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Life of Chopin

Franz Lizst

Section 14 of 19 - Table of Contents
CHAPTER VI.

Birth and Early Life of Chopin--National Artists--Chopin embodies
in himself the poetic sense of his whole nation--Opinion of
Beethoven.



CHOPIN was born in 1810, at Zelazowa-Wola, near Warsaw. Unlike
most other children, he could not, during his childhood, remember
his own age, and the date of his birth was only fixed in his
memory by a watch given him in 1820 by Madame Catalani, which
bore the following inscription: "Madame Catalani to Frederic
Chopin, aged ten years." Perhaps the presentiments of the artist
gave to the child a foresight of his future! Nothing
extraordinary marked the course of his boyhood; his internal
development traversed but few phases, and gave but few
manifestations. As he was fragile and sickly, the attention of
his family was concentrated upon his health. Doubtless it was
from this cause that he acquired his habits of affability, his
patience under suffering, his endurance of every annoyance with a
good grace; qualities which he early acquired from his wish to
calm the constant anxiety that was felt with regard to him. No
precocity of his faculties, no precursory sign of remarkable
development, revealed, in his early years, his future superiority
of soul, mind, or capacity. The little creature was seen
suffering indeed, but always trying to smile, patient and
apparently happy and his friends were so glad that he did not
become moody or morose, that they were satisfied to cherish his
good qualities, believing that he opened his heart to them
without reserve, and gave to them all his secret thoughts.

But there are souls among us who resemble rich travelers thrown
among simple herdsmen, loading them with gifts during their
sojourn among them, truly not at all in proportion to their own
wealth, yet which are quite sufficient to astonish the poor
hosts, and to spread riches and happiness in the midst of such
simple habits. It is true that such souls give as much affection,
it may be more, than those who surround them; every body is
pleased with them, they are supposed to have been generous, when
the truth is that in comparison with their boundless wealth they
have not been liberal, and have given but little of their store
of internal treasure.

The habits in which Chopin grew up, in which he was rocked as in
a form-strengthening cradle, were those peculiar to calm,
occupied, and tranquil characters. These early examples of
simplicity, piety, and integrity, always remained the nearest and
dearest to him. Domestic virtues, religious habits, pious
charities, and rigid modesty, surrounded him from his infancy
with that pure atmosphere in which his rich imagination assumed
the velvety tenderness characterizing the plants which have never
been exposed to the dust of the beaten highways.

He commenced the study of music at an early age, being but nine
years old when he began to learn it. Shortly after he was
confided to a passionate disciple of Sebastian Bach, Ziwna, who
directed his studies during many years in accordance with the
most classic models. It is not to be supposed that when he
embraced the career of a musician, any prestige of vain glory,
any fantastic perspective, dazzled his eyes, or excited the hopes
of his family. In order to become a skillful and able master, he
studied seriously and conscientiously, without dreaming of the
greater or less amount of fame he would be able to obtain as the
fruit of his lessons and assiduous labors.

In consequence of the generous and discriminating protection
always granted by Prince Antoine Radziwill to the arts, and to
genius, which he had the power of recognizing both as a man of
intellect and as a distinguished artist; Chopin was early placed
in one of the first colleges in Warsaw. Prince Radziwill did not
cultivate music only as a simple dilettante, he was also a
remarkable composer. His beautiful rendering of Faust, published
some years ago, and executed at fixed epochs by the Academy of
Song at Berlin, appears to us far superior to any other attempts
which have been made to transport it into the realm of music, by
its close internal appropriateness to the peculiar genius of the
poem. Assisting the limited means of the family of Chopin, the
Prince made him the inestimable gift of a finished education, of
which no part had been neglected. Through the person of a friend,
M. Antoine Korzuchowski, whose own elevated mind enabled him to
understand the requirements of an artistic career, the Prince
always paid his pension from his first entrance into college,
until the completion of his studies. From this time until the
death of Chopin, M. Antoine Korzuchowski always held the closest
relations of friendship with him.

