VIIITHE ETERNAL FEMININE
A Grand Piano underneath the Bough,A Gramophone, a Chinese Gong, and ThouTrying to sing an Anthem off the Key—Oh, Paradise were Wilderness enow!—Wallace Irwin.
A Grand Piano underneath the Bough,A Gramophone, a Chinese Gong, and ThouTrying to sing an Anthem off the Key—Oh, Paradise were Wilderness enow!—Wallace Irwin.
A Grand Piano underneath the Bough,A Gramophone, a Chinese Gong, and ThouTrying to sing an Anthem off the Key—Oh, Paradise were Wilderness enow!—Wallace Irwin.
A Grand Piano underneath the Bough,
A Gramophone, a Chinese Gong, and Thou
Trying to sing an Anthem off the Key—
Oh, Paradise were Wilderness enow!
—Wallace Irwin.
To the girl who plays Chopin! This sounds like a toast, and a cynic would certainly add: “May her pretty fingers ne’er touch ivory again!” But it is not a health that I wish to propose, nor yet an exhortation. My notion is to put the question boldly: Can women play Chopin? Before the rigor of such a query the hardiest-souled male must retire abashed, or write with the usual masculine brutality and lack of finesse. Chopin is the favorite composer of women; Chopin rules the soul of the girl, and to Chopin is addressed a particular form of worship. This consists of inarticulate gasps, irregular sighs, and the glance which is called psychic. To girls of eighteen or thereabouts Chopin is a religion—a sentimental one. Sympathetic medical men diagnose the symptomsand declare them Chopinitis. We have, many of us, suffered severely from it; most musical and unmusical people do. Chopin is in the emotional curriculum of every woman who plays the piano; therefore it shocks one if this question be posed: Can women play Chopin?
Let us be scientific, let us be profound, and let us quote rows of horrid, forbidding figures. I am now proposing a little journey into the misty mid-region of Womanology, for the need of proving my somewhat oblique case. It is crab-wise, this progression, but it may serve. The Nineteenth Century some years ago contained an article on woman’s brain by Alexander Sutherland. Written in fullest accord with the aims and ideals of the new woman, the author is yet forced to confess that “the male brain has an advantage of about 10 per cent in weight,” and adds that “it is a difference which certainly affords some little foundation for a very ancient belief,” said belief being the inferiority of the female intellect to the male intellect. But he proves that 90 per cent of women are the equals of 90 per cent of men. And in the very beginning of his short study he demonstrates that the neurons on the cortex of the brain are quite as numerous in women as in men, and that these neurons “are the instruments of mental energy.”
Mere brain weight, then, seems to prove nothing. It is the activity of the neurons which determines the quality of brain power. Music isdenied a place among the more intellectual arts by many great thinkers. Whether this is just or not, considering the vast claims of Bach and Beethoven, I will not say, but one thing is certain: in Chopin emotional sensibility predominates, and as women are supposed to be more emotional than their mates,ergothey should play Chopin better. But are they more emotional? Lombroso, who has measured the sighs of sentimental girls, and weighed her tears, says no. In an extraordinary series of public experiments, conducted at Turin, the learned Italian found that woman as compared with man was deficient in tactile sensibility; that she did not record impressions, whether optical, aural, or sensory, as rapidly or with such clear definition as did man. I admit this sounds discouraging, and is enough to give pause to the upward flight of the sex, if that flight is to be tested by scientific analysis. But what is all this testing, weighing, and measuring when faced by the spectacle of a glorious winged creature which sails away on victorious pinions with plumage unruffled by Lombroso and his laboratory logic?
A genuineféministe, one who gently felt the female pulse of his century and suavely waved the patient aside, was the late Ernest Renan. If ever a man should have had exalted ideals of womanhood, he was that man. His sister Henriette was his life companion, a veritable staff to him in his erudite studies, and when shedied, he withered, or, rather, grew fat and spiritually flabby. Yet this most subtly feminine of men had the ingratitude to write: “There is no doubt whatever that at the present time feminine instincts occupy more space in the general physiognomy of the world than they did formerly. The world is more exclusively preoccupied just now with frivolities that formerly were looked upon as the exclusive property of women. Instead of asking men for great achievements, bold enterprises, and heroic labors, the women ask them for riches only, to satisfy a vulgar taste. The general movement of the world has put itself at the service of the instincts of woman, not those splendid instincts through which they display more clearly than men can, perhaps, the divine ideal of our nature, but the lower instincts which form the least noble portion of her vocation.” This was written in 1855. What would Renan have written in the twentieth century?
We have now laboriously collated the opinions of three men—Sutherland on the brain, Lombroso on the sensibility, and Renan on the moral nature of woman. The general tenor of these three messages is hardly as hopeful as the new woman could desire. Let us leave the chill topic in all its frozen splendor and turn to the latter part of my question—Chopin. What is Chopin playing?
