Chapter IV: Part 4

A law of spoliation may be passed and carried into effect, but in the event of its results becoming permanent it runs the risk of destroying the government which has assumed the responsibility of it. Socialist policy is a permanent menace to the liberty and security of citizens, and, therefore, cannot be the policy of any government, the primary duty of which is to exact respect for internal and external security. If it fail therein it dissolves and is replaced by anarchy; and, inasmuch as every one has a horror of that condition, which betrays itself by the oppression of violent men banded together solely by their appetites, an appeal is made to a strong government and to a man with a strong grip, and then the risk is incurred of relapsing into all the disgraces and disasters of Cæsarism. In several sections of this admirable work, M. Guyot scrutinizes the various Utopias from Plato to Proudhon: Sir Thomas More, the Kingdom of the Incas, Campanella, the Jesuits in Paraguay, Moselly, Robert Owen, Fourier, the American Phalanx, the Oneida Community, Cabet, the Icarians, and other unsuccessful experimenters. Utopia is always within sight, but never reached. It is, in the charming parlance of the hour, a pipe-dream; these Utopias always cut their throats to spite their thirst. And precisely where socialism was expected to be a buffer against world wars, it dismally failed.

From time to time the everlasting busybody asks himself why a plea for mediocrity is not a fitting theme to interest ambitious essayists. Supermen and supper-rogues have been done to the death in print, yet few words are accorded to the garden variety of the human plant. Instead we are keyed to the loftiest pitch; exaggeration is a national neurosis. We are all professional altruists, and, as every one knows, altruism is the art of making our neighbor unhappy because of our oppressive happiness. And yet not a word for mediocrity, which is the backbone of our nation, the staple of its political, artistic, and literary productions. Not a word for the man in the street, whose collective opinion—King Opinion, the most despotic of tyrants—rules us, whose vote counts heavier than the vote of the “exceptional” being perched on the house-top. (A majority of exalted souls would turn America into a wilderness.) And all because the excellent word “mediocrity” is become debased in meaning. At one time it stood for the golden mean, for a happy equilibrium of forces, moral and physical. It spelled happiness to its possessor—we refer to the mediocre temperament—and if a man had enough money to keep the wolf from the door he was content. That is the precise word—content; to be contented is a gift of the gods. But to us nowadays it means that you are merely commonplace, without social ambitions, without intellectual eminence. And this is not well.

Notwithstanding the fact that we are a united nation of over one hundred millions of people, we are each in his own fashion endeavoring to escape the imputation of mediocrity. Alas! in vain. Number is mediocrity. We think and drink to order, vote as we are bidden by our wives, and wear the clothes given us by destroyers of sartorial taste. Wherefore, then, this mad desire to be exceptional? Whence this optimism that shudders in the presence of genuine art and espouses the vulgar because it better agrees with fat nerves? Let us acknowledge the truth. It is because, happily for us, we are all mediocre; because genius is not a normal condition of humanity, and that talent is much less rare than our national vanity admits. However, let us pluck up courage. The future—which is said by some to belong to socialism—will work out the problem of mediocrity, especially if socialism is involved; mediocrity and socialism are not poles asunder. Concrete houses filled with people who will eat, drink, and think alike will cover the land. Everything will be of concrete, even our political opinions. In his concrete Capitol a concrete President will devise concrete laws. Art, music, and literature will be so concrete that our native Gradgrinds, hungry for hard facts, will be ravished into the seventh concrete heaven. Made a law, mediocrity will do away with our present mortifying doubts, deceptions, and pretensions. O Happy Time! And this coming age of concrete, wherein all must walk and look alike, is it not a dream compared with which Dante’s Inferno would be a Garden of Armida?

Said a great poet-philosopher: “And many a man has gone into the desert and suffered from thirst with the camels rather than sit about the cistern with dirty camel drivers.” No wonder William James wrote that “the whole atmosphere of present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and dish-watery to people who still keep a sense of life’s more bitter flavors.” And how much more that is insipid and mawkish will follow under socialistic regimentation! “Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundreds of thousands, of the party, of the section to which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically as the North or the South?” These words were not uttered by a Socialist; they emanated from the crystal-clear intellect of our greatest Individualist, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

CHOPIN OR THE CIRCUS?

Rather hotly I argued the question with my editor: “After all, music critics are men and brethren,” I said. “Except when they are sisters,” he ironically interposed. I sternly resisted a temptation to blush, and continued: “Because I love Chopin must I forever write of his music—toujours perdrix! It’s an indigestion of strawberries, clotted cream, and green-eyes. I’m suffering from spring-fever. Let me write a story about the circus.” “Why not Ibsen?” interposed my editor, who is subtle or nothing. “He was a grand man,” I assented, “but in the present case he is only a red-herring across the trail. Suppose I mix up Chopin with sawdust merely for the sake of the mélange?” My chief assented, wearily. There are more important problems on the carpet than Chopin.

Had I ever been to the circus? What a singular question! Yet, yet—! No, I confessed to myself, I had not been to the circus for at least three decades. Critics are tame cats away from their regular guests. In the concert room or at the play, armed with our little hammers, we are as brave as plumbers; but on a roof garden, in church, at a circus, or innocently slumbering, we are the mildest gang of pirates that ever scuttled an American sonata or forced ambitious leading ladies to walk the plank. We may go alone to the theatre with impunity and another fellow’s girl, but at the circus we need a nurse to show us the ropes and keep us from falling under the elephants’ hoofs. I know, because I went one Sunday night to the Hippodrome and liked John McCormack’s singing immensely; so much indeed that I forgot to criticise and nearly fell over the edge of the box, so uncritically did I applaud. A private nurse—not necessarily old—say I is the only safety for a critic out of his element; otherwise a sense of the dignity of our calling is not maintained.

