XPOE AND HIS POLISH CONTEMPORARY
In the City of Boston, January 19, 1809, a son was born to David and Elizabeth Poe. On March 1, 1809, in the village of Zelazowa-Wola, twenty-eight English miles from Warsaw, in Poland, a son was born to Nicholas and Justina Chopin (Chopena or Szop). The American is known to the world as Edgar Allan Poe, the poet; the Pole as Frédéric François Chopin, the composer. On October 7, 1849, Edgar Poe died, poor and neglected, in Washington Hospital at Baltimore, and on October 17, 1849, Frédéric Chopin expired at Paris surrounded by loving friends, among whom were titled ladies. Turgenev has said there were at least one hundred princesses and countesses in whose arms the most wonderful among modern composers yielded up his soul. Poe and Chopin were contemporaries, and, curious coincidence, two supremely melancholy artists of the Beautiful lived and died almost synchronously.
My most enduring artistic passions are for the music of Chopin and the prose of Flaubert. In company with the cool, clear magic of a Jan Vermeer canvas, that of the Pole and Frenchmangrazes perfection. But as a lad Chopin quite flooded my emotional horizon. I had conceived a fantastic comparison between Poe and Chopin, and I confess I was slightly piqued when Ignace Jan Paderewski, not then Premier of Poland, assured me that Chopin was born in the year 1810, and not the year earlier. The date chiselled on Chopin’s Paris tomb in Père Lachaise—a sad tribute to the mediocre art of Clésinger, who married Solange Sand—is, after all, the correct one, and this new date, which is also the old, is inscribed on the Chopin Memorial at Warsaw, Poland. I shall not attempt to dispute the claim; even the most painstaking of Chopin biographers, Prof. Frederick Niecks, admits his error. The latest biography, said to be definitive, by the Polish musicograph, Ferdinand Hoesick, I have not seen; the war impeded the translation. Yet I am fain to believe that too many parish registers were in existence, and perhaps the next one that is unearthed may give as new dates either 1808 or 1811. I prefer 1809, while apologizing for my obstinacy. Unhappily for future investigators, Russian Cossacks in 1915 ravaged with torch and sword the birthplace, not only destroying the Chopin monument, but burning his house and the parish church. These once highly esteemed vandals, pogrom heroes, and butchers of thousands of helpless Jewish women, children, and old men, only repeated at Zelazowa-Wola the actions of their forebears at Warsawduring the sanguinary uprising of 1831. The correspondence of Chopin, treasured by his sister, Louise Jedrzejewicza, and the piano of his youth were completely destroyed. (Louise died in 1855, and the other sister, Isabella Barcinska, in 1881.)
The love of Poe began early with me. My father had been a friend of the poet’s in Philadelphia, and a member of the Poe circle during the forties of the last century; “roaring forties”, indeed. That prime old comedian, Billy Burton, the ideal Falstaff of his day; John Sartain, the engraver, and father of William Sartain, the painter; Judge Conrad, who could move his listeners to tears when he recited the Lord’s Prayer; the elder Booth, a noble tragedian much given to drink; Graham, the publisher, and several others whose names have escaped my memory, composed this interesting group. In his memoirs John Sartain has written of Poe and of a certain wild midnight walk in Fairmount Park. I remember the elder Sartain as an infrequent visitor at our house, and I also remember how I hung on his words when he spoke of Poe. My father told me that Poe would become a raving maniac after a thimbleful of brandy, so sensitive was his cerebral mechanism. But other authorities contradict this theory. Poe had been often seen to toss off a tumblerful of cognac neat. Last year at Atlantic City I met Mr. Hutzler, a well-known merchant of Baltimore, a spry young octogenarianand a seasoned raconteur. He told me, and in a vivid manner, of seeing Edgar Poe and Junius Brutus Booth hanging on to the same lamp-post, both helplessly drunk at midday. This happened about 1845, as the boys, Mr. Hutzler among the rest, trooped out to dinner from the public school on Holliday Street. Mr. Hutzler’s memory has a mirror-like clearness, and he described the occurrence as if it had happened yesterday. Like irreverent school-boys, they surrounded the greatest living Shakespearean actor and the greatest American poet and mocked at them.
