“I wish you would not talk in that light way, after what you have been telling us so earnestly,” said Gwendoline.
“I cannot help it, dear madam,” answered Heine.
“I have a particular talent for being easily moved; and when I am moved I shed tears, and when I shed tears it seems very foolish and I at once try to laugh at myself — or at the first convenient object which falls in my way. For tears hurt — bitterly sometimes, and it is best to get rid of them in any way one can, provided that one does not put them beyond one’s reach altogether.”
“People talk a great deal of sweet pain,” remarked Augustus. “I do not understand how anything which hurts can be sweet at the same time.”
“Can you understand how a thing sweet at the time may hurt afterwards?”
“Perfectly,” answered Chard.
“Then can you not understand how when the thing hurts it is pleasant to remember that it was once sweet? It is very simple. By no means all pains are sweet, but on the whole there are enough of the sort to supply poets for many years to come. There are men among us here, whose sufferings are bitter still — very bitter.”
“Shall we ever know any of your companions?” asked Lady Brenda.
“They would be delighted, I am sure. We rarely have an opportunity of exchanging words with living people — it has never happened to me before. Mr. Chard has discovered a rather dangerous way of making it possible, and I am delighted to see that you are not in the least nervous. That shows how greatly ideas have changed in thirty years. When I was alive there was something that made one’s flesh creep in the idea of talking with a dead man. You have overcome all that. If Mr. Chard will only continue his experiments there is no reason why we dead men should not play a real part in society.”
“I see no objection whatever,” said Lady Brenda. “I am sure, if they are all like you, it would be most charming. But, after all, you may only be some one who knows all about Heine and talks delightfully about him.”
“Will you let me look at your hand?” asked the poet, bending forward and taking Lady Brenda’s fingers in his. “What a beautiful ring, I always loved sapphires—”
But Lady Brenda turned pale, and after a moment’s struggle with her convictions she nervously snatched her hand away.
“Oh you are — you are really dead — I can feel it in your fingers,” she cried. After that, Lady Brenda ceased to be sceptical.
“There is only one point upon which I must warn you in regard to my friends,” resumed Heine, smiling at Lady Brenda’s discomfiture. “They wear the dress of their age — as I do. You must trust to them to avoid your servants, who might be surprised — or else you must warn your servants that some friends are coming to stay with you who wear the costumes of their country.”
“I will manage that,” said Augustus, confidently.
CHAPTER V.
THE MOON ROSE higher and higher in the cloudless sky, bathing the terrace in silver and lending in her turn to men the light she borrowed from heaven. For some minutes no one spoke, and it was as though all nature lay in a trance while the visions of heaven passed by. It was the hour when in eastern lands the lotus unfolds its heavy leaves, to take up the wondrous dream broken by the scorching day; it was the hour when in the laurel groves of Italy the nightingale raises her voice in long-drawn weeping for her sister’s murdered son, in passionate sorrow for the blood she has shed and can never more wash away; the hour when the mighty dead come forth from their tombs beneath the dark cathedral aisles and kneel before the high altar where the transepts meet the nave, and where the moonbeams from the stained windows of the lofty dome make pools of blood-red light upon the marble floor.
All the party were silent, realising perhaps in that moment the whole beauty of the scene. Heine leaned back in his chair and looked steadily at the moon, resting his elbows on the carved arms of the seat and clasping his delicate white fingers before him.
Suddenly and without the least warning a wonderful strain of music broke the silence. Some one was playing on the piano in the great hall, and through the open windows the sounds floated out to the terrace. No one dared to speak, though all started in surprise. It was a wild Polish mazoure, fitful, passionate and sad, woven in strange movement, now sweeping forward in a burst of fervid hope, full of the rush of the dance, the ring of spurs, the timely measured tread of women’s feet, the indescribable grace of slender figures in refined yet rapid motion — the whole breathing a reckless delight in the pleasure of the moment, a defiant power to be glad in the very jaws of death. Then with the contrast of true passion the pace slackens, the melody sways fitfully in the uncertain measure and sadness, waking in the harmony, trembles despairing for one moment in the muffled chords, while even love hardly dares to breathe sweet words in the ear of tired beauty. 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 drawingroom; 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 demo
lish,” 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 taste for blood by artificial means. Perhaps I am too sensitive — I hate blood. I detest commonplace, but I detest even more the furious contortions of ungoverned passion.”