In speaking of this period of his life, it gives us pleasure to
quote the charming lines which may be applied to him more justly,
than other pages in which his character is believed to have been
traced, but in which we only find it distorted, and in such false
proportions as are given in a profile drawn upon an elastic
tissue, which has been pulled athwart, biased by contrary
movements during the whole progress of the sketch. [Footnote:
These extracts, with many that succeed them, in which the
character of Chopin is described, are taken from Lucrezia
Floriani, a novel by Madame Sand, in which the leading characters
are said to be intended to represent Liszt, Chopin, and herself.-
-Note of the Translator.]



"Gentle, sensitive, and very lovely, at fifteen years of age he
united the charms of adolescence with the gravity of a more
mature age. He was delicate both in body and in mind. Through the
want of muscular development he retained a peculiar beauty, an
exceptional physiognomy, which had, if we may venture so to
speak, neither age nor sex. It was not the bold and masculine air
of a descendant of a race of Magnates, who knew nothing but
drinking, hunting and making war; neither was it the effeminate
loveliness of a cherub couleur de rose. It was more like the
ideal creations with which the poetry of the middle ages adorned
the Christian temples: a beautiful angel, with a form pure and
slight as a young god of Olympus, with a face like that of a
majestic woman filled with a divine sorrow, and as the crown of
all, an expression at the same time tender and severe, chaste and
impassioned.

"This expression revealed the depths of his being. Nothing could
be purer, more exalted than his thoughts; nothing more tenacious,
more exclusive, more intensely devoted, than his
affections....But he could only understand that which closely
resembled himself....Every thing else only existed for him as a
kind of annoying dream, which he tried to shake off while living
with the rest of the world. Always plunged in reveries, realities
displeased him. As a child he could never touch a sharp
instrument without injuring himself with it; as a man, he never
found himself face to face with a being different from himself
without being wounded by the living contradiction...

"He was preserved from constant antagonism by a voluntary and
almost inveterate habit of never seeing or hearing any thing
which was disagreeable to him, unless it touched upon his
personal affections. The beings who did not think as he did, were
only phantoms in his eyes. As his manners were polished and
graceful, it was easy to mistake his cold disdain on
insurmountable aversion for benevolent courtesy...

"He never spent an hour in open-hearted expansiveness, without
compensating for it by a season of reserve. The moral causes
which induced such reserve were too slight, too subtle, to be
discovered by the naked eye. It was necessary to use the
microscope to read his soul, into which so little of the light of
the living ever penetrated.......

"With such a character, it seems strange he should have had
friends: yet he had them, not only the friends of his mother who
esteemed him as the noble son of a noble mother, but friends of
his own age, who loved him ardently, and who were loved by him in
return..... He had formed a high ideal of friendship; in the age
of early illusions he loved to think that his friends and
himself, brought up nearly in the same manner, with the same
principles, would never change their opinions, and that no formal
disagreement could ever occur between them.......

"He was externally so affectionate, his education had been so
finished, and he possessed so much natural grace, that he had the
gift of pleasing even where he was not personally known. His
exceeding loveliness was immediately prepossessing, the delicacy
of his constitution rendered him interesting in the eyes of
women, the full yet graceful cultivation of his mind, the sweet
and captivating originality of his conversation, gained for him
the attention of the most enlightened men. Men less highly
cultivated, liked him for his exquisite courtesy of manner. They
were so much the more pleased with this, because, in their
simplicity, they never imagined it was the graceful fulfillment
of a duty into which no real sympathy entered.

"Could such people have divined the secrets of his mystic
character, they would have said he was more amiable than loving--
and with respect to them, this would have been true. But how
could they have known that his real, though rare attachments,
were so vivid, so profound, so undying?...

