One of the constant temptations of the biographer is that of seizing on some salient trait in his subject, magnifying it beyond all relation to others which supplement or modify it, and portraying an eccentric rather than a rounded personality, a monster rather than a man. Human nature is complex, many-sided, even self-contradictory to any but the most penetrative view; and so slender are the resources of literature for dealing with such a paradox as a man, that writers, resorting to simplification, sacrifice fullness to intelligibility. In books Napoleon is apt to be denied all scruples, Keats all virility, Marcus Aurelius all engaging folly; the real men were probably not so simple. It is certain, at any rate, that Tschaïkowsky, the greatest of Russian musicians, one of the two greatest of all composers since Wagner, cannot have been the mere incarnation of concentrated gloom that his critics have drawn. Some worthier powers than that of eloquent lamenting must have contributed to mold him. He was not simply a sort of neurasthenic Jeremiah with a faculty for orchestration.
It is only too easy and plausible, to be sure, to label him with one of those insidiously blighting epithets, «neurasthenic,» «decadent,» or «morbid.» He was, in fact, of an unfortunate heredity; his grandfather was epileptic, and his own symptoms pointed to an inherited nervous irritability. He was troubled more or less, all his life, by sleeplessness, fatigue, depression; and in his thirty-seventh year had a complete nervous collapse. But to discredit a man's insight by pointing out his physical misfortunes is as misleading as it is unkind. The fact that Schopenhauer, with whose temperament Tschaïkowsky's had much in common, had some insane and idiotic ancestors, and suffered much from his own unusual sensitiveness, does not in the least abate the truth of his philosophic teaching, though it may call attention to its one-sidedness. And so with the musician; knowledge of his personal twist ought not to make us deaf to whatever is universal in his utterance. We may remember that he reports but one aspect of the truth; but if he reports that truly, we may supply the other, and need not carp at the way he got his information. And indeed is it not, after all, an artificial circumscription of life to ignore its sadder verities, however moral Pharisees may stigmatize the perception of them as «morbid»? Has not disease, as well as health, its relation to our fortunes? Is not man's weakness an organic part of his strength, his fear of his courage, his doubt of his faith? That mere facile optimism which smiles blandly at all experience, with unseeing eyes, is as partial and false as the unrelieved pessimism into which the contemplation of it sometimes drives the sensitive. The world is no more all light than it is all shadow. All human life, with its suffering as well as its happiness, is one, and every sincere human experience has its own weight. And so Tschaïkowsky, in spite of grandfathers and symptoms, has a right to be respectfully heard.
The tendency to depreciate men like Tschaïkowsky and Schopenhauer generally rests on a confusion between what may be called sentimental and rational pessimism. The sentimental pessimist, the weak malcontent, who sees everything through the blue spectacles of egotism, or, like the cuttlefish, muddies his world with a black humor of his own, deserves indeed nothing better than a shrug. Like all other forms of sentimentality, his pessimism is based on selfishness. It is an emanation, not an insight. It is that form of colic, to use the figure of Thoreau, which makes him discover that the world has been eating green apples. Quite different from such a sentimentalist, however, is the sensitive man who feels impersonally the real evils of life. Such a man's experience is viewed by him, not as the end, but as the means, of insight. His own pains, however keen, appear to him but as symbols of the universal suffering of humanity, and however much his view may be subjectively jaundiced, it does not terminate in, but only begins with, the petty self. He is not a devotee of the luxury of woe. «A very noble character,» says Schopenhauer, «we always conceive with a certain tinge of melancholy in it—a melancholy that is anything but a continual peevishness in view of the daily vexations of life (for such peevishness is an ignoble trait, and arouses suspicions of maliciousness), but rather a melancholy that comes from an insight into the vanity of all joys, and the sorrowfulness of all living, not alone of one's own fortune.» And Tschaïkowsky, in describing Beethoven's Choral Symphony, writes, one can see, from precisely the same standpoint: «Such joy is not of this earth. It is something ideal and unrealizable; it has nothing in common with this life, but is only a momentary aspiration of humanity towards the holiness which exists only in the world of art and beauty; afterwards, this vale of earth, with its endless sorrow, its agony of doubt and unsatisfied hopes, seems still more gloomy and without issue. In the Ninth Symphony we hear the despairing cry of a great genius who, having irrevocably lost faith in happiness, escapes for a time into the world of unrealizable hopes, into the realm of broken-winged ideals.» Now undoubtedly these passages, especially the latter, are guilty of false emphasis; undoubtedly one can truly reply to Tschaïkowsky that the ideal is necessarily fairer than reality, as the flower is fairer than the soil from which it springs, that «this vale of earth» is not «without issue,» however gloomy, since it does in fact produce the ideal world of art and beauty, and that it is precisely the glory of hopes that they are unrealizable, and of happiness that it exists only on a level higher than that of finite life. But, however one-sided may be the opinions expressed, the attitude of mind is free from the taint of petty selfishness; it is frank, open-eyed, and manly. Such utterances proceed only from natures nobly human, however burdened with a greater sensibility than is common among men.