We lived on North Seventh Street, and twice a day, on my trip to and from school, I passed the house where Poe had lived during his sojourn in Philadelphia, from 1838 to 1844. That house I should not have been able to locate to-day if my friend, Christopher Morley (charming writer, with a name that recalls spacious Elizabethan times: Kit Morley!), hadn’t described it. This house, in which Poe wrote The Raven and The Gold Bug, is at the northwest corner of Seventh and Brandywine Streets. Another critic friend, Albert Mordell, assures me that the old pear-tree in the back yard still bears fruit for the present resident, Mrs. Owens. The house is the rear building of another numbered 530 North Seventh Street. Mr. Mordell sent me a photograph which shows a typical Philadelphia red brick structure with white shutters and marble steps. I have heard of many spotswhere Poe wrote The Raven, Fordham among the rest, but as boys we told ourselves when we stared at the old building: “Poe wrote his Raven and Gold Bug there!” It is something to remember in these piping times of hypocrisy and universal hatred of art, music, and literature.
It would be a strained parallel to compare Poe with Chopin at all points; nevertheless, chronological coincidences are not the only comparisons that might be instituted without exaggeration. True, the roots of Chopin’s culture were more cosmopolitan, more richly nurtured than Poe’s; the poet, like an air-plant, found his spiritual sustenance from sources unknown to the America of his day. Of Poe’s intellectual ancestry, however, we may form some conception, though his learning was not profound, despite his copious quotations from half-forgotten and recondite authors, Glanvil, for example. Nevertheless, the matchless lines, “Helen, thy beauty is to me like those Nicéan barks of yore,” ... were struck off in the fire of a boyhood passion. Chopin had a careful training under the eye of his Polish teacher, Elsner; but who could have taught him how to compose his Opus 2, the Variations on Mozart’s La ci darem la mano? Both Poe and Chopin were full-fledged artists from the beginning, their individualities and limitations sharply defined. Perhaps the most exquisite music penned by Poe is this same Helen, while the first mazourkaof Chopin stamps him as an original poet. In the later productions of these men there is more than a savor of morbidity. Consider the Fantaisie-Polonaise, Opus 61, with its most musical, most melancholy cadences; or the F minor Mazourka, composed during the last illness of Chopin; a sick brain betrays itself in the rhythmic insistence of the theme, a soul-weary Wherefore? In the haunting repetitions and harmonies of Ulalume there is a poetic analogue. This poem, in which sense swoons into sound, possesses a richness of color and rhythmic accent that betoken the mentality of a poet whose brain is perilously unhinged. If alcohol produced this condition, then might a grateful world erect altars to such a wondrous god of evocation. Prohibition has not thus far produced a Poe. But he wasn’t the creation of either alcohol or drugs, though they were contributory causes; they prodded his cortical cells into abnormal activity, made leap the neuronic filaments with surprising consequences. No, a profound cerebral lesion was the real reason why Poe resorted to brandy to soothe his exacerbated nerves, and not because he drank did he go to wrack and ruin. His “case” is like Baudelaire’s and E. T. W. Hoffmann’s; not to mention the names of James Clarence Mangan and Monticelli, one the singer of Dark Rosaleen, the other that master of gorgeous hues, fantasies of enchanted lands and crumbling linear designs.
Poe, then, like Chopin, did not die too soon.Neurotic natures, they lived their lives with the intensity which Walter Pater has declared is the true existence. “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits.” Alas! that way madness lies for the majority of mankind, notwithstanding the æsthetic exhortation of Pater. Poe and Chopin fulfilled the Pater conditions during their brief sojourn on our parent planet. They ever burned with the flame of genius, and that flame devoured them. They were not citizens of moral repute. Nor did they accumulate “mortal pelf.” They failed to form habits, and while the psychic delicacy of Chopin proved a barrier against self-indulgence of the grosser sort, he contrived to outrage social and ethical canons even in tolerant Paris. The influence of George Sand, her ascendancy over his volition, worked evil and unhappiness. The delicate porcelain of his genius could not float down-stream in company with her brassy ware without ensuing disaster for the finer of the twain. Alcoholic neurosis did not trouble him, but he was tubercular, and that malady is more fatal than alcoholism. Poe was not precisely a drunkard; probably masked epilepsy accounts for his vagaries; such victims are periodical dipsomaniacs, “circulaires” is the term of the psychiatrists. His personality was winning, his speech electric, his eye alight with genius; but, then, the obverse of the medal! A sad, slouching creature, witha cynic’s sneer, a bitter tongue which lashed friend and foe alike, a gambler, a libertine—what has this unhappy poet not been called? Baudelaire asked whether the critical hyenas could not have been prevented from defacing the tomb of Poe. (He used Rabelaisian language in the original French.) Charles Baudelaire, a spiritual double of Poe, was another unhappy wraith of genius, and of the same choir of self-lacerated and damned souls.
