H. G. Wells on America
I came to America balancing between hope and skepticism. The European world is full of the criticism of America; and, for the matter of that, America, too, is full of it; hostility and depreciation prevail—overmuch; for, in spite of rawness and vehemence and a scum of blatant, oh! quite asinine, folly, the United States of America remains the greatest country in the world and the living hope of mankind. It is the supreme break with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most valiant beginning that has ever been made in human life.—The Passionate Friends.
Paderewski and the New Gods
Margaret C. Anderson
I shall keep always, as my most unforgettable memory, the thought of a certain afternoon during Paderewski’s tour this year when he walked quietly back across the stage, in response to an encore, and played Schumann’s Warum. It was somehow heart-breaking. It was a more poignant questioning to me, than Arnold’s
“unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain—
Say, will it never heal?”
Nothing that I have ever heard or seen has given me so vivid a sense of being in the presence of an art that is immortal.
It seems to have become hideously “popular” to love Paderewski. The critics will tell you that it’s only done in America; that Europeans have any number of idols they put before him; and that we who persist in calling him “the greatest” are simply under the spell of an old hypnotism. There was a time, they’ll concede, when he came like a conqueror, royally deserving the flowers we strewed. But now—there’s Bauer, there’s Godowsky, and Hofman, and Gans, and Busoni! One local critic has even gone to the length of saying that since the American public has sat at the feet of these men and learned sanity in piano playing it has no enthusiasm for Paderewski’s “neurotic, disordered, incoherent” music—“his woeful exaggerations of sentiment and hysterical rhapsody.” I should say some unpublishable things to that critic if we should ever discuss the subject.
The three most interesting human faces I know are Forbes-Robertson’s, Kreisler’s, and Paderewski’s. In the English actor’s there is a meeting of strength and spirituality (not the anæmic “spirituality” of certain new cults, but a quality of soul that makes him “a prince, a philosopher, a lover, a soldier, a sad humorist,” all in the limits of one personality) that means utter nobility. It can be as cold as a graven image, or as hot with feeling as a poet’s. Depth upon depth of subtlety plays across it—not the hypnotic subtlety of the Orientalist, but the austere subtlety of an English scholar and a great gentleman. In Kreisler’s there is a meeting of strength and sensuousness that means utter fascination to the artist who would paint him—utter revealment to the musician who would analyze his art. For the secret of Kreisler’s personality and his music lies in that finely balanced combination of qualities: a sensuousness that would be a little overpowering, a little drugging, without the gigantic strength that seems to hold it in leash. That balance makes possible his little air of military jauntiness, of sad Vienna gayety; it gives him that huge effect of power that always makes me feel I’m watching the king of the forest stride through his kingdom. You need never expect emotionalism from this musician; he’s too strong to give you anything but passion. In Paderewski’s face there is a meeting of strength and two other predominant qualities: sentience, I think, and suffering. It’s difficult to express his great, interesting head in a series of nouns; but there are some that come near to it: mystery, melancholy, weariness, a sort of shattering sorrow; always the sense of struggle and pain, and always the final releasement—in music. For while you can conceive a Forbes-Robertson away from the stage, and a Kreisler apart from his violin, you can never for a moment think of Paderewski without his piano. Not that he’s less of a man, but that he’s the most sensitized human instrument that ever dedicated itself to an art.
To resort to the most overworked phrase in the language, Paderewski has a temperament. Somebody has said that no fat person ever possessed one; and after you’ve speculated about this till you begin to wonder what temperament really is, you can come back to Paderewski as the most adequate illustration. Ysaye is the best example I know of the opposite. When strength turns to fat ... well, we’ll not go into that; but to make my point—and there’s certainly nothing of personal maliciousness in it—it’s necessary to reflect that obesity has some insidious influence upon artistic utterance. (Schumann-Heink is an artist in the best meaning of the word; but no one ever talked of her and temperament in the same breath, so she doesn’t negate the issue.) But Ysaye’s tepid, wingless, uninspired music—his utterly sweet but fat music—that appears to attract thousands of people, is as lazily inadequate as its creator would be in a marathon. It’s as though his vision had dropped slowly away with every added pound of avoirdupois. Or perhaps it’s because vision has a fashion of dropping away with age....
Ah!—but Paderewski has the years, too, now, and his playing is as virile, as flaming, as it ever was. An artist—with a temperament—doesn’t get old, any more than Peter Pan does. Paderewski’s furrowed face shows the artist’s eternal striving; his music shows his eternal youth, his faithfulness to the vision that furnishes his answer to the eternal “Warum?”
This is the secret of Paderewski’s white magic. He’s still the supreme god! Bauer plays perfectly within the rules—exquisitely and powerfully—and misses the top height by the mere fraction of a mood, the simple lack of a temperament; or, as O. Henry might have explained it, by the unfortunate encumbrance of a forty-two-inch belt. Hofman has an impatience with his medium, apparently, that leaves his hearer unsatisfied with the piano; while Paderewski, though he transcends the instrument, does so because of his love for the piano as a medium, and forces his hearer to agree with him that it’s the supreme one. Godowsky forces things into the piano—pushes them in and makes them stay there; Paderewski draws things out, always, and fills the world with them.
I can think of no comparison from which he doesn’t emerge unscathed. If I were a musical reactionary, this judgment would have no value here; but I’m not. Classical perfection is no longer interesting; Beethoven seems no longer to comprehend all music—in fact, the people who have no rebellions about the sterility of the old symphonies are quite beyond my range of understanding. But Paderewski plays the old music in a new way, gives it such vitality of meaning that you feel it’s just been born—or, better, perhaps, that its composers have been triumphantly revalued, rejustified in their claim for eternal life. His Beethoven is as full of color as his Chopin; and who, by the way, ever started the popular nonsense about De Pachmann or anyone else being the supreme Chopin exponent? No one has ever played Chopin like Paderewski; no one has ever made such simple, haunting melodies of the nocturnes; no one has ever struck such ringing Polish music out of the polonaises, or such wind-swept cadences from the Berceuse; no one has ever played the Funeral March so like a cosmic procession—the mighty moving of humanity from birth to death and new life; no one has ever so visualized those “orchestras of butterflies that played to Chopin in the sun.”
I have still one great wish in the world: that some time I may hear Paderewski play on a Mason and Hamlin—that piano of unutterable depth and richness. The fact that he’s never used it is the one flaw in his performances, for no other instrument that I’ve heard gives you the same sense of drowning in great waves of warm sound. The combination would convince even the followers of the new gods. But, old or new, and even on his cold Steinway, no one has ever drawn from the piano the same quality of golden tone or dared such simplicity of singing as Paderewski. To put his genius into a sentence: no one has ever built so strong a bridge across the gulf that yawns between vision and accomplishment.