I
WARSAW

We are more accustomed in literature than in music to find immortality conferred on artists whose total quantity of production is slight or incomplete. Sappho lives in a few lyrics, Villon in a few ballades, Persius is a great satirist with some six hundred lines of verse, Merimée a great novelist with a slender handful of short stories. In all such cases we accept perfection of finish, individuality of note, concentration of effort, as more than compensating for the narrow limits within which the writer has thought fit to be confined: and we even impute it as a virtue that he has not changed the gold of his thought into the more diffuse silver of a meaner standard. But in music, as a rule, our judgment is affected by other considerations. For some reason the composer has generally been more lavish than his brother artists: he has worked more rapidly, perhaps more continuously, and has gained, in proportion, a larger abundance to bestow. Six weeks sufficed Mozart for his three greatest symphonies: Handel wrote the Messiah in less than a month: Schubert created nine of his songs in a single day: and it is therefore little wonder if we have learned to expect some opulence of achievement in our musicians, or even to estimate them, as an innkeeper discriminates his guests, by the amount of their baggage and the number of their retinue.

We shall find an interesting commentary on this view if we turn to the programme of a famous concert, given at Warsaw on February 24, 1818. The principal work performed was a pianoforte concerto which served to bring two names, those of its composer and its interpreter, into a forcible and prominent contrast. The one was a master of established reputation and acknowledged authority, the Hofkapellmeister at Vienna, the friend of Beethoven, the musician whose operas were applauded in every capital, whose symphonies were set in the balance against Haydn's, whose quartetts were declared by dispassionate judges to be the equal of Mozart's. The other was planting his first footsteps in a byway of the art which he was to tread for thirty years with little deviation, satisfied to pluck a posy of flowers from the hedgerow, and lay it down as his offering at the journey's end. The one covered the whole field of composition, and, at the end of his career, could number a list of works which outmatches the industry of almost all his contemporaries. The other, cut short by an early death, has left us a few thin volumes, curiously uniform in style, and restricted, with scarcely an exception, to the limits of a single instrument. Yet the one is as completely forgotten as though he had never lived, while the other has passed into the company of the immortals. To our ears the name of Adalbert Gyrowetz is of the most forlorn unfamiliarity, it has become 'fantastic, unsubstantial—like Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece'; but no vicissitude of fortune, no changing fashion of art, can ever obliterate from our memory the image of Frederick Chopin.

It must, however, be added, that Chopin's slenderness of accomplishment in no way indicated any poverty of invention. His work was not, as is sometimes said of Gray's, the laborious tillage of a light soil; rather it was like that Japanese gardening, which intensifies the beauty of a single blossom by cutting off all the rest. The true reason, indeed, is to be found in a point of character, 'Il avait l'esprit écorché vif,' said the comrade who knew him best, and in these words may be found the whole explanation, both of his life and of his artistic career. Delicate, sensitive, fastidious, he would shrink from committing himself to a decision, lest it should fall short of the highest that he knew. Rapid and brilliant in improvisation, he would spend weeks in writing and rewriting a single page. A pianist of rare and exquisite gifts, he would often feel paralysed by the mere sight of a public audience. Generous, affectionate, and enthusiastic, he was yet too earnest to be forbearing, too susceptible to be tolerant, too exacting to show indulgence, and the same acute criticism with which he visited the actions of others, he applied in an equal measure to his own.

Hence there is a special danger in estimating him from a British standpoint. Our bluff, sturdy manhood has little in common with the keenness and mobility which mark one side of the artistic temperament, and we have never been very successful at comprehending alien characters or alien nationalities. True, we have advanced beyond the stage of unreasoning hostility towards the stranger who presumes to be more impressionable than ourselves, but for the most part we have only substituted a half-contemptuous compassion which is equally galling, and almost equally unintelligent. A past generation looked on Shelley and wondered that the fires of Heaven delayed their falling; the present age insults Heine with forgiveness, in consideration of the purgatory of his later years; and in like manner, when we hear of Chopin, we think, 'Poor fellow! he was consumptive,' and prepare ourselves to condone the irregularities of his life by some rough and ready diagnosis of physical disease. It seldom occurs to us to reflect that the problem may be too complex for so easy a solution, and that, before it can be solved at all, it must at least be stated correctly. As a matter of fact, Chopin's life was singularly blameless, and, until its close, singularly free from the material conditions of trouble. No doubt there is a deep pathos in the record of a death which seems to us premature: no doubt the pathos is intensified by the spectacle of failing strength and encroaching sickness; but it is an entirely false application of perspective to let our view of the end obliterate our view of the whole. And there is otherwise little hardship in the case. The feeble health was compensated, at least in part, by friendship, by affection, and by fame such as few musicians have enjoyed in their lifetime. It is not history to draw fancy pictures of a querulous invalid, a continuous burden to himself and to all who cared for him; still less to fill page after page with unsubstantiated rumours of ill-usage and neglect. Chopin's relation to his friends was neither that of tyrant nor that of victim, and his career, if, like every other, it was traversed by heavy clouds, at least had its bursts of sunshine and its long days of genial warmth.

He was born on 1st March 1809,[16] at the little village of Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw. His father, Nicholas Chopin, was a French émigré, possibly with Polish blood in his veins, who, after sundry vicissitudes, had settled down as tutor in the family of Countess Skarbek, and had there met and married a Polish lady called Justina Krzyzanowska. Frederick, the only son, was the third of four children, and so was privileged to pass his earliest years in the Oriental despotism of a nursery peopled by admiring sisters.

In 1810 Nicholas Chopin carried off his household to the Capital, where he had been appointed Professor of French at the new Lyceum. At first there seems to have been some stress of poverty: salaries were low, life was unsettled; no one knew what quarter of Europe would next be set ablaze by the indomitable activity of Napoleon. However, in 1814, the Congress of Vienna established a kingdom of Poland, shorn, no doubt, of its border territories, and held in check by the suzerainty of Russia, but still governed by a Pole as viceroy, and recognising Polish as its official language. This was far from meeting the wishes of the 'patriotic party,' which looked to France as its ally and to the Emperor as its protector, but at least it ensured some measure of independence, and, after the next year, a certain prospect of peace and tranquillity.

As might be expected, the change of political condition produced an immediate effect on the national temper. Warsaw, which, in 1812, was one of the most miserable of cities, began in 1815 to recover the signs of material prosperity. Trade was developed, schools were opened, the great houses welcomed back their exiles, and the country at large shook off its dream of disquietude and set its face hopefully to the future. Only in secret rose an occasional murmur that Russia was an alien power, that the days of Suvorov had not passed out of memory, that the Viceroy was a mere puppet in the hands of the Emperor Alexander, and that the new Commander-in-Chief was a truculent savage who needed all the eloquence of his Polish wife to keep him from open oppression. Apart from these scattered voices of discontent, there can be no doubt that the nation rejoiced at its deliverance from German officialism, and, with characteristic buoyancy, resumed the business of life, and not a little of its brilliance.