Therefore, I swallowed my Chopin scheme without undue fervor and went to the circus. No matter which one. All circuses are in an attractive key to me. Thackeray said the same thing about the play, and said it better. Any circus will serve as a peg for my sawdust symbolism. Any Garden will do, so that it has a capitalized initial letter. (No allusion to Magical Mary.) The circus! What a corrective for the astringent Ibsen or the morbidezza of Sarmatia’s sweet singer, Chopin! The circus! It is a revelation. One thing I regretted—that I could not be a boy again, with dirty hands, a shining brow, and a heart brimming over with joy. Peter Pan! Oh! to recapture that first careless rapture, as Browning or some other writing Johnny said; surely he must have meant the circus, which is the one spot on our muddy planet where rapture rhymes with the sawdust ring.

“Have you ever seen Hedda Gabler?” I asked of the Finland giantess. We were wedged in front of the long platform at the Garden, upon which were the Missing Link, the Snake-Enchantress, the Lion-Faced Boy, the English Fat Girl—so fat—the Human Skeleton, the Welsh Giant, the Lilliputians, tattooed men, a man with an iron skull, dancers, jugglers, gun-spinners, “lady” musicians, and the three-legged boy. Eternal types at the circus. The noise was terrific, the air dense with the aura of unwashed humanity. This aura was twin to the aura in a monkey house. But I enjoyed my “bath of multitude,” as Charles Baudelaire names it, and I should not have bothered the tall creature with such an inept question. She coldly regarded me:

“No, I haven’t seen Hedda to-day, but I remember George Tesman always teased her with one question, ‘What do you know about that, Hed?’ Shoo! Sardou for mine.” “Do you read George Blarney Shaw?” I persisted. “He ought to be in a cage here. He would draw some crowds. But I’m told he lives in Germany now on account of the beer.” I backed away quickly as an East Side family consisting of a baker’s dozen, would allow. Why had I asked such a question of a perfect stranger? This giantess, I mused before the rhinoceros with the double prongs, is Finnish. That’s why she knew the name of Hedda Gabler. Why didn’t I speak of Rosmersholm? Rebecca West had Finnish blood in her veins. Careful, careful—this Ibsen obsession must be surmounted, else I shall be inquiring of the giraffe if neck or nothing is the symbol of Brand. All or Nothing! of course. How stupid of me. Among the animals I regained my equilibrium. Their odors evoked memories. Yes, I recalled the old-time circus, with its compact pitched canvas tent on North Broad Street, Philadelphia: the pink lemonade, the hoarse voice of the man who entreated us to buy tickets—there were no megaphones in those days—the crisp crackling of the roasting peanuts, the ovens revolved by the man from Ravenna, the man from Ascoli, and the man from Milan. They followed the circus all the way from Point Breeze, and I swear they were to me far more human than the policemen who gently whacked us with their clubs when we crawled under the tent.

The sense of smell is first aid to memory. As I passed the cages saluting our pre-Adamic relatives, bidding the time of day to the zebu, nodding in a debonair fashion to the yak, I could not help longing for my first circus. Again I saw myself sitting in peaceful agony on a splintery plank; again I felt the slaps and pinches of my tender-hearted Aunt Sue—now in Paradise, I hope; again my heart tugged like a balloon at its moorings as the clowns jumped into the ring, grimacing, chortling, and fascinating us with their ludicrous inhumanity. Again we sat, a lot of noisy rapscallions, on the stoop of Edwin Forrest’s home—the old Forrest mansion is still on the west side of Broad Street—and how we tumbled to the sidewalk when that terrific tragedian opened the door and transfixed us with his glittering glance. I can still see his leonine head with its shock of iron-gray curls, his exposed bull-neck, and hear his angry roar: “Get to blank out of here, you blankety-blanks!” It was the giant’s voice of Metamora, Coriolanus, Lear that we heard, an echo from the grand period in the history of the American theatre; but we didn’t know that. We were mischievous boys, and made mock of the mighty Edwin, no doubt adding insult to injury by twiddling derisive thumbs at our noses.

Other days, other ways. I sighed as I tore myself loose from the prehensile trunk of a too friendly baby elephant and passed into the huge auditorium where Gilmore had played. Ah! the sad, bad, glad, dear, dead, tiresome, poverty-stricken, beautiful days when we were young imbeciles and held hands with a fresh “ideal” every week (sometimes two). Ah! the sentimental “jag” induced by peanut eating, and the chaste, odoriferous apes.

It is time. We seat ourselves. I look about me. Two resplendent gentlemen wearing evening clothes at high noon, after the daring manner of our Gallic cousins, toll a bell. I became excited. Why those three and thirty strokes? What the symbolism! Chopin, or Ibsen; again, I groaned, and turned my attention to my neighbors, one of whom I could feel, though did not see. I raised my voice, employing certain vocables hardly fit to print. The effect was magical. “Johnny, take your feet out of the gentleman’s collar. That’s a good boy.” It was the soothing voice of a mother. Bless her clairvoyance! I sat comfortably back in my seat. Johnny howled at the interference with his pleasure. I felt sorrow for him. Childhood is ever individualistic, even pragmatic. But I only had one collar with me, and it was well the matter thus ended.

