In the second place, it is obvious that musical criticism must attach itself primarily to questions of form. Grant that the art has room for certain spiritual distinctions, which bear some remote and shadowy resemblance to those of the great poets or of the great painters; grant that we can describe Schumann's prevailing tone as manly, or Mendelssohn's as tender; that we can notice a want of sternness in Spohr, and a want of reticence in Berlioz; yet such judgments as these are always liable to misuse, and, at best, are speedily exhausted. We cannot imagine ourselves asking of the musicians, as Matthew Arnold asks of the poets, whether their art contains an adequate criticism of life, whether it is marked by insight and benignity. We feel at once that such phrases are inapplicable to music, that they make it too articulate, too definite, too precise. Again, when we read such a line as—
In la sua voluntade è nostra pace,
there are two separate and distinct sources of our pleasure: first, the pure serenity of the thought; secondly, the liquid perfection of the verse. But when we turn to a melody of Beethoven, we find that here the two aspects are inseparable: that the verse is the thought, that the embodiment is the inspiration, and that it is virtually impossible to formulate any test of the one which is not at the same time a test of the other. The contrast will become still clearer if we take a poem in which the two qualities are not both present. The epilogue in Browning's Asolando, for example, can hardly be regarded as verse at all: but the uncouthness which deprives it of any claim to the title of a classic, is to most readers compensated by the spirit of sturdy courage that animates it throughout. To this compensation there is no parallel in Music. We may sometimes condone a fault in a melody otherwise admirable—the second strain, for instance, in our ballad of 'The Bailiff's Daughter'—but in so doing we set one portion of the form against another; we do not set the form as a whole against some external counterpart. In short, whatever can be said as to the conditions of vitality in other arts, in Music, at least, it is true that a work is great in proportion as its form is perfect.
This perfection of form was Chopin's ostensible ideal. No composer in the whole history of Music has laboured with a more earnest anxiety at accuracy of outline and artistic symmetry of detail. We have here 'no clattering of dishes at a royal banquet,' no casual indolence of accompaniment; no gap filled with unmeaning brilliance or idle commonplace: every effect is studied with deliberate purpose, and wrought to the highest degree of finish that it can bear. Of course, the thoughts were conceived spontaneously; no man could have written the poorest of Chopin's works by rule and measure: but before they were deemed ready for presentation they were tried by every test, and confronted with every alternative which a scrupulous ingenuity could propose. It is no small commendation that workmanship so elaborate should be beyond the reach of any imitator. As a rule, it is the dashing, daring, impetuous pioneer in Art who distances all followers, and finds himself, he hardly knows how, on a height that they can never hope to attain: in this case the climber has planted every footstep with a careful circumspection, he has employed all his prudence, all his foresight, all his certain command of resource, and yet, at the end of the ascent he stands alone. The reason for this is twofold: first, that Chopin's intuition of style was a natural gift which few other composers have possessed in an equal degree: second, that he brought to its cultivation not only an untiring diligence, but a delicacy of taste which is hardly ever at fault. His limitations are plain and unmistakable. For the larger types of the art, for the broad architectonic laws of structure on which they are based, he exhibited an almost total disregard. His works in 'Sonata form,' and in the forms cognate to the Sonata, are, with no exception, the failures of a genius that has altogether overstepped its bounds. Of Choral compositions, of Symphony, of Opera, he has not left us a single example. But when all this has been admitted, it still remains true that he is a great master, great in his exquisite sense of beauty, in his almost unerring skill, and in the deliberate and reasoned audacity with which he has extended the range of musical expression.
Like all modern composers of acknowledged rank, Chopin was strongly influenced by the popular music of his native country. As a child, he had been fond of collecting and studying the folk-songs which he heard at harvest field or market or village festival; they supplied him with his first models, and in some cases with his first themes as well. In later life, their impression deepened rather than faded. He always thought of himself as a national poet: 'I should like,' he told Hiller, 'to be to my people what Uhland is to the Germans.' No doubt the external qualities of his music are entirely his own: the richness of harmony, the complexity of figure, the delicate elaboration of ornament; but the texture which these colour and adorn is essentially of native growth and native substance. In a word, he made precisely the right use of national materials, taking them as a basis, and developing them into fuller beauty by the force and brilliance of his own personal genius.
