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.

For an artist wholly unique, a smoothing and polishing to the many exactions of polite society is an undertaking questionable indeed. To come into outward conformity with mere convention is to imperil the freedom of his inner individuality. The actual effect of such a course on the genius of Chopin cannot be determined; that it survived the ordeal is proof enough of its virility and tenacity of purpose.

As we have hinted, the world of the Musician, unlike that of the severely practical man, has no fixed diameter; elastic, it widens at his will; at the bidding of his sympathies it stretches until co-extensive with the globe. Thus it gathers into its circumference every land where live and labor his brethren in the art. And so we find our youthful composer looking beyond the limits of his Warsaw, looking and longing for physical contact with that with which his heart was already in rapport; Dresden and Prague and Berlin, but chiefly Vienna the renowned, the rich and glorious with the memories and bequeathings of Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert. There could be heard, in its unfading loveliness, the «FreischÜtz» of Weber in whom Romanticism first wakened like a rose at dawn. There such pianists as Czerny and Hummel would discover to Chopin his failings, or prove his merits to be all his own. And then, far off as the horizon of his daydreams, upgrew the sumptuous city on the Seine, the siren city sweet of voice and fair of form; the heartless, hope-wrecking city beneath whose mocking eye the unheard Wagner in after years must chafe and struggle and starve and almost cease to be.

Chopin was instinctively and wholly a romanticist. Though deemed ultra by many a contemporary critic, to us he stands revealed the great tone-poet of the piano; the Keats, or rather the Shelley of musicians; the inimitable modern from whom the groping and straining virtuoso-producers of to-day have much retrograded.

As a pianoforte writer, Chopin has only Beethoven as compeer, but each in his way is supreme. The supremacy of Beethoven is that of the symphonist in whose brain the orchestra sounds ever a multitudinous variety of tone color. The piano was his dearest friend, the orchestra his great heart's love not to be shut out, not to be forgotten, because of friendship's closest, warmest hour; and so the orchestra would crowd and cramp itself in the piano. On the other hand, his chosen instrument was to Chopin his all of abiding friendship and passionate, absorbing love, and every height and every deep of his being is therein contained; his every unclouded gem, set in ornate and exquisite workmanship, his every matched and strung pearl, finds there a golden casket. Chopin made of his Erard, or his Pleyel, a novel instrument. No longer of uniform tint, its tone colors were yet unlike those from the orchestral blending of wood and metal and string.

Ere long our composer-virtuoso has met and measured many of his renowned contemporaries, and, by fair comparison, he knows to a nicety his own status; already he anticipates the acclaim of a just future. Such seership is necessary to the man of genius. Foreknowledge is his saving rock amidst the merciless seas of ridicule. Clinging to that stay, he awaits the spent fury of the storm, the lulling of winds, the leveling of waves.

For the sake of comparison let us, from the vantage ground of this present, glance at the chief musical celebrities contacted by Chopin in the years of his youthful activity. Thalberg, smooth and faultless executant, delight of the dilettante and the superficial amateur, was throwing off a series of showy but withal empty transcriptions of which his «MosÈ in Egitto» may be held the best. As a moulder of musicians, notably Liszt, and as a developer of technique, the hardworking Czerny was proving of immense value, but as a composer he was too diligent, not waiting for that inspiration which cannot be forced. Of Hummel, much over-rated in those days, the best thing sayable is that he influenced the shaping of Chopin's concertos, the least faulty of his larger works. Moscheles, the tutor of Mendelssohn, was a musician much esteemed by Chopin who deemed it a privilege to play the bass to the composer's treble in his chief pianoforte works. Unlike certain of our modern pianists, Kalkbrenner was no muscular virtuoso venting his rage upon the keyboard. He was, on the contrary, a performer of refinement and precision; one who could claim certain excellencies akin to those of Chopin. But alas for human vanity! his great show pieces, the cause of much self-gratulation, have vanished from every concert repertory and every musical collection save that of the antiquary. Mendelssohn, despite his eminence, had the backward-looking eye; much in his matter had already been sung and played, but not with the grace and charm of that accomplished scholar. And yet is the «Elijah» a triumph, a thing enduring, an epitome of all his powers. Oak-ribbed, wealth-laden voyager on the sea of Time, how bravely it breasts the waves that long have whelmed the wrecks of mediocre talent and seeming genius and empty pretence! Schumann, discoverer of the genius of Chopin, was a musician and thinker, an ever-broadening cosmopolitan, a radical in the van of Æsthetic progress and, inevitably, the soul of the new musical romanticism.

Almost any page, almost any stanza of Shelley—most ethereal of word-poets—would indicate an unobstructed outpouring which the first drafts of even his wholly sustained inspirations quite disprove. Beethoven's collected sketch-books are a study in the evolution of themes afterward impressed with the seal of spontaneity. We are told by one who ought to know, that Chopin's every opus was born only after soul-travail both long and sore. Against these curious facts can be set this apparent contradiction: facility is the rule among the merely talented, and many such have with ease dashed off their best efforts, of which doing they are wont to boast because, to the popular way of thinking, facility is proof of genius. Now why should Shelley and Beethoven and Chopin wrestle with the idea, and Pollok and Czerny and their kind be so easily victorious?

As we have said, our human world is subdivisible into manifold states of consciousness, each a world to its dwellers. The world of the man of talent may be, and usually is, but a step inward from the world of the multitude; hence few obstacles hinder communication between these nearly-related worlds. The ideas of the inner are with ease translated to the understanding of the outer. Evidently this is untrue of those inmost worlds where dwell the deep- and high-dreaming Poet and Musician whose respective domains are almost outside of time and space, those limitations wherewith the human mind divides the known from the unknown, the sensible from the super-sensible, the finite from the Infinite. Having in them little or nothing of the quantitative, the ideas of those worlds elude the mental grasp of all save the finely-organized man of genius.