"Association with him in the details of life was delightful. He
filled all the forms of friendship with an unaccustomed charm,
and when he expressed his gratitude, it was with that deep
emotion which recompenses kindness with usury. He willingly
imagined that he felt himself every day dying; he accepted the
cares of a friend, hiding from him, lest it should render him
unhappy, the little time he expected to profit by them. He
possessed great physical courage, and if he did not accept with
the heroic recklessness of youth the idea of approaching death,
at least he cherished the expectation of it with a kind of bitter
pleasure."...

The attachment which he felt for a young lady, who never ceased
to feel a reverential homage for him, may be traced back to his
early youth. The tempest which in one of its sudden gusts tore
Chopin from his native soil, like a bird dreamy and abstracted
surprised by the storm upon the branches of a foreign tree,
sundered the ties of this first love, and robbed the exile of a
faithful and devoted wife, as well as disinherited him of a
country. He never found the realization of that happiness of
which he had once dreamed with her, though he won the glory of
which perhaps he had never thought. Like the Madonnas of Luini
whose looks are so full of earnest tenderness, this young girl
was sweet and beautiful. She lived on calm, but sad. No doubt the
sadness increased in that pure soul when she knew that no
devotion tender as her own, ever came to sweeten the existence of
one whom she had adored with that ingenuous submission, that
exclusive devotion, that entire self-forgetfulness, naive and
sublime, which transform the woman into the angel.

Those who are gifted by nature with the beautiful, yet fatal
energies of genius, and who are consequently forbidden to
sacrifice the care of their glory to the exactions of their love,
are probably right in fixing limits to the abnegation of their
own personality. But the divine emotions due to absolute
devotion, may be regretted even in the presence of the most
sparkling endowments of genius. The utter submission, the
disinterestedness of love, in absorbing the existence, the will,
the very name of the woman in that of the man she loves, can
alone authorize him in believing that he has really shared his
life with her, and that his honorable love for her has given her
that which no chance lover, accidentally met, could have rendered
her: peace of heart and the honor of his name.

This young Polish lady, unfortunately separated from Chopin,
remained faithful to his memory, to all that was left of him. She
devoted herself to his parents. The father of Chopin would never
suffer the portrait which she had drawn of him in the days of
hope, to be replaced by another, though from the hands of a far
more skilful artist. We saw the pale cheeks of this melancholy
woman, glow like alabaster when a light shines through its snow,
many years afterwards, when in gazing upon this picture, she met
the eyes of his father.

The amiable character of Chopin won for him while at college the
love of his fellow collegiates, particularly that of Prince
Czetwertynski and his brothers. He often spent the vacations and
days of festival with them at the house of their mother, the
Princess Louise Czetwertynska, who cultivated music with a true
feeling for its beauties, and who soon discovered the poet in the
musician. Perhaps she was the first who made Chopin feel the
charm of being understood, as well as heard. The Princess was
still beautiful, and possessed a sympathetic soul united to many
high qualities. Her saloon was one of the most brilliant and
RECHERCHE in Warsaw. Chopin often met there the most
distinguished women of the city. He became acquainted there with
those fascinating beauties who had acquired a European celebrity,
when Warsaw was so famed for the brilliancy, elegance, and grace
of its society. He was introduced by the Princess Czetwertynska
to the Princess of Lowicz; by her he was presented to the
Countess Zamoyska; to the Princess Radziwill; to the Princess
Jablonowska; enchantresses, surrounded by many beauties little
less illustrious.