That Chopin was a Pole who went from Warsawto Paris, there won fame, the love of George Sand, misery, and a sad death are facts that even schoolgirls lisp. The pianist-composer belongs to the stock figures of musical fiction. He was slender, had consumption, slim, long fingers, played vaporous moon-haunted music, and after his desertion by Sand coughed himself off the contemporary canvas in the most genteel and romantic manner. I like to recall George Moore’s description of Robert Louis Stevenson: “I think of Mr. Stevenson,” he wrote in his Confessions, “as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of sad flowers with pale weak hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass window and scratching thereon certain exquisite profiles with a diamond pencil.” The piano was Chopin’s window, and upon it he traced arabesques, tender and heroic, sorrowful and capricious. All this is Chopin romantically conventionalized by artist-biographers and associates. The real man, as nearly as we dare describe a real man—was of a gentle, slightly acid temper, and of a refined nature, who had a talent for playing the piano that was without parallel, and a positive genius in composition. His life was stupid, if compared with an actor’s or a sailor’s, and was devoid of public incident. We can see him giving a few piano lessons to prim, chaperoned misses of the Boulevard Saint-Germain before each noon; in the afternoons making calls or studying; in the evening at theopera for an hour, later in the enchanted circle of countesses who listened to his weaving music, and afterward a space for breathing at a fashionable café before retiring. Public appearances were rare; this aristocrat loved not the larger world and its democratic criticisms. His was a temperament prone to self-coddling. Only to the favored few did he reveal the richness of his inner life. That he suffered intensely from petty annoyances before which the ordinary man would hunch his shoulders was but the result of a hyperæsthetic delicacy. An æolian harp! you cry, and the simile is a happy one. But no wind harp has ever discoursed such music as Chopin’s piano.
And then there is the national element, perhaps the most fascinating of all the fibres of his many-colored soul. Chopin was Polish, he loved Poland madly, yet Chopin never laid down his music to take up arms for his native land, fight or die for, as did his countrywoman Emilia Plater. Being infinitely more feminine than any woman, Chopin sang his dreams, his disillusions, into his music, and put his fiery patriotism into his polonaises. His range is not so wide as Beethoven’s; but it is quite as intense. His mazurkas, valses, nocturnes, studies, preludes, impromptus, scherzos, ballades, polonaises, fantaisies, variations, concertos, cradle-song, barcarolle, sonatas, and various dances are the most intimate music written for any instrument. Alyric poet, he touched us to the core, and with exquisite tentacles drew our soul to his. He is dead, yet a vital musical force to-day. To play Chopin one must have acute sensibilities, a versatility of mood, a perfect mechanism, the heart of a woman and the brain of a man. He is not all elegant languors and melancholy simperings. A capricious, even morbid, temperament is demanded, and there must be the fire that kindles and the power that menaces; a fluctuating, wavering rhythm yet a rhythmic sense of excessive rectitude; a sensuous touch, yet a touch that contains an infinity of colorings; supreme musicianship—Chopin was a musician first, poet afterwards; a big nature overflowing with milk and honey; and, last of all, you must have suffered the tribulations of life and love, until the nerves are whittled away to a thin, sensitive edge and the soul is aflame with the joy of death. Does this sound like mocking at the impossible? All this and much more that is subtle and indescribable are needed to interpret Chopin. And now do you see that I am right when I declare that most women play his music mechanically?
Who has played Chopin in a remarkable manner? The list is not large. Chopin himself must have been the greatest of all, though Liszt declared that his physical strength was not able to cope with the more heroic of his works. Liszt, Tausig, Rubinstein, Essipoff, Joseffy,Karl Heymann, Pachmann, and Paderewski—a somewhat attenuated number of names. Of course there were many others; but these represent supreme mastery in various phases of the master’s music. The real pupils all claimed to have inherited the magic formula, the tradition. To-day the best-known Chopin players are Joseffy, Rosenthal, Pachmann, Paderewski, and others. Each has his virtues, and to define their limitations, enunciate their excellences, would be critical hair-splitting. Nearly all the younger professional men and women play Chopin after approved academic models. He is expounded by æstheticians and taught throughout the land. He is mauled, maimed, thumped, and otherwise maltreated at conservatories, and the soul of him is seldom invoked, but floats, a wraith with melancholy eyes, over nearly every piano in Christendom. There have been and are charming interpreters of his music among women pianists. Paderewski told me that he never heard the mazurkas better played than by Marcelline, Princess Czartoryska, a beloved pupil of Chopin’s. We have never had the mazurkas so charmingly played here as by the wilful Vladimir de Pachmann; yet not even his dearest foe would dower that artist with great mental ability. But he is more feminine than any woman in his tactile sensibilities. Joseffy has far more intellectuality; Paderewski is more poetic. All three are, as all musical artistsshould be, feminine in their delicacy of temperament.