There are three chief ways in which this national influence affected his work. In the first place, the popular music of Poland, unlike that of Italy or Germany, is almost invariably founded on dance forms and dance rhythms. Its gifts to the art of Europe are the Polonaise, the Krakowiak, and the Mazurka: types which, however widely they may differ in grade of social acceptance, are all essentially Polish in history and character. The very ballads of the country have the same lilt and cadence; they are primitive dances not yet differentiated from the use of words. They move with recurrent figure, with exact balance of melodic phrase, with that precise symmetry which is required by a 'Muse of the many-twinkling feet.' And it is hardly necessary to point out that in this respect Chopin is a true Pole. More than a quarter of his entire composition is devoted ostensibly to dance forms; and throughout the rest of it their effect may be traced in a hundred phrases and episodes. Grant that his treatment of the rhythmic figures is very different from the simple naïvité of his models: we are here discussing not treatment but conception, and in conception his indebtedness to his country is incontestable. His Mazurkas, in short, bear somewhat the same relation to the tunes of the peasantry as the songs of Robert Burns to those of the forerunners whom he superseded.
A second point of resemblance is Chopin's habit of founding a whole paragraph either on a single phrase repeated in similar shapes, or on two phrases in alternation. By itself this practice is primitive almost to barbarism, and its employment in many of the Polish folk-songs is a serious depreciation of their artistic value. But when it is confined to an episodical passage, especially in a composition founded on a striking or important melody, it may serve as a very justifiable point of rest, a background of which the interest is purposely toned down to provide a more striking contrast with the central figure. Of its illegitimate use a noticeable example may be found in the 'Spring Song,' which, it must be remembered, Chopin never intended to publish: its true and right employment will be seen in many of the Mazurkas—such, for instance, as the first (in F sharp minor), the fifth (in B flat), and the thirty-seventh (in A flat), which is, perhaps, the most beautiful of all. In the longer works, which are the more varied in proportion to their greater scale, we should hardly expect to find examples of a mannerism which, by its very nature, stands at the opposite pole from variation: but its influence may be noticed in the short, clear-cut phrases and exact balance of such compositions as the Scherzo in C sharp minor. No doubt much of this exactitude is due to an intense desire for clearness and precision: yet none the less the particular way in which that desire is satisfied may be regarded as characteristic of the national manner. Beethoven does not attain the lucidity of his style by such close parallelism of phraseology.
Thirdly, Chopin was to some extent affected by the tonality of his native music. A large number of the Polish folk-songs are written, not in our modern scale, but in one or other of the ecclesiastical modes: notably the Lydian, which has its fourth note a semitone sharper, and the Dorian, which has its third and seventh notes a semitone flatter than the major scale of Western Europe. Some, again, end on what we should call dominant harmony; a clear survival of the ecclesiastical distinction between plagal and authentic. Of this tonal system, some positive traces may be found in the Mazurkas, the cadences of the thirteenth, seventeenth and twenty-fifth, the frequent use of a sharpened subdominant, and the like; while on the negative side it may perhaps account for Chopin's indifference to the requirements of key-relationship. Not only in his efforts at Sonata form does he show himself usually unable to hold together a complex scheme of keys, but in works of a more loose structure his choice seems to be regulated rather by hazard than by any preconceived plan. Sometimes, as in the end of the F major Ballade, he deliberately strays away from a logical conclusion;[42] sometimes, as in the sixth Nocturne, he forces himself back with a sudden and inartistic violence; more often he allows his modulations to carry him where they will, and is so intent on perfecting each phrase and each melody that he has no regard left to bestow on the general principles of construction. No doubt some of this weakness was due to defective training, some, also, to the prevailing spirit and temper of the Romantic movement. But, in Chopin's case, there was a special reason beyond. As a Pole, he approached our western key system from the outside, and although he learned its language with wonderful skill and facility, he never wholly assimilated himself to the method of thought which it implies.
It is quite possible that, in any case, Chopin would have found himself incapable of dealing with large masses. The want of virility, which has already been noted in his character, appears beyond question in his music; leaving untouched all the grace and tenderness, all the rare and precious qualities of workmanship, but relaxing into an almost inevitable weakness at any crisis which demands sustained force or tenacity. When he is at his strongest, we miss that sense of reserve power, that quiet irresistible force, 'too full for sound or foam,' which characterises the dignity of the noblest art. He can be passionate, vehement, impetuous, but he expends himself in the effort. He can express agitation, challenge, defiance, but he lacks the royal magnanimity that will never stoop to defy. Even his melody is never sublime, never at the highest level. Its more serious mood stands to the great tunes of Beethoven as Leopardi stands to Dante, rising for a moment on a few perfect lines to follow the master's flight, and then sinking back to earth under some load of weariness or impatience.