Hurrah! Here they come! A goodly band. The clowns! the clowns! Some hieratic owl of wisdom has called the clown the epitome of mankind. He certainly stands for something, this “full-fledged fool,” as good old Tody Hamilton used to write, and “surcharged with the Roe of Fun,” which phrase beats Delaware shad. Odds fish! There was only one Hamilton. What a Rabelaisian list of names boast these merry clowns! If the years have passed over the skulls of these lively rascals, jolly boys do not show them. The same squeaks, the identical yodling, the funny yet sinister expression of the eyes, the cruel, red-slitted mouths—not a day older than ten did I seem as they came tumbling in and began their horse-play, punctuated with yelling, yahoo gestures, ribald ejaculations, and knockabout diversions. It must all mean something, this hooting, in the economy of the universe, else “life is a suck and a sell,” as Walt Whitman puts it. As in a dream-mirror I saw Solness slowly mount the fatal tower when Hilda Wangel cries to him: “My—my Master-builder!” She sings The Maiden’s Wish, and he hears the harps of Chopin hum in the air. I rub my ears. It is not Hilda who is crying, but a pet pig in a baby carriage, wheeled by a chalk-faced varlet. How difficult it is to escape the hallucinations of the critical profession. I couldn’t forget Chopin or Ibsen even at the circus.

It was with relief, after more bellmanship from the man with the shiny silk hat and spiked coat, as the elephants majestically entered. Followed the horses. Tumblers and wire-walkers, women who stood on their heads and smiled—as they do in life. Something like the “inverted pyramid,” as James Hinton called modern civilization—plastic poseurs, Oriental jugglers, the show was let loose at last. Human projectiles were launched through midair to the tap of a drum. My nerves forbade me to look at them, so I read a programme advertisement of wall-paper for bathrooms. Some people like such horrible sights. I do not. They dare not precisely formulate to themselves the wish that “something” would happen, and when it does they shudder with sadistic joy. I close my eyes when the Whirl of Death or any other sensational act is staged. “Something” might happen.

The mad dancers delight our rhythmic sense as they make marvellous arabesques. The chariot races stir the blood. The crash around curves, the patters of gleaming metal excite so that you stand up, and, brushing the feet of inevitable Johnny from your neck (notwithstanding his remonstrances), you shout with woolly mouth and husky voice. Instinctively you turn down your thumbs: “Pollice verso,” which Bayard Taylor translated “the perverse police.” You remember the Gérôme painting?

“This beats Ibsen,” I hilariously exclaimed to Johnny’s mother. (She was a comely matron.) “His name is John, and when he gets home his father will beat him,” she tartly replied. With the prevoyance of boyhood Johnny burst into despairing howls. I at once folded up my mind. A million things were happening in the haze of the many rings. The New Circus is polyphonic, or nothing.

Enough! Filled to the eyes with the distracting spectacle, ear-drums fatigued by the blare and bang of the monster brass band, my collar quite wilted by Johnny’s shoemaker, my temper in rags because of the panting, struggling army of fellow-beings, I reached the avenue in safety, perspiring, thirsty, unhappy. Like Stendhal, after his first and eagerly longed-for battle of love, I exclaimed: “Is that all?” In sooth, it had been too much. The human sensorium is savagely assaulted at the twentieth-century circus. I was in pessimistic enough humor to regret the single ring, the antique japes of a solitary clown, and the bewitching horsemanship of Mlle. Léonie, with her gauze skirts and perpetual rictus. As a matter of fact, we wouldn’t endure for five minutes the old-fashioned circus and its tepid lemonade. Where are the mullygrubs of yesteryear? But the human heart is perverse. It always longs for the penny and the cake in company, while ineluctable destiny ever separates them. Perhaps my editor was right. Render unto Chopin the things that are Chopin’s; send Ibsen back to his Land of the Midnight Whiskers. Smell the sawdust at the Garden, not forgetting that the chilly, dry days are at hand when even Panem et Circenses shall be taboo; when pipe and prog and grog will be banned; when these United States shall have been renamed Puritania; when a fanatically selfish minority shall take all the joy from life. Ergo, carpe diem! I thank you.

ART AND ALCOHOL

What will be the reactions among artistic men and women summarily deprived of wine and malt beverages? I asked this of Manager Gatti-Casazza the other day at the Metropolitan Opera House. He is not a drinking man, but the contemptuous shrug of his shoulders showed me his position in the thrice-vexed controversy. Singers, one and all, are accustomed to mild alcoholic refreshment. If they go beyond bounds the effect on their voices is soon made manifest, but usually being foreign-born, they have been in the habit of drinking light wines at meal time, perhaps beer after a performance, for good beer relaxes nerve-tension. People don’t drink beer to become intoxicated; they drink it because it lets down the pressure of a day’s work better than whiskey or wine. Beer is not an intoxicant; it is a depressant. The cry that “the workingman must have his beer” is far too exclusive. The professional man, the brain-worker, needs beer, and the singer or musician—sometimes singers are not musicians!—after a nerve-exhausting performance finds in wine or beer a veritable solace. Matthew Arnold wrote that the American funny man was a national calamity. What would he have said to the plans of certain misguided females to found “recreation centres” where, after eight hours’ exhausting daily grind, the workman could listen to “instructive reading”—ye gods!—and drink non-alcoholic beverages (super-taxed?). Little wonder Bolshevism is growing apace in an America that soon will be a vast Dry Tortugas.