Of the extraordinary sensibility of Tschaïkowsky, his emotional intensity and impetuosity, which, discerning truly, critics have so often falsely interpreted, there can be no doubt. He was the subject and in some ways the victim, of hereditary instability, a tendency, so to speak, to go off at half-cock. In his life no trait comes out more conspicuously, and its association with his powerful intellect, with which it was always at odds, goes far to explain the anomalies and paradoxes of his music. We see it constantly in his acts, where, if we always remember that we are studying a great nature, which must be analyzed respectfully and without vulgar curiosity, we may learn much from observing it.
Peter Ilyitch Tschaïkowsky was born in a small Russian town in 1840. As a very small boy he showed his ardent patriotism by kissing the map of Russia, in his Atlas, and spitting at the rest of Europe. When his French nurse remonstrated, he explained that he had been careful to cover France with his hand. There already is his temperament—passionate and tender. The Tschaïkowsky family early moved to St. Petersburg, where Peter at first entered the School of Jurisprudence, and later obtained a post in the Ministry of Justice. All through his youth he was indolent, popular, fond of society, a graceful amateur who played salon pieces at evening parties. That his serious interest in music was first aroused by his cousin's showing him how to «modulate» is rather amusing when we remember the virtuosity and daring of his mature harmonic style. «My cousin said it was possible to modulate from one key to another,» he says, «without using more than three chords. This excited my curiosity, and to my astonishment I found that he improvised whatever modulations I suggested, even from quite extraneous keys.» In 1861 he wrote to his sister that he was meditating a musical career, but was still in doubt whether he could pursue it successfully. «Perhaps idleness may take possession of me, and I may not persevere.» But a little later all doubts had vanished, he had given up his official work, withdrawn from society, and thrown himself with characteristic ardor into his studies. He now sometimes sat up all night working, and Rubinstein, his composition teacher at the Conservatory, tells how on one occasion he submitted no less than two hundred variations on a single theme. He made such good progress that in 1866, a few years after his graduation, he was appointed professor of harmony in the Moscow Conservatory.
From about this time date his first important compositions. «When first he came to live in Moscow,» writes his friend M. Kashkin, «although he was then six-and-twenty, he was still inexperienced and young in many things, especially in the material questions of life; but in all that concerned his work he was already mature, with a particularly elaborate method of work, in which all was foreseen with admirable judgment, and manipulated with the exactitude of the surgeon in operating.» M. Kashkin's testimony is a valuable corrective to the widespread impression that Tschaïkowsky composed in a mad frenzy of passion. No good work, in art any more than in science, is done without that calm deliberation which his strong mental grasp made possible to him. His early compositions were for the most part operas, and, it must be added, unsuccessful operas. «The Voievoda,» written in 1866, did not satisfy him, and he burned the score. «Undine,» composed in 1870, was not accepted by the theatrical authorities, who moreover mislaid the manuscript; Tschaïkowsky, years later, recovered and destroyed it. In 1873 «Snegourotchka,» a ballet, in spite of some musical beauty, failed for lack of dramatic interest. The success of «Kouznetz Vakoula,» produced a year later, was ephemeral. Thus it was not until «The Oprichnik,» which still holds the stage in Russia, was brought out, when Tschaïkowsky was thirty-four, that he made a pronounced success. The persistence with which he continued to labor during these years seems to be overlooked by those who consider him a mere prophet of lassitude and discouragement. Nor would such a man have undertaken and discharged the drudgery of journalistic criticism as did Tschaïkowsky in the four years from 1872 to 1876, when he was writing critiques for the Moscow papers. Whatever fluctuations of mood he may have undergone in these early years, and we may be sure they were many, his outward life was an example of equability, diligence and patience.