While still very young, he has often cadenced their steps to the
chords of his piano. In these meetings, which might almost be
called assemblies of fairies, he may often have discovered,
unveiled in the excitement of the dance, the secrets of
enthusiastic and tender souls. He could easily read the hearts
which were attracted to him by friendship and the grace of his
youth, and thus was enabled early to learn of what a strange
mixture of leaven and cream of roses, of gunpowder and tears of
angels, the poetic Ideal of his nation is formed. When his
wandering fingers ran over the keys, suddenly touching some
moving chords, he could see how the furtive tears coursed down
the cheeks of the loving girl, or the young neglected wife; how
they moistened the eyes of the young men, enamored of, and eager
for glory. Can we not fancy some young beauty asking him to play
a simple prelude, then softened by the tones, leaning her rounded
arm upon the instrument to support her dreaming head, while she
suffered the young artist to divine in the dewy glitter of the
lustrous eyes, the song sung by her youthful heart? Did not
groups, like sportive nymphs, throng around him, and begging him
for some waltz of giddying rapidity, smile upon him with such
wildering joyousness, as to put him immediately in unison with
the gay spirit of the dance? He saw there the chaste grace of his
brilliant countrywomen displayed in the Mazourka, and the
memories of their witching fascination, their winning reserve,
were never effaced from his soul.

In an apparently careless manner, but with that involuntary and
subdued emotion which accompanies the remembrance of our early
delights, he would sometimes remark that he first understood the
whole meaning of the feeling which is contained in the melodies
and rhythms of national dances, upon the days in which he saw
these exquisite fairies at some magic fete, adorned with that
brilliant coquetry which sparkles like electric fire, and
flashing from heart to heart, heightens love, blinds it, or robs
it of all hope. And when the muslins of India, which the Greeks
would have said were woven of air, were replaced by the heavier
folds of Venetian velvet, and the perfumed roses and sculptured
petals of the hot-house camellias gave way to the gorgeous
bouquets of the jewel caskets; it often seemed to him that
however good the orchestra might be, the dancers glided less
rapidly over the floor, that their laugh was less sonorous, their
eye less luminous, than upon those evenings in which the dance
had been suddenly improvised, because he had succeeded in
electrifying his audience through the magic of his performance.
If he electrified them, it was because he repeated, truly in
hieroglyphic tones, but yet easily understood by the initiated,
the secret whispers which his delicate ear had caught from the
reserved yet impassioned hearts, which indeed resemble the
Fraxinella, that plant so full of burning and vivid life, that
its flowers are always surrounded by a gas as subtle as
inflammable. He had seen celestial visions glitter, and illusory
phantoms fade in this sublimated air; he had divined the meaning
of the swarms of passions which are forever buzzing in it; he
knew how these hurtling emotions fluttered through the reckless
human soul; how, notwithstanding their ceaseless agitation and
excitement, they could intermingle, interweave, intercept each
other, without once disturbing the exquisite proportions of
external grace, the imposing and classic charm of manner. It was
thus that he learned to prize so highly the noble and measured
manners which preserve delicacy from insipidity; petty cares from
wearisome trifling; conventionalism from tyranny; good taste from
coldness; and which never permit the passions to resemble, as is
often the case where such careful culture does not rule, those
stony and calcareous vegetables whose hard and brittle growth
takes a name of such sad contrast: flowers of iron (FLOS FERRI).

His early introduction into this society, in which regularity of
form did not conceal petrifaction of heart, induced Chopin to
think that the CONVENANCES and courtesies of manner, in place of
being only a uniform mask, repressing the character of each
individual under the symmetry of the same lines, rather serve to
contain the passions without stifling them, coloring only that
bald crudity of tone which is so injurious to their beauty,
elevating that materialism which debases them, robbing them of
that license which vulgarizes them, lowering that vehemence which
vitiates them, pruning that exuberance which exhausts them,
teaching the "lovers of the ideal" to unite the virtues which
have sprung from a knowledge of evil, with those "which cause its
very existence to be forgotten in speaking to those they love."
As these visions of his youth deepened in the long perspective of
memories, they gained in grace, in charm, in delight, in his
eyes, fascinating him to such an extent that no reality could
destroy their secret power over his imagination, rendering his
repugnance more and more unconquerable to that license of
allurement, that brutal tyranny of caprice, that eagerness to
drink the cup of fantasy to the very dregs, that stormy pursuit
of all the changes and incongruities of life, which rule in the
strange mode of life known as LA BOHEME.
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