Where, then, does woman enter this race, a race in which sex traditions are topsy-turvied? If women are deficient in brain weight, in nervous and spiritual powers, how is it that they dare attempt Chopin at all?
Because, patient reader—and now I begin to draw in the very large loop I have made—men of science deal with the palpable, and the time for measuring and weighing the impalpable has not yet arrived. Because there is no sex in music, and because you may not be very moral or very intellectual, and yet play Chopin like “a little god”—as Pachmann would say. And now for my most triumphant contention: if the majority of women play Chopin abominably—so do the majority of men!
“It may indeed,” answered Amelia; “and I am so sensible of it that unless you have a mind to see me faint before your face, I beg you will order me something—a glass of water if you please.” And then that most fascinating chronicler, Henry Fielding, Esq., proceeds to relate the further history of Captain Booth’s good lady, but not until Mrs. Bennet infuses some “hartshorn drops” into a glass of water for her. All this was about 1750. Since thenMiss Austen and her troop of youthful creatures, swooning to order, have stolen with charming graces across the canvas of fiction; the young woman of 1750, with her needles and her scruples, has quite vanished; and passed away is the girl who played the piano in the stiff Victorian drawing-rooms of our mothers. It has always seemed to me that slippery haircloth sofas and the Battle of Prague dwelt in mutual harmony. And now at the beginning of the century the girls who devote time to the keyboard merely for the purpose of social display are almost as rare as the lavender water ladies of morbid sensibilities in the Richardson and Fielding novels. It was one of the new English essayists who wrote of The Decay of Sensibility. He meant the Jane Austen girl; but I wonder if the musical girl of the old sort may not be also set down for study—the study we accord to rare and disappearing types. Yet never has America been so musical, never so crowded the recitals of popular pianists, while piano manufacturers bewail the day’s brevity, so eager for their instruments is the public. Here is a pretty paradox: the piano is passing and with it the piano girl,—there really was a piano girl,—and more music was never made before in the land!
Women and music have been inseparable in the male imagination since the days when the morning stars sang cosmic chorals in the vastyblue. The Old Testament tells of dancing and lyrics that accompanied many sacred offices, and we all recall those music-mad maids who slew Bacchus for a mere song. Women played upon shawm and psaltery, and to her fate went dancing with measured tones the daughter of Jephthah. I am not sure but Judith crooned a melody for the ravished ears of Holofernes. An early keyed instrument was named in honor of woman—the virginal—and the first printed piece of English music was called Parthenia. On the title-page is represented a simpering and rather blowzy young woman of Rubens-like physique, playing upon a virginal, her fingers in delightfully impossible curlicues. This piece was engraved in 1611. A variety of pictures, some as early as 1440, show the inevitable girl seated at the spinet, or clavichord. There is a painting by Jan Steen in the London National Gallery, depicting an awkward Dutch miss fingering the keys, and a Gérard Ter Borch at the Royal Museum, Berlin, reveals a woman of generous breadth playing upon a violoncello. She appears to be handling her bow like a professional; and she is, strange to say, left-handed. Ample are the facts relating to the important rôle enacted by woman as interpretative artist. To no less an authority has been ascribed—wrongly, I suspect—a certain aphorism which places in curious sequence wine, woman, and song. It was the woman who entertained that then was considered.She pleased the rude warrior, fatigued by the chase or war, and with her dainty tinklings soothed his sottish brain. Like music, woman was a handmaiden. With the emancipation of the art from churchly rubric came its worldly victories. In the brilliant spaces of the concert room the piano was king, and not seldom a king subdued by queenly fingers. The male virtuoso, surely a thing of gorgeous vanities, soon had his feminine complement. The woman who played the piano appeared in Europe; and there were those that predicted the millennium. In the eighteenth century pianos had sconces in which burned candles, while charming women, hair powdered and patch on face, played Haydn, attempted Scarlatti, and greatly wondered at the famously difficult music of Mozart. Beethoven, a loutish young man of unbearable habits, wrote music that was not to be thought of—it was simply not playable. To be sure, a few grand ladies who gave themselves superior airs of culture—as do Ibsen girls to-day—attempted the Beethoven sonatas in the presence of the composer, who, quite deaf, lolled complacently in their drawing-rooms and betimes picked his teeth with the candle snuffers. But there was sterner stuff in the next generation. After Camilla Pleyel came Madame de Belleville-Oury, admired of Chopin, and the transition to the modern piano-playing women, Clara Schumann, Annette Essipoff, Sophie Menter, Teresa Carreño, was an easy one.