In 1877, however, there was some sort of tragic happening. That it was somehow connected with an unhappy marriage, that it resulted in a complete nervous breakdown, these things we know.[E] It is unnecessary to probe for more specific details; it is enough to note that for a long time he was broken and despairing, that through all the rest of his life his mental temper, never bright, was shadowed with a pathological gloom. He left the Conservatory suddenly, and was abroad a year. He wrote one of his friends, «On the whole, I am robust; but as regards my soul, there is a wound there that will never heal. I think I am homme fini.... Something is broken in me; my wings are cut and I shall never fly very high again.» He says that had he remained a day longer in Moscow he should have drowned himself, and it is said that he did go so far, in his terrible depression, as to stand up to his chest in the river one frosty September night, «in the hope of literally catching his death of cold, and getting rid of his troubles without scandal.»
But he took the better way; indeed, the best years, the quietest and most fruitful years, of his life were yet before him. As robust in character as he was sensitive and impetuous in temperament, he pulled himself together, and wrote in the next year his masterly Fourth Symphony, his best opera, «Eugene Oniegin,» said to be the second most popular opera in Russia, and many other strong works. He returned also, in the fall of 1878, to his post at the Conservatory, but, by the generosity of an anonymous lady,[F] was soon enabled to give up teaching and devote himself entirely to composition. From this time on, except for a conducting tour through western Europe in 1888, and one to America a few years later, he stayed chiefly in the country, in studious solitude. His mode of life at Maidanova, a little village where in 1885 he took a house, has been described by M. Kashkin, who often visited him. After working all the morning, and taking a simple but well-cooked dinner, Tschaïkowsky always went for a long walk, no matter what the weather. «Many of his works were planned and his themes invented,» we are told, «in these long rambles across country.» After tea he worked again until supper-time, and after supper the two friends, ordering a bottle of wine and dismissing the servant, would devote themselves to playing four-hand music. M. Kashkin tells one or two interesting stories of Tschaïkowsky at this period. His impulsiveness, it seems, took the form in money matters of a fairly reckless generosity. So lavishly did he shower coppers on all the peasant children in the neighborhood, that he could not go for his walk without being surrounded by them. In one afternoon he is said to have dispensed fourteen shillings of his own and all of M. Kashkin's small change. A friend once asked him where he «invested his capital.» Convulsed with laughter, he answered that his last investment of capital had been in a Moscow hotel, and that where his next would be he did not know.
The events of his tour in 1888 he has himself narrated with characteristic modesty and charm, in a fragment of diary. One can read between the lines that he was everywhere the center of admiring interest, but with fine literary instinct he constantly subordinates himself to the people and events through which he moved. How lovable are his vainly continued efforts to enjoy the music of Brahms, his eagerness to record the little kindnesses of his friends, his dignified reticence about his enemies, his hearty appreciation of work far inferior to his own! «I trust,» he says, «that it will not appear like self-glorification that my dithyramb in praise of Grieg precedes the statement that our natures are closely allied. Speaking of Grieg's high qualities, I do not at all wish to impress my readers with the notion that I am endowed with an equal share of them. I leave it to others to decide how far I am lacking in all that Grieg possesses in such abundance.» This warm appreciation of others, combined with so pathetic a lack of self-confidence that on more than one occasion he burned the score of a work which was coldly received, was so extreme in Tschaïkowsky that one of his friends pronounced him the least conceited of composers. Like all sensitive people, indeed, he was painfully conscious of social bonds; what was due him from others, and what in turn was due them from him—these intangibles, so easily forgotten by most men, were to him heavy realities. It is touching to see how dependent he was on the friendliness of the orchestra he was leading, and he was so impressible by criticism that long after his fame was established he could repeat word for word Hanslick's and Cui's early attacks upon him. On the other hand, M. Kashkin says that when he was conducting the works of others he was so sensible of his responsibility that his face wore a look of physical pain. When he was dying of cholera, in terrible agony, he thanked all about his bedside for the consideration they showed him, and his last remark reminds one of Charles the Second's «I am afraid, gentlemen, I am an unconscionable time a-dying.» He turned to his nephews after an unusually severe attack of nausea with the exclamation, «What a state I am in! You will have but little respect for your uncle when you think of him in such a state as this!» He died at St. Petersburg, in October, 1893.