CHOPIN OU LE POÈTE

POLONftl The fife - of Chopin By GUY DE POURTALES of FRANZ LISZT etc. Translated from the French by CHARLES BAYLY, JR. NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Re use d his art only to give to himself his own tragedy LISZT. DEDICATION WHEN I suggested the example of Liszt to a soul stricken but still capable of enthusiasm, I thought also of offering him this story of Chopin. Not that this latter should serve to discount whatever slight exuberance there might be in the former. On the contrary they complement and complete each other and show the two fold visage, the one concave and the other convex, of this symbolic being that we call the artist. Or, the sensitive man, the cognizant, he, at any rate, whom we envy. One of these masks portrays glory and pas sion the other, sorrow and loneliness I quite realize the romantic sound of these four words in an age when they are so far out moded. But if I agree that in our time every thing possible has been tried, indeed, to elimi nate from our orchestra these harps, these tremolos, these rubatos, these great billows of harmony that transported three generations with the struggles between heaven and hell, it is nevertheless necessary only to open a news- 7 DEDICATION paper to the section on the courts of law, only to gaze into the show windows of the picture dealers., only to hear a saxophone, to convince myself that the themes of the human legend have in no degree changed. The rhythms are different, the harmonies, but our responsive vi brations are just the same as they were in the age of innocence. The real disaccord between our ancestors and us is that the ugly or what they called ugly has been incorporated to-day in the beautiful or what we call thebeautiful. In other words, there is to-day no such thing as beauty or ugliness of harmony or discord, there is no longer any aesthetic prohibition As Paul Valery has written I see the modern man as a man with an idea of himself and of the world that is no longer fixed . ., It has become impossible to be a man of a single view point, to hold, really, to one language, to one nation, to one faith, to one physical type, Let us add to one music. Thanks to scientific method, it has become easy to believe everything, or nothing To love every one, or no one But do we gain other than in childishness and dotage I ques- 8 DEDICATION tion whether this new abundance enriches us more than their apparent poverty fertilized our fathers. This mass of sensations and percep tions has not increased our lucidity any more than the steam siren and the typewriter have added new notes to our scale. And yet we should hardly consent to the loss of one of these recent contributions. But if this very ironic, very cynical jazz en chants me, it in no way removes the pleasure I feel in hearing Chopin. I should be sorry not to be able to savor two such different forms of modern sadness, the one born in New Orleans and the other in the Warsaw garret To pur sue still further the little problem which the two parallel existences of Liszt and Chopin pose for our reflection, let us say that on certain days we are more apt for action, for youth, for ex penditure in any form on other days for re serve, for shrinking, for incertitude, for con centration, and even though the word has lost its beauty for mysticism. The life of Liszt is an open book. He wrote it everywhere in ink and in adventure. Of the life of Chopin almostnothing remains. His nature protected him from needless experience, 9 DEDICATION and fate furthermore decreed that a great many of his letters and relics should be burned in a house in which his sister lived at Warsaw in 1863. We can discover him therefore only in his music, in a few scraps of correspondence, and in the memories of his friends. Mean while, his life was always so simple and so log ical that a slight commentary is necessary to understand it, as an appoggiatttra enhances the value of a note...