In one of her always interesting novels Gertrude Atherton depicts a poet whose inspiration dried up when he stopped drinking. Swinburne is said to have been Mrs. Atherton’s model; when the English poet ceased his cognac his muse did not fly far afterward. If he had not become temperate in regard to spirituous liquors the greatest Victorian poet would have died. Walter Savage Landor, and after him Byron, wrote that brandy is a drink fit only for heroes. The puny physique of Swinburne could ill brook alcoholic excesses. His friend and protector, Theodore Watts-Dunton, literally saved the effervescent Algernon Charles from sudden death. As a rule lyric poets need no stimulant. Youth is the propulsive force to their lyricism. If Byron drank heavily at times, Shelley was ever a water-drinker. No rules can be formulated. There is Bernard Shaw, the “Uncle Gurnemanz” and venerable busybody of international politics. He is a fierce teetotaler. He has confessed that family reasons prompted him to become so, although Archdale Reid in Heredity has shown that acquired traits are not inherited; that the children of drunkards are seldom drunkards (prohibitionists declare the opposite, but figures can be made to lie). By the same token the sons of clergymen are not often pious. Nature abhors uniformity. If Shaw had taken his ale like the British workmen he harangues, he would not have been the pestiferous nuisance he is to-day. But, like all “reformers,” “uplifters,” and public nuisances, he has a weak stomach. Because he is virtuous!—the motto of all these Malvolios, these tailless foxes. Mind your own business! Ah! that’s the true golden rule. There would be no wars if this custom prevailed.

The late Lombroso-Levi, formulator of many ingenious and amusing theories concerning the stigmata of genius, has collected some names of men who drank, nevertheless who contrived to leave the world in their debt for their art. Max Nordau followed his “master” with his absurd tome on Degeneration, and then the system, chiefly framed for imbeciles, quite collapsed. Professor William James sent the cardboard structure into thin air when he revealed its numerous inconsistencies. Any stigma applicable to genius or talent may be found in your shoemaker, butcher, or policeman, from megalomania to alcoholism, from faun-like ears with attached lobes to an unholy greed for other people’s money. Let us look at Lombroso’s list of alcoholic men of genius. He writes that Alexander died after having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules (some thirst!). Julius Cæsar was often carried home on the shoulders of his friends—so was a certain highest dignitary in the United States during the last century, and a mediocrity he was. Socrates, Seneca, Alcibiades, Cato, Peter the Great, the Czarina Catherine were notorious boozers. Tiberius Nero was nicknamed Biberius Mero. Septimius Severus and Mahomet II died in delirium tremens. Jan Steen and Frans Hals were heavy imbibers. Hals, who lived to an advanced age and painted masterpieces to the last, was drunk every night. So was Monticelli, absinthe proving his ruin. George Morland drank, and Turner, too; both drank to excess. As for the poets and literary men, the litany is long. Henry Murger, Gerard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Poe, Hoffmann, Addison, Steele, Carew, Sheridan, Burns, Charles Lamb, James Thomson, Hartley Coleridge, James Clarence Mangan, Ernest Dowson, Swinburne—Rossetti, who drugged—and Coleridge, De Quincey and Mme. de Staël abused opium.

In the domain of music examples are as thick as bombs were at Verdun. Handel swallowed a mighty amount of firewater, for he was a mighty man. Gluck drank far more than was good for him. It was a pleasing habit of his to have a harpsichord placed in some pretty rural spot, where, with a regiment of bottles, he played and composed. He died, so it is said, of brandy. Tasso drank, Baudelaire drugged and drank, and Lenau, poet, died from alcohol. Mozart and Beethoven abused wine. Beethoven was often “a little how come ye so!” Modern instances multiply. Singers, players, actors, authors, composers—how many there are about whose heads is the aura of alcoholism! Alcohol has been the nursing bottle of genius, and of many commonplace citizens may not the same be said? Woe to him who abuses the priceless gift. He is doomed. And doomed, too, is the prohibitionist who overindulges in flapjacks and fried steak. Native cookery has slain more than the rum mills of the universe. And notwithstanding our vaunted cosmopolitanism, a natural outcome of the great war, the village pump is to be our national Totem. Butchered to make a prohibitionist holiday; that prohibition which has elevated “legislation” to the dignity of a sport.

Richard Wagner possessed an irritable stomach, but was comforted by a glass of good wine (as apparently was St. Paul). Walt Whitman neither smoked nor drank. Poor Guy de Maupassant began with wine, and, in the wake of erotic excesses, he resorted to opium, even to ether, which he would put on his handkerchief and apply to his nostrils. Such a hatred of reality was his! He well deserved the appellation of “Taureau triste,” as he was surly toward the end of a brilliant career. Flaubert, like Zola, was chary of excess, except in literary work. Be chaste in your life that you may be violent in your art! he enjoined de Maupassant. Turgénieff, Daudet, Huysmans, Gounod, Goncourt, were not alcoholic. Bizet, it is said, died of absinthe, not of disappointment over the failure of Carmen; which didn’t fail, as Philip Hale has shown us. Goethe was wild in his youth, drank wine, pursued the golden girl, yet he cannot by any stretch of imagination be placed in the ranks of the drunkards. The alcoholic neurosis exists in the individual, who drinks because he is neurotic, and is not necessarily neurotic because he is a drunkard. As usual, the prohibitionists have put the cart before the horse, being ignorant, or pretending to be, of facts disclosed by modern biological research. These fanatics suffer from what might be called psychical dandruff.