“But you cannot say that Wagner is exaggerated in his effects,” argued Diana.
“No — they are well studied and the result is stupendous when they are properly reproduced. He is great — almost too great. He makes one realise the awful too vividly. He produces intoxication rather than pleasure. He is an egotist in art. He is determined that when you have heard him you shall not be able to listen to any one else, as a man who eats opium is disgusted with everything when he is awake. I believe there is a pitch in art at which pleasure becomes vicious; the limit certainly exists in sculpture and painting as well as in literature, just as when a man drinks too much wine he is drunk. The object of art is not to make life seem impossible, any more than the object of drinking wine is to lose one’s senses. Art should nourish the mind, not drown it. To say that Wagner’s own mind, and the minds of some of his followers were of such strong temper that nothing less than his music could excite them pleasurably, is not an answer. The Russian mujik will drink a pint of vodka in the early morning, and when he has drunk it he is gayer than the Italian who has taken a little cup of coffee. You would probably think his gaiety less refined than that of the Italian, though there is more of it. It will also be followed by a headache — but the headache, the moral headache after an orgy of modern art is worse than the headache from too much vodka. It is like Heine’s ‘toothache in the heart.’ He used to say that the best filling for that was of lead and a certain powder invented by Berthold Schwarz. Romantism can go too far, like everything else. The Hermes of Olympia was descended from a clumsy but royal race of Egyptian granite blocks; but he is the historical ancestor of the vilest productions of modern sculpture. Modern art is drunk — drunk with the delight of expressing excessively what should not be expressed at all, drunk with the indulgence of the senses until the intellect is clouded and dull, or spasmodically frantic by turns, drunk with the vulgar self-satisfied vanity of a village coxcomb. Ah, for Art’s sake let poor art be kept sober until the heaven-born muses deign to pay us another visit!”
“Amen!” exclaimed Heine, devoutly. “The same things are true of literature. But I admire Wagner, nevertheless, though his music terrifies me. I think Mozart was the Raphael, Wagner the Michelangelo of the opera. Any one may choose between the two, for it is a matter of taste. But in music the development from the one to the other seems to me more rational than it has been in literature.”
“How do you mean?” asked Gwendoline.
“I think music has advanced better than literature. They were both little boys once, but the one has grown into a great, dominating, royal giant — the other into a greedy, snivelling, dirty-nosed, fou
l-mouthed, cowardly ruffian. There are bad musicians and good writers, of course. The bad musicians do little harm, but the good writers occupy the position of Lot in the condemned cities — they are the mourners at the funeral of romance. The mass of fiction makers to-day are but rioters at the baptismal feast of Realism, the Impure.”
“What a sweeping condemnation!” exclaimed Augustus. “I thought that you yourself were a supporter of realism, or declared yourself to be, though your lyrics are certainly very romantic.”
“I was the renegade monk from the monastery of the romantists,” said Heine. “A Frenchman once told me so. But when I grew old and married, I hankered for the dear old atmosphere, and my little French wife helped me to breathe it again.”
“Our great modern realist, Ernest Renan, says of himself, half regretfully, that he feels like a religieux manqué,” said Augustus.
“I can understand that,” answered Heine. “But when I was young the word romance stunk in my nostrils. It meant Platen.”
“And what does it mean to you now?” inquired Gwendoline, who wanted to lead the dead poet back to the point.
“You would have a definition, madam?” he replied. “Romance is a beautiful woman, with a dead pale skin, and starry eyes and streaming raven hair, and when I look into her sweet dark face I could wear a ton of armour on my back and cleave a Saracen to the chine with my huge blade for her sake, or go barefoot to Jerusalem, or even read Platen’s poetry all through. But she looks so strangely at me with her great black eyes, that I am never quite sure whether she is quite real and quite serious. I only know that she is very, very beautiful, and that I love her to distraction.”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 303