How to come into touch with the great, common world by giving fixed form to that which is formless and by rendering tangible the intangible, making seen the unseen, felt the unfelt, and heard the unheard, is the problem of Genius. It was the problem of Michel Angelo before the unchiselled «David»; the problem of Raphael musing upon the Madonnaless canvas; the problem of the absorbed Beethoven when, in his seemingly aimless meanderings, the trees by the roadside and in the forest would prompt him to solution with their whispered «Holy! Holy!» and it was the problem of Chopin as in the quiet of his study, apart from the roar of the great city, the empty page tormented him with the thought of unwritten and perhaps unwritable beauties.

That within the space of twenty-four days, Handel penned the notes of his most glorious work, proves nothing but his enormous powers of mental concentration, and the endurance of a brain supported by a vigorous body; but to the vital question: How long had «The Messiah» been maturing in him? history affords no conclusive answer. Rossini was no doubt a facile composer, yet from what soul-deep his operas came is proved by his deliberate estimate of their longevity. He believed that as an entirety nothing but «Il Barbiere» would survive.

The well-attested fact that Beethoven and Chopin, those cautious and self-critical composers, were both extempore performers par excellence, goes far toward proving the impromptu inferior to the finished after-product. And does not all this favor our view that from the birth-throes, and not from the painlessness of Genius, are born the masterpieces of every art?

II

Genius is essentially sympathetic and would draw all men into rapport with its world of light and love. Companioned it must be, aye, close companioned! But descend it will never because to Genius its world embodies more of reality than does all this terrestrial globe.

Happy the master gathering around him his little following! Happy indeed the genius, the solitary being, who finds among men an ideal friend; one to whom self-explanation, so hateful to Genius, is needless; one who knows instinctively the soul life of the other! To Genius that friend is a proof of its mission; a witness that it lives not a thing more useless than the most ordinary mortal; an assurance that it yet will come into the fullness of its own. Such a friend Chopin was now to find within that great Paris which like a gigantic lodestone was drawing him to herself.

Franz Liszt, the Hungarian composer, pianist and litterateur, was born in 1811, and in 1831, the date of Chopin's advent in the French capital, he was but twenty years of age, and so by two years the junior of the Pole. Soon the fame of the younger man would eclipse even that of Kalkbrenner, esteemed the first pianist of the day. Liszt was steadily nearing an eminence ever afterward his own against all comers, that of the world's unparalleled pianoforte virtuoso.

The artist who, in days to come, would first divine and adequately measure the comprehensiveness of Wagner; the timely helper who would deem it a duty, a privilege, to aid and cheer the impecunious political refugee in the despondent years of his exile; the whole-hearted enthusiast whose determined arm would open for the composer of «Lohengrin,» the close-shut door of the Temple of Fame, was the friend in whom Chopin now saw reflected his own peculiar genius. As the painter, stepping backward from his easel, scans his work as a whole, and in the most favorable light, so, from the view-point of Liszt's intuitive rendering, Chopin better estimated his own productions than could otherwise have been possible.

That consummate interpretation of a work proves not one's ability to create its like is shown by the coming together of Chopin and Liszt. While Liszt was indubitably of advantage to Chopin, the latter in turn reacted upon the former. In the nature of the fiery Hungarian, and that of the dreamy Pole, were those resemblances and differences which make high friendship a possibility and also a means of mutual growth through reciprocity of ideas.

The fascinating and dominating Liszt was by nature a Bohemian. From first to last he dwelt in the realm of those laxities and unconventionalities which dismay the ordinary mortal, but whose glamour is over the life of many an artist. And yet, despite every shortcoming, Liszt had that which was much indeed, a virtue frequently the saving one of genius, to wit, the artistic conscience.

Beneath a demeanor disguising rather than revealing his inner self, Chopin was an ardent soul, a Polish patriot from whose heart overflowed, to his every page, the sorrows of his native land. Those sorrows were a cloud shadowing the radiance of his ideal world, and at times dulling it almost to the sombre hues of this earth, begetter of many sorrows.

It is regrettable that Chopin sought to bind within the limits of conventional forms, already half outgrown, his poetical ideas amenable only to the requirements of those freer forms for which Berlioz and Schumann were striving, and to which Wagner ultimately attained.

In his Impromptus, and a few other ventures beyond self-imposed barriers, Chopin made most praiseworthy use of freedom, but quickly he returns to contemplation of his beloved Mozart, that perfect master of classical form. Naturally the polished frequenter of the Parisian drawing-room and salon, found no lasting pleasure in the wild freedom and amplitude of the forest of Romanticism. The change was too abrupt and novel. Those far-reaching vistas of unfrequented shade! How different from the metropolitan thoroughfare! Those mighty but fantastically-growing trees thick-planted by Nature's careless hand! those never-trimmed and irregular branches! those fallen and dismantled trunks! How unlike the well-kept parks of Paris and Versailles!

While composing, Chopin never quite divorced himself from the keyboard of his piano, and yet the writer who would attain to untrammeled expression, in both matter and form, should compose beneath a roof no narrower than the dome of heaven. Let the study be his reference room, his library, and, for convenience, his place of final elaboration. Like Beethoven and Wordsworth, let him receive at first hand the impartings of Nature that needed teacher of us all.

In the heart of Chopin the melodies of his beloved Poland, mingling with his own imaginings, became invested with a subtle, poetical charm and a delicate sweetness idealizing their own quaint loveliness.

The Mazurka! does it not bring the peasant gathering on the green; the evening or the holiday of swaying forms and agile feet and rustic beauty in the graceful round? The Polonaise! does it not bring the brilliant hall; the jewelled fair; the stately-moving, king-led company of lords and noble dames? Yes, such were the scenes which, to the dances of his people, Chopin had conjured from the happy, bygone days. How appealing this music to those of the old Polish nobility then finding in Paris their most congenial abode in exile! Largely through the influence of these the Parisian success of Chopin was speedier, although more circumscribed, than that of Meyerbeer, who, only by laborious and painstaking adaptation of his methods to the requirements of the French operatic stage, won the Parisian public and brought them to their knees before the shrine of «Robert.»

In the homes of rank and wealth, Chopin now mingles with princes, ministers, ambassadors and literary notables. Titled ladies are his pupils and, because he would have it so, he deems his musical self best understood by the lionizing fashionables of French society who, in fact, looked not beneath the finished, but by no means robust virtuoso, and polished gentleman conforming to their every convention.

The fashionables of French society! Oh for a moment natural and true amidst the false and artificial hours! A candid, soul-sprung greeting to shame the outward suavity where envy rankles, or where hatred burns within! Oh for a laden word to prove the hollowness of empty tongues! A normal heart of innocence in that blasÉ assembly! Oh for an individuality unrepressed; a potent unit in that crowd of merest ciphers!

It is almost incredible that in such environment Chopin composed many of his noblest works. His Rondo in C minor Op. 1, published in 1825, when he was but sixteen years of age, and therefore in the old Warsaw days, had announced the advent of a writer of the highest rank, one authoritatively proclaimed by Schumann on the appearance of the variations in B flat Op. 2. Arriving in Paris late in the year 1831, the man of two-and-twenty was already known to musicians like Franz Liszt and Ferdinand Hiller, as creator of such music as the Concerto in F minor, the Concerto in E minor, and the Funeral March in C minor. This last was afterward eclipsed by the great march in the B flat minor Sonata. But the bulk of Chopin's pianoforte works was written during the next seventeen years, and despite adverse conditions other than those of environment.

III

Chopin's compositions, aside from his Waltzes, were in his day too novel and strange to attract more than the discerning and progressive few. Obtuse and ignorant critics vented their wrath upon them. Even Moscheles found them full of abrupt and harsh modulations, and the attitude of Mendelssohn was one of mingled like and loathing. Liszt alone accepted them in their entirety. Because of all this, their inevitably small sale made Chopin's office of composer comparatively an unremunerative one.

Unlike Beethoven who, from choice as well as necessity, lived most frugally and solitary as a lion in his den, Chopin was somewhat of a Sybarite in his tastes, and, furthermore, improvident and accustomed to extravagant expenditures. Therefore, while esteeming himself at par value as a composer, he was of necessity a teacher also. In addition to the distractions and fatigues of regular lesson-giving, an ever-present misfortune, a wasting and fatal malady, crippled what should have been his years of physical prime. Yet despite all that certainly hindered and probably impaired the result of Chopin's Parisian years of creative effort, that result may be summarized as follows:

First and foremost, are those «Soul-animating strains, alas too few!» the four incomparable Ballades of which Schumann said that a poet inspired them, and a poet might easily write words to them. In the Ballades, Chopin encompasses a height and breadth and depth elsewhere unattained in his works. Here the local is indeed outgrown, and almost the universal is in the sweep of his vision. Abreast of the bardic view, he develops a world theme, he rings a story of the antique and the modern.

Next in enumeration come the great Polonaises, epics of Poland in heroic meter, Iliads of battle on her native soil. The bitter taunt of rage and scorn; the hurled defiance and the fierce reply; the rush, the crash of the onset; the broken swords and splintered lances; the vanquished rider and the fallen war-horse; the anguished cries of dying men; the hopeless wail of captives; the harsh rattle of galling chains; the deep and solemn notes of dirge. Iliads of Poland! Iliads of her olden glory and her prone defeat; and then an Iliad of her proud-arisen days to be!

In marked contrast, and therefore proving the versatility of Chopin, we have what outlasts a thousand ballroom waltzes every one of which, like the gay butterfly, joys through its little day and then is gone forever. Of the poetic and perfect Waltzes of Chopin, evidently not written for the mere dancer, may be instanced the one in A flat op. 42; also the set of three op. 34. The second of them, tenderly melancholy in both minor and major, was an especial favorite of its author. Nor should we overlook the celebrated waltz in D flat which, while fulfilling all musical requirements, has proved universally popular, being, in fact, what its history indicates, the unpremeditated outpour of a happy hour.

The greater number of the forty-one Mazurkas published by Chopin, date from the Paris period. They are easy of execution and often brief, some being held within the limits of sixty measures. In these Mazurkas the poet of the epic turns to polish the line, the stanza; the painter of the heroic perfects the miniature. Each Mazurka is a tiny picture of Polish life; a little draught from the well of Polish folk-song. How readily these dances lend themselves to an exaggerated rubato, the common fault of would-be interpreters!

Because of its noble, singing quality, the key of D flat was chosen for some of Chopin's most exquisite melodies. In this markedly individual key, whose tone color is but the veil of some unimagined splendor, was set the «Berceuse,» most ethereal and lovely of cradle songs. A sweet murmur of waters, it glides and ripples and gently falls from no earth-born spring. No upland snows make clear its limpid, winding way. From loftier far than ever rain-clouds find, the home of innocence which slumbering infancy beholds, it brings of Wisdom's fount what, hidden from the wise, is yet revealed to babes.

Another of the Paris pieces is the somewhat long Barcarolle in nocturne form; an Italian scene beneath the skies of Venice. Not the palaced Venice of marble and porphyry and alabaster, but that mobile Venice which mirrors the rising moon touched at times by filmy shades, yet light enough for lovers borne upon the sparkling tides. Though devoid of striking contrasts, this Barcarolle contains probably more of variety than Mendelssohn could have woven into it.

In Paris were composed all save one of the nineteen Nocturnes bearing the name of Chopin. On these, and the Polonaise in A major, and such Waltzes as op. 18 in E flat, mostly rests his popular estimate.

As a producer in this lighter vein, Chopin encounters no rival. A few, a very few of the earlier Nocturnes betray the influence of John Field originator of this somewhat sentimental style of salon music; but shortly the Chopinesque quality asserts itself and lo, the night of lulled winds, heavy with the tropical odor of flowers! Night of indolent southern stars, and the chaste Diana grown languorous and tender! Night of little clouds that weep they know not why! Night of the bashful, subdued bird that lifts not to the cheerful sun his notes of love and grief and yearning.

Without underestimating the musical and technical value of Clementi's «Gradus ad Parnassum» on whose broad and solid foundation rests all modern pianoforte playing, and without in the least belittling the contributions of Cramer, it may be asserted that the Etudes of Chopin are revelations in technique. Of all their class, they alone anticipate the virtuoso requirements of to-day, while some, like Nos. 3 and 6 of op. 10, are, as inspired music, unmatched in the world's repertory of piano studies. Painstaking authorities have edited, and eminent critics have almost extravagantly praised them. Hunaker holds them monumental of our nineteenth century attainment in piano music. However, Chopin's twenty-seven Etudes have little place in this present enumeration, for, excepting two or three in the second book, op. 25, they, like the Concertos, the Bolero, the Rondos op. 1 and op. 16, and the Variations op. 2, all of them antedate the year 1831.

The weight of evidence would prove that of the twenty-four Preludes op. 28, the bulk was composed prior to Chopin's visit to Majorca in 1839. Schumann called them «ruins, eagle feathers all strangely intermingled.» To Kullak they are «little masterpieces of the first rank.» Hunaker holds them «a sheaf of moods.» Rubinstein believes them the pearls of Chopin's works. They are in fact autobiographical poems in brief stanzas. Though we grant the excellence and completeness of many, and the individuality of all these Preludes, certain of them seemed fragmentary. The sixteen measures comprised in No. 7, may be the sole remnant of some discarded Mazurka. Those thirteen measures of solemn moving chords in C minor, the total of No. 20, suggest the episode in the G minor Nocturne, and may have been preserved from some such composition.

We have, by Chopin, four Impromptus all written later than the year 1831: op. 29 in A flat, op. 36 in F sharp major, op. 51 in G flat, and the posthumous Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor. The word Impromptu is usually a misnomer betraying, to the discerning, the vanity of an author who would have his public suppose him capable of off-hand effusions in all ways superior to the careful work of others.

That Chopin is here not altogether innocent is at once shown by the premeditated consecutive minor ninths between the melody and accompaniment in the first and second measures of op. 29. The six introductory measures of op. 36 are a carefully written two-part bass which, blending with the treble melody entering at the seventh measure, forms with it a three-part harmony worthy of the most painstaking writer. In op. 51, Chopin is chromatic and winding and premeditating as is his wont. Op. 66 comes nearest the title, «Impromptu.» Interest here centers in the right hand, which, throughout the first and the third sections, is an uninterrupted torrent of semiquavers, and, in the D flat middle movement, is a sustained and melodious cantabile which yet is not the master's true cantabile, that noble and tender and pensive poetry pervading, for instance, the con anima of the B flat minor Scherzo.

The instrumental music of Haydn and Mozart furnishes many models of the true Scherzo. The Sonatas and Symphonies of Beethoven exhibit in its fullness this evolution of the old Minuet, but, coming to the four Scherzos of Chopin, the mere classifier is puzzled and halted while the real musician is exalted and led onward. Leaving the consideration of name and structure and logical sequence to the hypercritical, he enters without cavil this unique, forest-encompassed temple of art where joy and laughter indeed are not, for an elegiac sadness murmurs from the over-roofing green, and oftentimes the winds without, those whisperers in their woodland tongue, will swell to impassioned euphony or hopeless, wild lament, and suddenly midst Nature's momentary hush, a solemn, deep-toned temple hymn is breathed around, and then, above, the swaying branches make their moan anew, and hark! the harsh, capricious blast is pouring once again its tale of wretchedness and woe.

The mind of Chopin, like that of every man and woman of true genius, exhibits both male and female characteristics, for the sexless human soul, the source of those characteristics, would stamp itself clearly and wholly on the impressionable brain of such as he. Chopin's masculineness, so often in abeyance, as throughout the Nocturnes, at once asserts itself in the noble Fantaisie op. 49, whose recurring first figure requires no fortissimo to drive it deep into the heart.

The true genius has his moment when, sole and venturous, he lifts him loftier than the eagle. The sun beyond—the light he failed to reach—did it not from the airless heaven scorn his defeat and leave him humbled in the height? And yet the tree-tops, far beneath upon the mountain, were proud with wings that never dared as he. Many fanciful and imaginative interpretations we have of that empyrean flight the F minor Fantaisie, but, as if too conscious of failure in the unattainable, the author would discredit them all with a commonplace explanation.

Inevitably the collected works of great authors, in whatever department, contain that which as a whole adds little or nothing to their eminent reputation. Of the works of Chopin's mature years, the Allegro de Concert, the Tarantelle, and the Rondo op. 16, belong in this category. And yet any of these, the first especially, would make famous a pianoforte composer not already high in the first rank.

Chopin, as we have seen, studied well the compositions of Bach, and to that study should be traced his comprehensive knowledge of harmonic possibilities. This is wholly proved by his every important work; but in daring how he distances the profound and methodical contrapuntist of Leipsic! Only Wagner and Richard Strauss are bolder than he. As a harmonist Chopin was bent on notable things, and with equal zeal he essayed that most difficult and hazardous of undertakings, the Sonata. Had our Romanticist but given to the pianoforte Sonatas of Beethoven somewhat of those hours devoted to «The Well-tempered Clavichord,» the effect on op. 35 and op. 58, probably had been an enrichment of our repertory of high-class piano Sonatas. After all, the Sonata is a perfected growth of Classicism, and so lends itself most ungraciously to the looser treatment of the Romanticist, for it demands not only sequence of ideas and systematic development of themes, but also a unification of its constituent movements that as a whole it shall be homogeneous.

During his Parisian career, Chopin composed three Sonatas, op. 35 and op. 58, for piano, and op. 65, for piano and violoncello. This last, a most unequal work, has provoked more of adverse criticism than any other bearing his name.

Chopin's chief defect, one almost always apparent, originated in his somewhat narrow sympathies, which, though deep, did yet by no means fathom the joys underlying and destined to outlast the waves of sorrow, which, to his circumscribed vision, were sufficient for the engulfing of the world. What, we ask, was the partition, the virtual obliteration of Poland, to that universal freedom, which, since the Napoleonic days, was known as a blessing yet to be? As already said, Chopin allowed these earth-clouds of sorrow to darken greatly the radiance of his ideal world. The pessimist could not sink himself in the deeper and wider optimist. We suspect his predilection for the gay and thoughtless dwellers on the surface of life, to be but desire to rid himself of a weight of sadness engendered by solitary musings.

The Sonata should be the outpouring of a heart attuned to every chord of life; a heart capable of universal sympathies. Nevertheless, the supreme expression of that heart is joy, a prophecy hopeful as a Christmas greeting to the world. Let us turn to a consideration of op. 35 in B flat minor, for there, as nowhere else, Chopin betrays the defects of his qualities.

The four vague introductory measures, «Grave,» attempt the expression of unutterable woe whose painful fullness is yet relieved by this anguished cry. During the next four measures the soul, still overburdened, meditates a more adequate expression, and, at the Agitato, again attempts its story in what proves but an interrupted and broken eloquence of grief whose poignancy soon softens to tender, sweet regret. This presently swells to passionate longing as for some far-off good. But alas for expectance! Alas for every looked-for happiness gilded by the sunlight of a day that shall not be! This last mood, so characteristic of Chopin, ends the first section of the first movement, and then suddenly but inevitably come back the old brooding and the tearful, sob-choked utterance. And now a calmer moment for, as from the Sun of all being, a ray of heaven-born cheer finds the darkened chambers of the heart; but whatsoever of hope is there enkindled, is, by sorrow's unstayable fountain, soon made cold again.

In almost no one succeeding bar of the four movements comprised in this so-called Sonata, does a note of real joy leap forth from the funereal throng. Even the piÙ lento of the Scherzo seems to say, «Whatever we feel, let us be outwardly cheerful!» Ah yes! But then this outwardness misleads no observer, for the suffused eye betrays the smiling lips, and laughter is the adroit but ineffectual turning of a sigh.

The Presto was abhorrent to Mendelssohn. A normal, happy being, he was born into the sunshine and green of a happy world, and his heart had not been plowed and harrowed, and then planted with the black-berried nightshade and all the baneful things of death. So he turned from this «Dark tarn of Auber» to the Chopin of meads and banks where no bird of midnight mood is croaking and the wholesome winds blow never from the «ghoul haunted woodland of Weir,» and the lithe branches are waving Æolian at eve.

In the Sonata op. 26 in A flat, Beethoven rightly placed amidst a contrasting environment the immortal «Marcia funebre sulla morte d'un Eroe.» Amidst the almost unmitigated gloom of the B flat minor Sonata, Chopin has inserted a commemoration worthy of many heroes. But who were the heroes inspiring the Polish composer to one of his grandest thoughts, the unsurpassable Funeral March? Yes, who in truth were those dedicated heroes? Surely not the great achievers whom the wide world esteems, but rather those losing heroes hopeful in a hopeless cause; those fallen patriots of Polish blood whose mangled forms the iron hoofs of war had trampled in the mire of battle.

In the prevailing key of his Sonata, the key of B flat minor, one of the most sombre in all the realms of tone, Chopin's Funeral March at once reveals itself as no chapter of private sorrows; the mourning of a multitude is in its deep-voiced chords telling the burial of a people's loss. Fit for the final pageant of emperors and kings, yet little varied as the monotone of some grave discourse, the weighty measures move majestically and slow while everywhere bared heads are bending, and the dull, despondent look is downward for now the dust shall hide yon poor reminder of a vanished life. Ah, how those earth-bound chords, for less than two brief measures, struggle free and lift us on their glorious, upward wings! Alas, they falter ere yet they attain, and then, in feebler soaring, turn and sink exhausted to the very charnel place of Death. Once more with mighty final strength the massive chords are mounting only to falter and attempt and fall again even to the dismal housing of the dead. Then, suddenly unto that comfortless abode a song of heaven is wafted from her angel choir. At once complaining Doubt is dumb, and Sorrow hath her respite, and Hope her sweet uplooking to the rest of heroes from their finished days. Long afterward, when acute grief has changed to pensive musing, that song in tones of unforgettable beauty steals upon the silence of the soul; a tender message from the never-dying dead.

But whatever of balm in such serene outpouring, the torn heart must look for ease to Time the great healer, and so the deep wounds reopen, the insurmountable doubt and grief again are undergone, and in this wise the sublime march, so masterfully epitomizing certain human experiences, draws to its pathetic close and ends on the sombre chord which characterized its beginning.

IV

During this study of Frederic Chopin, the musician, certain incidents in his career, those favorably or unfavorably affecting his artistic development, have been touched on. Notable among them was his friendship with Liszt; but we have now to record the effects of another coming together, that of Chopin and George Sand. This latter was not the marriage of two minds musically preËminent, but, in fact, the result of the drawing near, until under one sky, of two related worlds: that of the musician, and that of the poet, for such, in fact, was the world of the imaginative French novelist. From this meeting and blending of abodes resulted a drama, and, for Chopin, a final tragedy; therefore a word in regard to the two distinguished actors.

Chopin's bodily appearance was marked by an entire absence of the robust; his features indicated delicate and refined feeling; his tastes were fastidious; his manner smooth and faultless with the last polish. This much created an impression as of a feminine personality, but the real, virile man was there, well-hidden beneath his mask. «George Sand,» as that nom de plume would indicate, claimed for herself almost every masculine prerogative. With manly daring and physical vitality, she overleaped convention as but the walls of a prison-pen fit only for the shutting in of little minds. And yet, before some noble and deep nature, a softest fire would mount to those dark eyes of hers, and voice and mien revealed the «Eternal Womanly,» which often outlined and sometimes portrayed itself upon her most tender, soulful pages. From trustworthy accounts we conclude that Chopin was at first repelled, not by any physical lack, for Madame Dudevant had just and ample claims to comeliness, but rather from his inability to divine at once the basic affinity which afterwards drew and held him despite external dissimilarities. Not so with the great novelist to whose feminine insight much of the analytical, masculine mind was added. She at once divined Chopin, and whatever was defective in him the glamour of sex made good; so she desisted not until she had made him her own.

The beauty and symmetry and fragrance of the flower is the complete expression of a life simple because low in the scale of evolution; but the beauty and symmetry of the masculine human form, together with every endowment of the characteristic masculine mind, only half expresses the rounded whole of the complex human soul, itself sexless because above sex. What is true of man is equally so of woman. The man and the woman of genius each recognizes in the other the riches and worth of that hemisphere of the soul adequately revealed only by that other. This perception of a mutual need is the prompter of love between men and women high in the scale of human evolution; it is in fact the cause of love even in the most unthinking; those whom only the wisdom of Nature enlightens.

Like Beethoven, who sighed for his «Immortal Beloved,» Chopin himself had loved and more than once. That half of his being which, because a man, he failed to realize as an inward belonging, he had projected as an ideal clothed with the grace and beauty of womankind. That ideal had looked into his eyes with tender recognition, or a glance almost of scorn had wholly told his poor unworth. But, favoring or reproving, that ideal had vanished utterly and forever, and now his heart indeed was lone save in brief, exalted moments of genius. Then the soul in its entirety would assert itself, and amidst that fullness he needed no other company.

Chopin, now twenty-eight years of age, had reached the early maturity which hastens to the precocious genius into whose brief but brilliant years are crowded the doings of an ordinary lifetime. In subject matter, at least, he had from the first shown an originality almost unimpressed by any great contemporary or predecessor. Conscious of ability to stand alone, he shunned rather than sought the friendship of renowned composers and virtuosi. A tone poet most essential to the romantic movement, he cared not for the Romanticism of Schumann. The eccentricities of Berlioz repelled him, and, strange in an admirer of Hummel and Field, he could not or would not condone what he deemed commonplace in the bulk of Mendelssohn's work. As for Liszt, to whose interpretation he accorded deserved praise, he had with secret disdain penetrated to the somewhat small kernel of original and worthy ideas in that author's early virtuoso pieces.

From this much, and more that might be added, it is evident that Chopin's glance was chiefly introspective. Moreover, it is evident that his inner world was not that of other musicians.

What then was the influence of George Sand upon our composer, now at the zenith of his powers? Evidently that of a projected ideal the image of the half of his soul life which Goethe calls the Eternal Feminine. In the searching light of our everyday world, the personality of George Sand betrays many defects. This of itself forbade a union like that of the Brownings; and to such a union other objections existed. The physical ailments of Chopin, which even in youth had menaced, and in a gradual approach had now seized upon him, were never wholly to loosen their grasp, so the chronic invalid became at times an exacting and by no means patient sufferer. On the other hand, George Sand was a woman of wide outlook and varied interests. Certain chimeras in the guise of political and social reform were leading the temperamental novelist far afield; but in these matters the composer shared not her enthusiasm, neither would he be indoctrinated as she herself had been. Knowing where his strength lay, he remained faithful to his muse, his lavish endower. While Chopin sought the smiles of princesses, and the applause of the fashionable salon, the Sand remained aloof. Conscious of her superb mental equipment, she no doubt believed that the brightest of all that gay company could add not a single thought to her ever-overflowing store. No wonder that as time wore on our musician more and more failed to fulfill the requirements of her ideal.

The affair with De Musset should have warned Chopin, but what warning, what philosophy, what asceticism, could offset the fascinations of one who at will swayed the hearts of her immense public? Besides, Chopin was not a philosopher save that unconscious one which an analysis of his deepest tone-poems reveals. Still less was he an ascetic this highly-developed emotional nature, this virile yet frail man of genius.

Of Chopin it must be admitted that he remained true to his attachment, true despite indubitable proof of the other's infidelity; true even till the shutting of the door wherewith eventually she barred her heart forever from his own; true even then he remained, nursing in secret the sorrows of a bruised and broken life, while, from this episode in her own career, but the finale in that of her lover, the woman, like Faust and Wilhelm Meister, emerged into other and varied experiences.

But, to repeat our former question, what was the effect of George Sand on the ten years of productive effort which measured the beginning and the end of this affaire du coeur? We hold that effect the most important of everything extraneous on the body of our composer's works during that rich decade. Nevertheless that effect is not local; the finger cannot be placed upon it, nor is it determinable as a fixed quantity. Rather it is nourishment assimilated, chemically changed to blood and bloom and beauty by a process whereof genius alone has the secret.

Of the work of these memorable years it may well be said that, beneath their various dedications, the name of George Sand was written in the warm and ruddy life of the heart of Frederic Chopin. Had the novelist been another Clara Schumann rendering for the composer those great fortissimos, and those loud and brilliant passages to which his delicate physique was unequal, or even had Chopin himself been, like Liszt, a man of literary tastes and capabilities, how much happier the outcome! How that mutual happiness, triumphing over the depressing power of a dread disease—as afterwards in the case of Heinrich Heine—would have infused a more luminous color into the prevailing sombreness of his tone poetry! But, thankful for our rich heritage, we grieve not over what might have been.

V

Because of the superabundance of producers in every department of art and literature, and because the actual needs of the world are small in proportion to the total output, a sifting results whereby is preserved only that most typical of its kind. Thus of a thousand melodies popular in their hour, one is added to a people's treasury of song. A stirring, national anthem, or a perfect poem of tender feeling or contagious flame, may alone preserve the memory of a prolific author. Much of what the world once deemed great in art, as in all else, has gone to the limbo of little things. Of the surprising bulk of poems which Byron at thirty-six left behind him, most of the «Childe Harold,» displaying the range and fire of his yet undimmed imagination, and the freshness and amplitude of his characteristic, eloquent description, will live; but «Lara» and «Cain» and such must mingle with the trodden dust. So in the domain of music; many old-time authors of supposed masterpieces are superceded by others of like calibre and claim. Only of him who in his department creates a new type, or perfects an old one, can anything approaching longevity be predicted.

To but one popular poet was it given to interpret in a hundred lyrics the heart of his peasant Scotland. To but one English dramatist to create for our sympathy Lear, Cordelia, Othello and Desdemona, and to evoke from his fecund brain the philosophical musings of Hamlet, the whimsical humor of Falstaff, the gossamer beauties of «Midsummer Night's Dream,» and the terrible realism of Macbeth and Richard. To but one epic poet was it given to breathe a quickening breath into the pale shades of those mighty dead, Hector, Agamemnon, Achilles, and many an otherwise forgotten hero. To but one musician was it given to perfect in «The Well-tempered Clavichord» the great organ Fugue, to but one master of his art to show the attainable in those purely classical forms, the Symphony and the Sonata.

But what in a summary are the features of Chopin warranting his present vogue, and assuring his future fame? They are many, and each is an unimpeachable witness to his worth.

Prior to his day, Bach and Beethoven had explored the known world of harmony. They knew the geography of its vast continents, the choreography of its countries, the topography of its mountains and valleys and plains. They had measured its waterways, had sounded its seas, had sailed by its limiting shores; and then Ludwig Spohr, suspecting other lands beyond the uncharted west, had ventured as from Gibraltar even to the Azores, or the Canaries, the Fortunate Islands of old. Schumann had gone even farther, but not to the utmost of daring for this was the deed of Chopin. He, the Columbus of composers, gave to Harmony a new world. He, and he alone, first dreamed and then beheld its isles of Paradise, tropic and enticing, embowered and restful, fit for lone and pensive musing till suddenly the sun is darkened, the winds make wail, and a dread note of thunder foretells the bursting storm. Many times a voyager, many times an explorer, he brought continually, for the world's wonder and delight, the fantastic, the weird, the exquisite. Ah! his was no haphazard sailing on the ocean of sound; no rudderless drifting with wind and tide! Every appliance of the skilled navigator, the quadrant, the sextant, the compass, were his guides. In day or in night he knew the altitude of the sun or else of the polar star. He had calculated to a nicety the deflections of the needle. Though seemingly lost was he on the limitless waves, latitude and longitude, to the fraction of a degree, were clear to his never-beclouded mind. He it was who opened the way for all future discoverers and, inevitably, for rash and turbulent adventurers, even for Richard Strauss that Cortes, that Pizarro of them all.

An erudite originality, and the passionate abandon of the author of «Norma,» characterize Chopin the melodist. In the new world by him discovered, his own before-mentioned world of the ideal, were birds of rare and differing plume, winged with the delicate greens of half-grown forest leaves, or breasted with the morn's red kindling ere the sun, or throated with the orange of the fading eve, or mottled with the melancholy grey which tells the night. And some there were a purity of white more spotless than the farthest, feathery cloud; and some whose tufty blue was borrowed from no sky like ours. Of these creatures of the composer's realm, each was vocal with the mood whereof his beauty was the symbol. Amidst the morning wood, one lifted to the sun a brief yet brilliant song of transport; another's notes were cadenced from beside the splash of shaded waterfalls when noon was burning all the fields. Another at the day's down-sinking breathed a tender plaint, or trembled forth a melancholy, sweet farewell; and when the round and tropic moon had touched the listening groves to silver, a rarer than the nightingale would warble from the branching palms.

These all were the teachers that made Chopin a melodist; but he was more than a melodist, more than the harmonist we have indicated; he was a great, national tone-poet whose romantic measures characterized his Poland better than did the lines of her chiefest versifiers. The individuality of Chopin the composer was distinguishable as that of Beethoven and Wagner. He was above the mere perfector of types. His Scherzos, his Preludes, his Ballades, his Fantaisies are original conceptions. On the rhythm of the Polish dance he reared his dainty Mazurkas. Graceful and ethereal, they yielded like the slender pine to every swaying wind. Framed to endure, no blast could overthrow them. On the same national foundation uprose his Polonaises, an architecture of his own devising. Fantastic but not grotesque, uniquely and wholly expressive, those solid structures argued immovability, but the tempest proved them pliant and yet enduringly based as the deep-rooted giants of the wood.

The master of the mechanical difficulties of Bach and Clementi, must encounter others quite different in the Etudes of Chopin. The mind of such a one follows not swiftly the odd and rapid chromatics swarming through certain of them. His muscles tire in the midst of extended and unusual chords filling whole pages. His fingers, trained to anticipate conventional harmonic successions in the passage work, are here hindered by the unusual become the usual, the exception become the universal rule; and yet the musical worth of these intractable measures, whose like abounds everywhere in Chopin, compels the pianist of our day to conquer them.

But, more important than the mechanical, there is in Chopin a mental technique peculiar to himself. It informed his playing with an ineffable charm which haunted the memory of pupils and listeners, and yet lives, a tradition of the old Paris days.

Unlike Shakespeare and Beethoven, the Pole was not privileged to sound the harp of universal life; therefore the universal note is denied him, and therefore his chief interpreters may not be chosen from the gifted of every nation. It cannot be denied that for the music of the vehement, unreasoning passion which in an instant transforms the shaft of love to the stiletto, the Italian temperament is alone adequate. It is acknowledged that for the rendition of the semi-barbaric native rhythms, the wild, lawless onrushings and the tearful, or dreamy, or voluptuous lingerings of Hungarian music, the blood of the Magyars must surge from the heart to the finger tips.

These examples prove that the mental technique of our composer, a matter of phrasing and pedaling and accent, and, most intangible of requirements, the Chopin rubato, is most easily and completely mastered by the Slav genius. Of the world's goodly company of virtuosi, only a few exponents of the Polish musician wholly reveal his invaluable contributions to art.

In her own eyes the Amazonian Sand towered a genius in every way superior to the sickly and effeminate-mannered Chopin, but she attained not to the duty of a great novelist. No permanent types have sprung from her ambitious and busy pen. Those fretting, fuming, shadow-chasing Byronic heroes and heroines have lived their mortal days, and discriminating Time denies them an immortality vouchsafed the works of the man she abandoned.

Chopin's career as composer ends with the Sand affair. Of what followed little remains to be told. An unimportant visit to London and Edinburgh where broken health and spirits were serious obstacles to brilliant artistic success. A few friendships formed, a few old ones cemented, then back to Paris which first he entered a sojourner. Yes, back to Paris, the gay and frivolous and cynical Paris, that dances to the waiting grave and laughs and scoffs until the sad receiving of the tomb.

And now at last the untimely end. He who had blended the sheen of stars with the rainbow mist of waterfalls; he who had swung the forging hammer, and rivalled the delicate, meshy gold of Vulcan; he who had prisoned the loud thunder, the swift lightning, the angry, the plaintive, the whispering wind; he who had outridden the ocean's fury, and slept on the polished breast of mountain lakes; he, the Endymion of melancholy groves beloved of Luna; he, the portrayer of battles dread with the doings of conquering foes, was himself to yield, leaving for our musical heritage the gloom and glory of his works.

Let us draw near, but not to the concert hall, and the applauding crowd greeting the advent of the young Polish virtuoso. Yes, let us draw near, but not to the dazzling salon and yonder listening group, the elite of fashion and culture and fame, gathered around the Erard. Let us draw nearer than these; nearer than the studio of the composer, and the wrapt company of the inner circle: Sand and Hiller and Heine and Meyerbeer and Delacroix and Liszt, who himself has described the scene. Ah, let us, with hushed hearts and noiseless foot-fall, approach and enter, for this is the place of parting where human angels neglect no ministration of love and soothing song as a finished life sinks, like the master's diminuendo, to waken and swell and rush and thunder, filled with the vigor of immortal day.

Far from the charm of English vales and meadows; far from the skylark and the cloud he saw and loved above their freshening green; afar from all the sweet allurements of his native isle he sleeps, the English Shelley, where the blue of Italy is bending o'er the ruined olden, and the risen new whose ancient and eternal name is Rome. And close beside, where Winter spreads the flowers of northern June, is lying Adonais, poet wept in tearful poesy, the youthful Keats whom Beauty, in the guise of Death, drew to her own enamoured breast.

Walled from the covetous human waves, safe from the encroaching human tide, PÈre la Chaise, a mass of bloom and verdure, lies asleep while the Parisian metropolis roars and surges on. Of all the multitudes here gathered to the silence, one at least is alien for never a branch is moaning, never a breeze, for Polish liberty; and never a bird is inspired by such sad, sweet threnody; and never a strip of Polish sky, clear, or cloud-bedarkened, or heavy with the drops of sorrow, is bending o'er chiseled marble of a tomb. Amidst the dead of every high and noble calling, the dead whose deeds enhance the fame of France, that alien's dust is in the jealous keeping of a nation richer because of Poland and her greatest bard.

Sixty years have gone since the October day when, within the walls of the Madelaine, the master's funeral measures dirged his death. Since that memorable time many pianoforte composers, men of talent and men of genius, have arisen. These, by their indebtedness to the years of Chopin's productivity, prove him the one epoch-making composer for their instrument since Beethoven, and the one probably without a successor in kind.

The certainty that the principal Sonatas of Beethoven, and the Ballades and other chief works of Chopin, overtop all else written for the piano, provokes the question, Which of these composers is foremost in this realm of music? The question at once lends itself to argument. Evidently Chopin abounds in technical difficulties unattempted by Beethoven, and these difficulties are a proof of worth because in fact the unusual but necessary conveyers of a message new to the musical world. It must be conceded that Chopin's daring chromaticisms, transitions and modulations are the inevitable expressions of a genius novel but not forced. Then again, Chopin wrote for the piano not as he found it, but with prophetic knowledge of its future possibilities; to the extent of all this he outrivals Beethoven.

It must not be supposed that harmonic complexity is of itself superior to broad and bold simplicity. This truth Handel well knew. He, the master of Fugue, with all contrapuntal devices at command, is renowned for a Doric beauty the despair of the Byzantine and the Rococo. As a harmonist, Beethoven felt not the urge of the unusual; the immense possibilities which he perceived in Bach were enough for his grand and stately measures. Taking from that unexhausted mine, he cut and polished; then, brilliant on their every facet, he strewed the gems along his pages. Because of his many-sided excellence, we hold Beethoven a harmonist superior to Chopin, himself a delver in the Bachian mine. The music of Chopin is recognizable almost from the opening bar, but, as a creator and developer of characteristic themes, Beethoven is unequalled. While Chopin is one of the most inspired melodists, Beethoven sings himself more into the soul.

Although a solitaire, Beethoven was really a man of widest, deepest sympathies. Against his own bosom he felt the heart beat of humanity, and, love-enlightened, he divined that heart, even its total meaning. The heaven-reaching heights of joy, and the black profound of woe, and every intermediate, throbbed contagious into his own breast. Therefore is he the universal man, interpreter of his own ideal world and interpreter of nations, while, on his human side, the intense Chopin is the epitome of Poland. That this universal man was not containable within the possibilities of the pianoforte, was plainly no fault of his; nevertheless, that much of the universal which informs the chief Sonatas of Beethoven, entitles them to supremacy over the greatest of the other.

As the second of pianoforte composers, what giants Chopin leaves in his rear! Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Von Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and behind them many of lesser stature, Hummel, Clementi, Moscheles and such; and, still further back, the great average, the ephemeral multitude. Of all their pushing of pens, little will remain when, on some distant to-morrow, the stirred pulse and the suffused eye prove the tone-poems of the Polish musician an unfading charm, an undimmed worth, an eternal beauty, in the realms of art.

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