What am I trying to prove? Nothing. Alcohol inspired or spurred on these men, and we are the inheritors of their visions. Naturally, to the boneheads who engineer reforms, all art is dangerous, is immoral. Art, like religion, is also an opiate. God made the dawn, but the devil invented the evening. The Seven Arts are the invention of men in revolt against the tedium of life. Killing time is only killing one’s self, for we are crucified at the crossroads of Time and Space (with the Button-Moulder lurking around the corner). To escape the eternal ennui man created the arts, and music, the most soothing of the seven, has drugged his dreams and made fantastic the rude angles of concrete life. Perhaps music is only a majestic noise. Sometimes it bruises the soul as do bells the air. It can retire majestically into the recesses of the imagination, like the faint roar of surf withdrawn on the beach of Time. It may be a ballet for triphammers or as splendidly sonorous as the color chords of Picasso or the tortured mechanisms of Marcel Duchamps. But always an opiate, a consoler.

The truth is that our existence without some buffer between our naked souls and the chill wind of empty spiritual space would be inconceivable. Man devised Time and Space—symbols of his terrifying ignorance in the presence of eternity—and religion and the arts wherewith he might cloak his nakedness. All the rest is vanity. Prohibition is only a symptom of the everlasting propensity of intolerant minds to fashion others after their own mean image. There is no need to worry over it. Like other tyrannical devices to enslave the will of mankind, it will be tested, found wanting, and dropped. And the best way to hasten the decease is to enforce rigidly the law. But come what may, art and alcohol are inseparably wedded, as in the Greek myth Apollo and Dionysos imaged beauty and ecstasy.

THE TRAGIC CHOPIN

Chopin has bequeathed to us six scherzos. The four that comprise a group are opus 20, in B minor; opus 31, B flat minor; opus 39, C sharp minor, and opus 54, E major. The two remaining scherzos are in the second sonata, opus 35, and in the third sonata, opus 58. They are in the respective keys of E flat minor and E flat major. These six compositions are evidences of the power, originality, variety, and delicacy of Chopin. The scherzo is formally not his invention. Beethoven and Mendelssohn anticipated him. But he remodelled the form and filled it with a surprisingly novel content, though not altering its three-four measure. With the Beethoven scherzo we realize the swing, the robustiousness and, at times, the rude jollity. In the Mendelssohn scherzo we enjoy the velocity and finish. Light without heat, true scherzando moods; indeed, more scherzo-like than Chopin’s, Mendelssohn’s sense of elfin joy stemmed from the early Italian masters of the pianoforte. Rossini voiced this belief after hearing the scherzo a capriccio from the nimble fingers of Felix himself, and said to the composer: “That smells of Scarlatti.” And it does recall Domenico Scarlatti, whose compositions, slight as to structure, are replete with gracious vitality and a surface skimming of sentiment like the curved flight of a thin bird over shallow waters.

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A terrible though beautiful domain is the Chopin scherzo. Only two have the lightness of touch, clarity in atmosphere and bustling gaiety of the conventional scherzo: the other four are fierce, grave, ironic, sardonic, fiery, passionate, even hysterical, and most melancholy. In several the moods are pathologic; in all, magical. The scherzo in E, opus 54, may be best described by the thrice commonplace word, delightful. It is sunny music, and its sweep and swiftness are compelling. The five preluding bars of half-notes, unison, strike the keynote of optimism. What follows is like the ruffling of tree-tops by warm southern winds. The little upward flight in E, beginning at the seventeenth bar, in major thirds and fourths, has been cleverly utilized by Saint-Saëns in the scherzo of his G minor piano concerto, opus 22. The fanciful embroidery of the single finger passages is never opaque; a sparkling, bubbling freedom and freshness characterize this Chopin scherzo, a composition not heard too often in public, possibly because there are few pianists, like Joseffy or De Pachmann, to play it. Its emotional content is not deep; it lies well within the category of the elegant, the capricious. Its fourth page contains an episode which at first blush suggests the theme of the A flat valse, opus 42, with its comminglement of duplex and triple rhythms. Although the piu lento is in C sharp minor, it betrays little sadness; it is but the blur of a passing cloud that shadows with its fleecy edges the wind-swept moorland.

This scherzo in E is a mood of joyousness; as joyous as the witty, sensitive, umbrageous composer ever allowed himself to become. Its coda is not so forcible as the usual Chopin coda. There is a dazzling flutter of silvery scale at the close. Altogether a charming work. Closely allied to it in general sentiment is the E flat scherzo from the B minor sonata. It is largely arabesque and its ornamentation is genial though not surprisingly ingenious. It somewhat savors of Weber. It might go on forever. The resolution is not intellectual; it is purely one of tonality. The thought is tenuous. But it is highly embroidered relief after the first movement of the sonata. Nor is the trio in B particularly noteworthy. Truly a salon scherzo, which challenges Mendelssohn on his native heath. It may be considered as an intermezzo, also as a prelude to the lyric measures.

We are on firm and familiar footing when the first page is opened of the B flat minor scherzo, the second in order of composition. Who has not heard with interest those overarching and questioning triplets which Chopin could never make his pupils play sufficiently “tombé”? He told De Lenz: “It must be a charnel-house.” Alas! These same vaulted phrases have since become banal. This scherzo, like the lovely A flat Ballade, is cruelly tortured by the ambitious musical flapper. Yet how great, how vigorous, it all is; how it abounds in sweetness and light when the music falls from the fingers of a master! It is a Byronic poem—“so tender, so bold, as full of love as of scorn,” to quote Schumann. Has Chopin ever penned a more delicious song than this in D flat, with its straying over the tonal borderland? It is the high noon of life. The dark bud of the introduction has come to a perfect flowering, and with what miracles of scent, shape, and color! The second section has the quality of sane wit. It is serious to severity, yet its meanings are noble. The brief excursion that follows is the awakening from a wondering dream; no suggestion there of pallid morbidities. And how supremely welded is the style with the subject; what masterly writing evolved from the genius of the instrument! Then, fearful that he has dwelt too long upon his ideas, Chopin, in a rapturous flight, soars away to clear sky. After the repetition comes the development section, and while it is ingenious and effective in a chaotic way, nevertheless it is here that the composer is at his weakest. The Olympian aloofness of Beethoven, which permitted him to survey his material from every point of view, Chopin could not boast. He is a great composer, but he was also a great pianist. He nurses his themes with constructive frugality, and sometimes the mechanical limitation of the piano checks his imagination. The well-sounding is considered as much as the clearly thought. There is logic in his exposition, though it is often piano, not music, logic. A certain straining after brilliancy, a falling off in the spontaneous urge of the earlier pages, force us to feel easier with the return of the first theme. The coda is brilliant. This scherzo in B flat minor bids fair to remain the favorite among its fellows. It is neither cryptic nor repellent, like the first and third scherzo. It is a perennial joy to pupil and public. Like the soliloquy in Hamlet, the B flat minor scherzo is become a popular quotation.

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Its predecessor in B minor, opus 20, is the profounder of the pair, but not so melodious. It is the most shrill and hysterical of the scherzos. Though in the ironic vein, it is Chopin recklessly throwing himself to the winds of remorse—a Manfred mood, a mood of self-torture, a confession from the first chord to the last. Within the dream inclosed by its gates of tonal brass there is the struggle of an imprisoned soul. It is the unhappiest and the most riotous of the Pole’s works, and it is also unduly long. Its emotional keynote is too tense to permit of the repetitions marked by the composer. These repetitions are unsuited to present taste, which, above all, demands brevity. Poignancy and prolixity are mutually exclusive. The piece greatly gains when played without “da capo.” Its first part is so drastically harsh that the succeeding melody in B, with its lilting tenths—“the sweet slumber of the moonlight on the hill”—after the tragic strain comes as benison. This scherzo seems to possess a personal message. Chopin, like Robert Louis Stevenson, was consumptive. Slender of frame, as was the Scotch writer, his spirit was leonine. His was psychic bravery. He could write terrible music, conjure up desperate images. A sense of stifled longing, of the inability to compass his lofty ambitions, fill this first scherzo. It is the tragedy of Chopin’s life compressed within a few pages; the tragedy of one whose spirit was weaker than his flesh.

The arabesques after the eight-bar introduction—some of them muted bars, as is Chopin’s wont—has a spiritual resemblance to the principal figure in the Fantasie-Impromptu, opus 66; but instead of the ductile triplets, as in the bars of the Impromptu, the figure in the scherzo is divided between the hands, while the harshness of the mood is emphasized by the anticipatory chord in the left hand. The vitality of this first page is positively electrifying. The questioning chords at the close of the section are as imaginative as any passage ever written by the composer. The half-notes E and the upleaping appogiaturia are evidences of his originality in minor details. These occur before the modulation into the lyric theme and with some slight dashes before the dash into the coda. The second section, in agitato, contains several knotty harmonic problems; they must be skimmed over at tempestuous speed, else cacophony. Here Chopin is bold to excess, as if his spirit would knock at the very gates of heaven or hell. But the thunder and surge, after waxing, soon wanes and spends itself. The soul has stormed itself into sheer weariness. By critical consent, the molto piu lento is a masterpiece. Written in the luscious key of B, it is like a woven enchantment. Chopin attains most subtle effects with broken accords in tenths. The only other slow movements comparable to this are the B major episode in the B minor octave study, opus 25, and the largo of the B minor sonata. The Garden of Armida or the Vale of Tempe are evoked by all three tone-poems.

Mark how the composer resumes his first savage mood. It is a picture of contrasted violences. Beware of the “da capo.” Too many repetitions provoke satiety. Rather attack at once the coda—that most dramatic of Chopin’s codas. Bold, breathless, startling, is this impetuous ride ’cross country. The heavy accentuation on the first note of every bar should not obscure one’s rhythmic sense to the second beat in the left, which is likewise accented. This produces mixed rhythms, which add to the murkiness, confusion, and despair of the finale. These daring dissonances—so daring, so logical, so dramatic—how they must have rasped the nerves of Chopin’s contemporaries! And they should be rigorously insisted upon. No veiled half-lights. All bridges are burned. Naught remains but catastrophe. To his doom goes this musical Childe Roland! The Dark Tower crumbles as the poet dauntlessly blows his slug-horn. The scherzo ends in overwhelming ruin. The last page is a supreme offering to the god of pessimism.

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Even though the sneering fretfulness of an unhappy sick-brained man disturbs its sharp contours, the third scherzo in C sharp minor, opus 39, is the most dramatic and the finest moulded of them all. It is capricious to madness, but the dramatic quality is unmistakable. It seethes with scorn—if such an extravagant expression may be allowed; but it is extravagant, full of fire and fury, yet signifying something. A word as to the tempo: The scherzos, with a few exceptions, are marked presto, but we must remember that it is the presto of Chopin’s time, also of his piano action. His favorite Pleyel piano was light and elastic in action. To-day actions are heavier, the key dip greater, though the elasticity is the same. Therefore the tempi of these scherzos—or should I write scherzi?—ought to be moderated, otherwise the music loses its significant ponderability, not to say dignity, when we adopt the old-fashioned time markings. The first part of the B minor scherzo may be taken at a presto pace—that is, a commodious presto, the scherzo in E major must be played presto; also the one in E flat, as both are of the velocity genre; but when the thought takes on a graver hue, where the mastery of utterance and nobility of phrase are to be considered, then moderate your pulse-beat. The scherzo in C sharp minor is a special sufferer from a too hurried speed. Architectonics are blurred, details jumbled and grandeur of style is absent. And if you start with such a fiery tempo, how shall you secure contrast in the coda, which should be fairly shot from the finger-tips? Or would you emulate Schumann in his G minor sonata, in the finale, which begins prestissimo, and is later ordered by the composer to become still more prestissimo? Achieve a presto, by all means, but consider the heavier tonal mass of the modern piano.

This C sharp minor scherzo is a massive composition, yet replete with fitful starts and rhythmic surprises. The chorale and its trio are Chopinesque as to fioritura and in harmonic basis. Throughout the narrative tone is dramatic; even in the “meno mosso” it never tarries. The coda is built on an effect of persistent iteration. It is excellently adapted to the keyboard. The composition has affinities with the dark and grotesque conceptions of Hoffmann, Poe, or Coleridge. Its acid irony recalls Heine. It is like fantastic architecture seen in a dream; about it hover perpetual gloom and the despairing things that circle in the night. It is like a tale from Poe’s iron-bound, melancholy volume of the Magi and across its portal is written the word, Spleen.

Remains the E flat minor scherzo from the second sonata. It is the most powerful of the set. To interpret, one needs breadth of style, heroic spirit, abetted by wrists of steel. The big Rossinian one-bar crescendo at the beginning taxes the strength. The composition is elemental; the chromatic whistling of the wind in the chord of the sixth makes true storm-music. There is menacing gloom in the initial bars; the blissful song is not quite uninterrupted bliss; there is always a tempest that threatens. The descending octaves, which seem to invite us to the infernal regions, are swept away by the storm-theme, and once more we are madly projected through space. Satanic pride, a challenge to fate, the defiance of the microcosm to the threatening macrocosm; these and other characteristics may be imagined in this profound work. It depends on the listener. With Chopin as with Rome, you carry away what you fetch to either man or city. But your little Peter’s pence of sympathy has suffered a rich change in the return. We are the gainers. Some day, no longer as remote as when the fallacious belief that the music of any particular nation is better than another’s, perhaps Chopin may stand where he should, next to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. There is no such thing as map-music; there is only beautiful music. And you can never play Chopin beautifully enough.

PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN

To-day the Impromptus of Chopin are well-nigh impossible in the concert-room. Those delights of all true “flappers,” the Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, and the A flat Impromptu are played too often, that is, played badly. The first part of the Fantasie-Impromptu is taken at too swift a pace, and, in consequence, sounds too much like an etude, when in reality its arabesques do hint at something more emotional. The figuration suggests that of the B minor scherzo, not, however, so pregnant with dramatic meanings. And that second section in D flat, how it is dragged, how it is sprawled and drawled! In company with the second theme of the Funeral March, it is the most sentimental of its composer. The greater Chopin is revealed in the second Impromptu, the one in the key of F sharp major. It is a sheaf of moods organically more bound together than seems at a first hearing. Because of its true impromptu spirit, its vagrant moods, its restless outpouring of fancies, it has been rather disregarded by some Chopinists, who, hidebound as any academic critic, are shocked by the changes in tonality, and, being unimaginative, are shocked also by the capricious shifting of moods; one dream melts into another, and after a repetition of those sweetly attuned chords at the close, a vigorous affirmation awakens the listener as would a sudden clap of thunder during a peaceful evening in June. There are several enigmatic bars of modulation that have puzzled purists and still are disquieting even to excursionists through the tangled harmonic underwoods of Ornstein and Stravinsky. I refer to a transitional passage after the march-like measures and immediately before the return of the principal melody. Elsewhere I have compared them to the creaking of a rusty hinge in the dooryard where Walt Whitman’s lilacs last bloomed. The G flat Impromptu, the third in the published order—the Fantasie-Impromptu, opus 66, is posthumous—was seldom heard in recital till Vladimir de Pachmann, master expositor of the more delicate phases of the Polish composer, revived it in his programme. Since then it is become more familiar. It is charming with its spiral figuration, though less novel than its two predecessors.

The Mazurkas, those impish, morbid, gay, sour, dour, graceful little dances, I need not dwell upon here at length. For the majority of pianists they are a sealed book, and if you have not a savor of Slav in you pray do not disturb them with your literalism. De Pachmann, Godowsky, Paderewski, Gabrilowitsch, and Josef Hofmann play them wonderfully, but how few others. I recall a story told me by Rosenthal, whose colossal performances here are memorable. He wished to hear from De Pachmann’s nimble fingers his own version of the Mazurkas and paid the Russian a visit one evening. Pachmann did not greet Rosenthal too sympathetically. “Ah!” he exclaimed, when Moriz, the octave-thunderbolt, explained the reason for his unexpected appearance. “Ah! but I play the Mazurkas so badly. Now, if I had your technique”—his eyes fairly sparkled with malicious irony—“I might be able to play them!” However, he was persuaded, and once seated at the piano he didn’t leave it till he had almost finished the entire collection; and Chopin wrote many of these dances. (At least fifty-one, if you include several of doubtful authenticity). How did he play them, this perverse magical artist? Rosenthal told me that he had never heard such beautiful, subtle, and treacherous playing; the treachery was the manner in which he interpreted the music. Not an accent was correct, the phrasing was falsified, though the precise notation was adhered to, and all delivered with a variety of touches positively exquisite. “There!” cried De Pachmann, as he finished, “that is the only way to play the Mazurkas.” And he smiled with his eyes. “Not!” thought Rosenthal, who thanked his colleague and hurried into the open air where he could explode. Talk about camouflage! The joke was later when Rosenthal teased De Pachmann about his trickery and the Chopinzee absolutely grinned with joy. Surely, as Sam Johnson remarked, the reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life. The splenetic doctor could have joined musicians to authors.

Chopin has composed some marvellous music in the Mazurka form. Consider the three or four of these dances in the key of C sharp minor, the poetic one in B flat minor, the one with the morbidly insistent theme in B minor or that sad, appealing example in F minor, the last which Chopin is said to have put on paper. Its fixed idea, its hectic gaiety and acrid gloom reveal a sick brain, the brain of a dying man. But there are many other Mazurkas filled with daylight cheerfulness. Of the greater Chopin posterity will probably acclaim the Polonaises in F sharp minor, A flat major and the Fantaisie-Polonaise in the same key. There is a wealth of fantasy in this Polonaise, opus 61; its restless tonalities, the beauty of the first theme, the vaporous deliquescence later of this theme, the violent mood changes and harmonic grandeur left this work to the elect of the composer. The F sharp minor Polonaise and the so-called Siberian in E flat minor, as well as the Polonaise in C minor are nothing if not virile. They demand men as well as pianists to interpret them.

Liszt pronounced the F sharp minor Polonaise pathologic. As a matter of fact, it surpasses in sombre grandeur the Heroic Polonaise, opus 53, notwithstanding the thundering cannons and cavalry charges of the more popular of the pair. The triplets in eight notes of the introduction achieve a splendid climax of suspense before the entrance of the chief theme. Soon octaves and chords supplant the single notes of the melody. There is epical breadth which at each reiteration becomes bigger, so big that it almost overflows the frame of the keyboard, in suggestion becomes orchestral. The second subject in the major (D flat) is less drastic, is an excellent contrast figure. The strange intermezzo in A which precedes the Mazurka is not enigmatic if you hear it as a sinister roll of drums. I think of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, and its muffled morning music. Its intent is manifest, it leads to the second theme, now transposed to the despairing key of C sharp minor; the Mazurka which follows tempted Liszt—or his amanuensis, Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein—to the most extravagant panegyric. Its brace of double notes, thirds and sixths are lovely in hue and scent, but pray do not languish your tempo, else the episode soon becomes sugary. Again the Polonaise resumes its elemental chant, a chant which grows huger in rancorous woe until the very bottom of the pit of desolation is reached, and, without a gleam of light, comes the code with mutterings of the main theme, and only in the very last bar we hear with positive relief a smashing F sharp in octaves.

What does it all mean? Some obscure psychological drama of the composer’s soul in which he vents his spleen, indignation and defiance, and rages against the ineluctable canons of destiny. In a sense this Polonaise is pathologic. It appeals to the nerves. It lacerates the pulp of our sensibility, it is morbid, but it is also magnificent. It is not sensational like the two Polonaises of Liszt in E major and C minor, though it is equally brilliant. Arthur Friedheim played the Chopin Polonaise superbly at one time. It suited his saturnine mood. I fancy, however, that Franz Liszt’s performance must have been the supreme exemplar. There is a loftiness of mood coupled with the heroic patterns of this piece which place it in the category of masterpieces. It reminds one of a sullen, rugged landscape in the style of Salvator Rosa, a solitary human in the foreground, distracted, who lifts suicidal hands to the darkling, indifferent skies. It is the tragedy of Man, who is no longer, as in the old-fashioned geocentric conception of the universe, the centre of things, but discovers himself alone, deserted by the familiar signs and stars in his cosey firmament, and despairs. The tragedy of unfaith. The tragedy of love that slays. Unhappy Chopin was baptized a Roman Catholic, so was George Sand. Both were, to put the case mildly, slack in the practices of their church. Chopin was of a pious bent.

He concealed his attachment to the French sphinx of the inkpot from his mother in Warsaw because he feared to pain her. She was profoundly religious. Madame Sand, who didn’t wear trousers and smoke all day, as caricature proclaims, was cruel to her consumptive genius. She appreciated his work, but his humors were antic. She called Frederic “mon cher cadavre,” and this “corpse” must have grated on his nerves. Oh! if he had possessed but a tithe of her saving sense of humor. But Chopin was not given to jesting over his love. He flirted and mildly diverted himself; the Sand affair was deadly serious to him. When the spirit moved her she betrayed him (let us politely call it spirit rather than temperament). Her final desertion didn’t kill him. It was the liaison that slew the man, body and soul. She robbed him of love, faith, and fatherland. His ending, though, was in the proper religious key. According to Turgines, half the countesses in Europe sang him to his death. (Many are still singing their hearers along the same road.) I believe the F sharp Polonaise to be the most subjective from the pen of its composer, even more so than the B minor scherzo, opus 20.

The nocturnes are done to death. Let us pass them by. The C sharp minor nocturne is like the one in C minor; both are still free from persecution at the hands of the young person who has decked the most virile spirit of his age with Parisian millinery. These two nocturnes do not intrigue the fancy of the amateur. In breadth of conception they are Beethovenian. The E major nocturne, a favorite of Josef Hofmann, and the one in B, the Tuberose, in which Paderewski proved so eloquent and whose very title makes H. L. Mencken grit his teeth, are loaded with purest Chopin ore. I admire, but with reservations, the transcription of various nocturnes to instruments of the string family. Wilhelmj transposed the D flat nocturne for violin and Leopold Auer has arranged the posthumous nocturne in E minor, which Heifetz plays beautifully; yet, effective as they may be, they are not truly Chopinesque. They are too saccharine on the strings; we miss the cool, crystalline tones of the pianoforte.