upon to air our moral indignation over the bass end of the musical clef.” I recommend the entire chapter to such men as Lombroso Levi, Max Nordau and Heinrich Pudor, who have yet to learn that “all confusion of intellectual substances is foolish.”

 

Oscar Bie states the Chopin case most excellently:—

 

Chopin is a poet. It has become a very bad habit to place this poet in the hands of our youth. The concertos and polonaises being put aside, no one lends himself worse to youthful instruction than Chopin. Because his delicate touches inevitably seem perverse to the youthful mind, he has gained the name of a morbid genius. The grown man who understands how to play Chopin, whose music begins where that of another leaves off, whose tones show the supremest mastery in the tongue of music—such a man will discover nothing morbid in him. Chopin, a Pole, strikes sorrowful chords, which do not occur frequently to healthy normal persons. But why is a Pole to receive less justice than a German? We know that the extreme of culture is closely allied to decay; for perfect ripeness is but the foreboding of corruption. Children, of course, do not know this. And Chopin himself would have been much too noble ever to lay bare his mental sickness to the world. And his greatness lies precisely in this: that he preserves the mean between immaturity and decay. His greatness is his aristocracy. He stands among musicians in his faultless vesture, a noble from head to foot. The sublimest emotions toward whose refinement whole generations had tended, the last things in our soul, whose foreboding is interwoven with the mystery of Judgment Day, have in his music found their form.

 

Further on I shall attempt—I write the word with a patibulary gesture—in a sort of a Chopin variorum, to analyze the salient aspects, technical and aesthetic, of his music. To translate into prose, into any language no matter how poetical, the images aroused by his music, is impossible. I am forced to employ the technical terminology of other arts, but against my judgment. Read Mr. W. F.

Apthorp’s disheartening dictum in “By the Way.” “The entrancing phantasmagoria of picture and incident which we think we see rising from the billowing sea of music is in reality nothing more than an enchanting fata morgana, visible at no other angle than that of our own eye. The true gist of music it never can be; it can never truly translate what is most essential and characteristic in its expression.

It is but something that we have half unconsciously imputed to music; nothing that really exists in music.”

 

The shadowy miming of Chopin’s soul has nevertheless a significance for this generation. It is now the reign of the brutal, the realistic, the impossible in music. Formal excellence is neglected and programme-music has reduced art to the level of an anecdote. Chopin neither preaches nor paints, yet his art is decorative and dramatic—though in the climate of the ideal. He touches earth and its emotional issues in Poland only; otherwise his music is a pure aesthetic delight, an artistic enchantment, freighted with no ethical or theatric messages.

It is poetry made audible, the “soul written in sound.” All that I can faintly indicate is the way it affects me, this music with the petals of a glowing rose and the heart of gray ashes. Its analogies to Poe, Verlaine, Shelley, Keats, Heine and Mickiewicz are but critical sign-posts, for Chopin is incomparable, Chopin is unique. “Our interval,” writes Walter Pater, “is brief.” Few pass it recollectedly and with full understanding of its larger rhythms and more urgent colors. Many endure it in frivol and violence, the majority in bored, sullen submission. Chopin, the New Chopin, is a foe to ennui and the spirit that denies; in his exquisite soul-sorrow, sweet world-pain, we may find rich impersonal relief.

 

V. POET AND PSYCHOLOGIST

 

Music is an order of mystic, sensuous mathematics. A sounding mirror, an aural mode of motion, it addresses itself on the formal side to the intellect, in its content of expression it appeals to the emotions.

Ribot, admirable psychologist, does not hesitate to proclaim music as the most emotional of the arts. “It acts like a burn, like heat, cold or a caressing contact, and is the most dependent on physiological conditions.”

 

Music then, the most vague of the arts in the matter of representing the concrete, is the swiftest, surest agent for attacking the sensibilities. The CRY made manifest, as Wagner asserts, it is a cry that takes on fanciful shapes, each soul interpreting it in an individual fashion. Music and beauty are synonymous, just as their form and substance are indivisible.

 

Havelock Ellis is not the only aesthetician who sees the marriage of music and sex. “No other art tells us such old forgotten secrets about ourselves…It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primitive sex traditions of the race before man was, that music is rooted…Beauty is the child of love.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti has imprisoned in a sonnet the almost intangible feeling aroused by music, the feeling of having pursued in the immemorial past the “route of evanescence.”

 

Is it this sky’s vast vault or ocean’s sound, That is Life’s self and draws my life from me, And by instinct ineffable decree

Holds my breath

Quailing on the bitter bound?

Nay, is it Life or Death, thus thunder-crown’d, That ‘mid the tide of all emergency Now notes