Fancy Poe and Chopin in New York during the prosaic atmosphere of those days! If Chopin had not achieved artistic success at the Soirée of Prince Radziwill in Paris, 1831, he would probably have gone to America, where he might have met Poe. He had declared his intention to leave Paris for New York, and his passport was viséd “passing through.” Poe and Chopin conversing! The idea is rather disquieting. Stendhal, not hoodwinked by Châteaubriand, with his purple phrases and poetic visions of virgin forests and sweet Indian girls in an impossible Louisiana, declared that America was materialistic beyond hope of redemption. Talleyrand knew better. However, it was better for the artistic development of the Polish composer that he remained in the Old World. Think of Chopin giving piano lessons to the daughters of the New-Rich at the fashionable Battery, and Poe encountering him at some conversazione—they had conversaziones then—and propounding to him Heine-likequestions: Are the roses at home still in their flame-hued pride? Do the trees sing as beautifully as ever in the moonlight? Are humming-birds and star-dust—Francesca Astra—still as rare as ambergris? At a glance Poe and Chopin would have sympathized. In sensibility the American was not inferior to the Pole. Poe would have felt the “drummed tears” in the playing of Chopin, and in turn Chopin would not have failed to divine the vibrations of Poe’s high-strung nature. Both men were mystics, were seers. What a meeting that would have been; yet inevitable misery might have come to the Pole in unsympathetic New York. A different tale if Poe had gone to Paris and enjoyed a meed of artistic success. Baudelaire, who was born in April, 1821, therefore a young chap in 1845, would have known him and, congenial souls, they would surely have gone to the devil quicker than apart. Baudelaire and Poe! There’s a marvellous combination for you of fantasy, moonlight, rotten nerves, hasheesh, and alcohol! The fine flower of the genius of Poe might have bloomed more fragrantly on French soil; perhaps with the added note of depravity not in his sexless creations, and so corroding a note in Les Fleurs du Mal. Who may dare say! But then we might not have had the sinister melancholia, so sweetly despairing, so despairingly sweet, that we enjoy in the real Poe.
The culture of Chopin was not of a finer stamp than Poe’s, nor was his range so wide. In theirintellectual sympathies both were rather narrow, though intense to an emotional poignancy, and both were remarkable in mood-versatility. Born aristocrats, purple raiment became them well. Both were sadly deficient in planturous humor and the Attic salt that conserves the self-mockery of Heine. Irony they possessed to a superlative degree. Both created rhythmic beauty, evoked the charm of evanescence. A crepuscular art; the notations of twilit souls and the “October of the sensations.” Both were at their best in smaller artistic forms. When either one spreads his pinions for symphonic flight we think of Matthew Arnold’s interpretation of Shelley: “beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.” Which phrase truly is of Mat’s own making, yet somehow misses the essential Shelley. Poe and Chopin supremely mastered their intellectual instruments. Artificers in precious cameos, they are of an artistic consanguinity because of their extraordinary absorption in the Beautiful. Poe wrote in English, but was he really as American as Hawthorne and Emerson were American? His verse and prose depict characters and landscapes that belong to No Man’s Land, in that mystic region east of the sun, west of the moon. The American scene was unsympathetic to him, and he refused to become even morally acclimated. His Eldorado is “over the mountains of the moon, down the valley of the shadow.” His creations are bodiless; shadow of shadows, theincarnation of Silence, set forth in spectral speech. Unlike any other native-born writer, he sounds better in a French garb; the Baudelaire translations improve his style, and Stéphane Mallarmé has accomplished an almost miraculous transposition of Ulalume. (The Raven—Le Corbeau—by the same master I do not care for as much, and with its refrain, “Jamais plus!” is not so musically sonorous as “Nevermore!”)
Henry Beyle-Stendhal wrote in his witty, malicious manner that “Romanticism is the art of presenting to the people literary works which in the actual state of their habitudes and beliefs are capable of giving the greatest possible pleasure; Classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers.” Stendhal is half right. A Classic is sometimes a dead Romantic. But Poe and Chopin remain invincibly Romantic, yet are Classics. Chopin is more human than Poe, inasmuch as he is patriotic. His polonaises are “cannons buried in flowers,” his psychic bravery overflows in the Revolutionary Etude. He is Chopin. And he is also Poland. Like the national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, he struck many human chords, though some of his melodies could dwell in Poe’s “misty mid-region of Weir,” where Beauty boasts an icy reign. There is a disturbing dissonance in the Poe-Chopin case: Poe was a man without a country; Chopin had the priceless possession of Poland. On his heart wasengraved “Poland.” The love of Frédéric Chopin for his native land dowered him with a profounder nature than the Lucifer of American poetry, Edgar Allan Poe. But what enigmatic, beautiful souls!