The latter half of this century has witnessed an intense devotion to a barren ideal. Years previous to the advent of the sewing-machine there burst upon the civilized globe a musical storm of great magnitude. Every girl whose parents respected themselves was led almost manacled to the keyboard, and there made to play at least one hour out of the twenty-four. This was before the age of eight; after that crumby and pinafore period an hour was added, and O, the tortures of her generation and the generation that succeeded her! Veritable slaves of the ivory, they worked like the Niebelungs for a stern Alberich, who pocketed the hoard of their fathers and rapped their cold, thin, and despairing fingers with a lead pencil—one usually “made in Germany.” With what infantile malignancy was regarded the lead pencil of the German music-master! Why, even as I write, my very sentence assumes an Ollendorffian cast because of the harrowing atmosphere conjured up by that same irritable Teutonic pencil-wielder. Piano music of those days was a thing of horror. Innumerable variations and the sonatina that stupefied were supplemented by diabolical finger studies without end. One hour after breakfast, one hour after luncheon, and in the evening a little music to soothe digestion and drive away dull drink—something of this sort was the daily musical scheme of our natural rulers. Every girl played the piano. Notto play the instrument was a stigma of poverty. The harp went out with the Byronic pose, though harp-playing was deemed “a fine, ladylike accomplishment” until the Civil War. But a harp is a troublesome instrument “to keep in order”; it needs skilled attention—above all, careful tuning. Now the piano is cheaper than the harp—I mean some pianos—and it is the only instrument I know of that is played upon with evident delight when out of tune. Even the banjo is tuned at times; the average piano so rarely that it resents the operation and speedily relapses below pitch. Because of its unmusical nature, a very uncomplaining beast of burden, the piano was bound to drive out the harp; it is more easily “worked,” and, by reason of its shape, a more useful piece of furniture. Atop of a piano may be placed anything, from a bonnet to an ice-cream freezer; indeed, stories are told of heartless persons using it for a couch; and once a party of French explorers discovered on the coast of Africa an individual, oily but royal, who had removed the action and wires of a grand piano and used the interior for his permanent abode. The unfortunate instrument had drifted ashore from a wreck.
Other reasons, too, there are for the supplanting of the harp by its more stolid half-brother, the piano—bigger brother, a noisier, more assertive one, and a magnificent stop-gap for the creaking pauses of the drawing-room machinery.And how nobly it covers thin talk with a dense mantle of crackling tones! A provoker of speech, an urger to after-dinner eloquence, the piano will be remembered in the hereafter as the greatest social implement of last century’s latter half.
Liszts in petticoats have been so numerous during the past twenty-five years as to escape classification. It was the girl who did not play that was singled out as an oddity. For one Sonia Kovalesky and her rare mastery of mathematics there were a million slaves of the ivory. Not even the sewing-machine routed the piano, though it dealt it a dangerous body blow. Treadles and pedals are not so far asunder, and a neat piano technique has been found quite useful by the ardent typewriter. What this present generation of children has to be especially thankful for is its immunity from useless piano practice. Unless there is discovered a sharply defined aptitude, a girl is kept away from the stool and pedals. Instead of the crooked back—in Germany known as the piano back—and relentless technical studies, our young woman golfs, cycles, rows, runs, fences, dances, and pianolas! While she once wearied her heart playing Gottschalk, she now plays tennis, and she freely admits that tennis is greater than Thalberg. Recall the names of all the great women’s colleges, recall their wonderful curriculums, and note with unprejudiced eyes theirscope and the comparatively humble position occupied by music. In a word, I wish to point out that piano-playing as an accomplishment is passing. Girls play the piano as a matter of course when they have nimble fingers and care for it. Life has become too crowded, too variously beautiful, for a woman without marked musical gifts to waste it at the piano.
Begun as a pastime, a mere social adjunct of the overfed, music, the heavenly maid, was pressed into unwilling service at the piano, and at times escorted timid youths to the proposing point, or eked out the deadly lethargy of evenings in respectable homes. Girls had to pull the teeth of this artistic monster, the pianoforte, else be accounted frumps without artistic or social ambitions. Unlike that elephant which refused to play a Bach fugue on the piano, because, as the showman tearfully explained, the animal shudderingly recognized the ivory of the tusks of its mother, the girl of the middle century went about her task muddled in wits, but with matrimony as her ultimate goal. To-day she has forsaken the “lilies and languors” of Chopin, and the “roses and raptures” of Schumann, and if she must have music, she goes to a piano recital and hears a great artist interpret her favorite composer, thus unconsciously imitating the Eastern potentate who boasted that he had his dancing done for him. The new girl is too busy to play the piano unless she has the gift; then sheplays it with consuming earnestness. We listen to her, for we know that this is an age of specialization, an age when woman is coming into her own, be it nursing, electoral suffrage, or the writing of plays; so poets no longer make sonnets to our Ladies of Ivories, nor are budding girls chained to the keyboard. