For the Blood Is the Life. Francis Marion Crawford
But again the dance awakes, the stronger rhythm breaks out again and dashing through the veil of melancholy, seizes on body and soul and whirls them down the storm of wild, luxurious, and wellnigh unbearable delight.
"That must be by Chopin!" exclaimed Diana. "But I never heard Gwendoline play it — "
She stopped short in surprise. She had imagined that Gwendoline had slipped away to the piano during the silence, but as she looked she saw her in her place.
"It is by Chopin," answered Heine with a smile. "It is Chopin himself."
All rose to their feet and hastened to the drawing-room ; Gwendoline reached the door first.
At the piano sat a man with a fair and beautiful face, dressed much as Heine himself but with far greater elegance. There was about him a wonderful air of distinction, an unspeakable atmosphere of refinement and superiority over ordinary men. He had the look which tradition ascribes to kings, but which nature, in royal irony, more often bestows upon penniless persons of genius. His fair hair was fine and silky as spun gold; his skin transparent as a woman's; his features delicately aquiline and noble, and in his soft eyes there shone a clear and artistic intelligence, a spirit both gentle and quiet, yet neither weak nor effeminate, but capable rather of boundless courage and of heroic devotion when roused by the touch of sympathy.
He rose as the party approached him, and they saw that he was short and very slender. He smiled, half apologetically, and made a courteous inclination.
"Perhaps the introduction of a dead man is hardly an introduction at all," he said in a muffled voice, which, however, was not unpleasant to the ear. "I will save my friend Heine the trouble — I am Frederic Chopin."
Gwendoline, in her delight at meeting her favourite composer, would gladly have pressed him to remain at the piano, but hospitality forbade her.
She sat down and the others followed her example. The two dead men glanced at each other in friendly recognition and took their places in the circle. They looked so thoroughly alive that it was impossible to feel any uneasiness in their society, and perhaps none but Augustus and Lady Brenda, who had touched Heine's icy hand, realised fully the strangeness of the situation. But Chopin was perfectly at his ease. He did not seem to admit that his presence could possibly cause surprise. He sat quietly in his chair and looked from one to the other of his hosts, as though silently making their acquaintance.
"What an ideal life! " he exclaimed. "If I could live again I would live as you do — in a beautiful place over the sea, far from noise, dust and all that is detestable."
"It is a part of fairyland," answered Heine. "Do you remember ? It was only last year that we came here together and sat on the rocks and tried to think what the people were like who once lived here, and whether any one would ever live here again. And you wished there were a piano in the old place — you have your wish now."
"It is not often that such wishes are realised," said Chopin. "It is rarely indeed that I can touch a piano now, though I hear much music. It interests me immensely to watch the progress of what Mozart began."
"It sickens me to see what has grown in literature from the ruins of what I helped to demolish," answered Heine.
"Believe me, my dear friend," returned the musician, "without romance there is neither music nor literature."
"What do you mean by romance, exactly? " asked Gwendoline, anxious to stimulate the conversation which had been begun by the two friends.
"Heine will give you one definition — I will give you another," answered Chopin.
"I never really differed from you," said his friend. " But give your definition of romance. I would like to hear it."
"It is the hardest thing in the world to define, and yet it is something which we all feel. I think it is based upon an association of ideas. When we say that a place is romantic we unconsciously admit that its beauty suggests some kind of story to our minds, most generally a love-story. Such scenery is not necessarily grand, but it is necessarily beautiful. I do not think that a man standing on the summit of Mont Blanc would say that it was a romantic spot. It is splendid indeed, but it is uninhabited and uninhabitable. It suggests no love-story. It is hugely grand and vast like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or like the great pyramid. But it is not romantic. There is more romance in a Polish landscape — with a little white village in the foreground surrounded by flat green fields and green woods, cut symmetrically in all directions by straight, white roads, and innocent of hills — one may at least fancy a fair-haired boy making love to a still fairer girl, just where the brook runs between the wood and the meadow. No — Mont Blanc is not romantic. Come down from the snow-peaks — here for instance, where the wild rocks hang and curl in crests like a petrified whirlpool, but where the walls of this' old castle suggest lives and deeds long forgotten. You have romance at once. From the grey battlements some Moorish maiden may have once looked her last upon the white sails of her corsair lover's long black ship. The fair young Conradin may have lain hidden here before Frangipani betrayed him to his death in Naples. Here Bayard came, perhaps, after the tournament of Barletta. Here Giovanna may have rested — she may even have plotted here the murder of her husband—"
"I did not know you were such an historian," interrupted Heine with a smile.
"I have learned much since I died," answered Chopin, quietly. " But I am encroaching on your ground. I only want to prove that it is easy to see the romantic element in a place which we can associate with people. If none of those things really happened here, it seems very simple to imagine that they might have happened, and that is the same thing in history."
"Absolutely the same," assented Augustus, whose favourite theory was that nobody knew anything.
"Very good," continued the composer. "Romance is then the possibility of associating ideas of people with an object presented to the senses, apart from the mere beauty of the object. I say that much magnificent music pleases intensely by the senses alone. Music is a dialogue of sounds. The notes put questions, and answer them. In fugue-writing the second member is scientifically called the 'answer.' When there is no answer, or if the answer is bad, there is no music at all. The ear tells that. But such a musical dialogue of sounds may please intensely by the mere satisfaction of the musical sense; or it may please because, besides the musical completeness, it suggests human feelings and passions and so appeals to a much larger part of our nature. I do not think the great pyramid suggests feelings and passions, in spite of all its symmetry. It may have roused a sympathetic thrill in the breast of Cheops, but it does not affect us as we are affected by the interior of Saint Peter's in Rome, or by Westminster Abbey, or by Giotto's tower. These are romantic buildings, for they are not only symmetrical, but they also tell us a tale of human life and death and hope and sorrow which we can understand. To my mind romantic music is that which expresses what we feel besides satisfying our sense of musical fitness. I think that Mozart was the founder of that school—I laboured for it myself — Wagner has been the latest expression of it."
"I adore Wagner," said Diana. " But it always seems to me that there is something monstrous in his music. Nothing else expresses what I mean."
"The monstrous' element can be explained," answered Chopin. " Wagner appeals to a vast mass of popular tradition which really exists only in Germany and Scandinavia. He then brings those traditions suddenly before our minds with stunning force, and gives them an overpowering reality. I leave it to you whether the impression must not necessarily be monstrous when we suddenly realise in the flesh, before our eyes, such tales as that of Siegmund and Siegfried, or of Parzifal and the Holy Grail. It is great, gigantic—but it is too much. I admit that I experience the sensation, dead as I am, when I stand among the living at Bayreuth and listen. But I do not like the sensation. I do not like the frantic side of this modern romantism. The delirious effects and excesses of it stupefy without delighting. I do not want to realise the frightful crimes and atrocious actions of mythological men and beasts, any more than I want to see a man hanged or guillotined. I think romance should deal with subjects not wholly barbarous, and should try to treat them in a refined way, because no excitement which is not of a refined kind can be anything but brutalising. Man has enough of the brute in him already, without being taught to cultivate his