FREDERIC CHOPIN
FREDERIC CHOPIN
I
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.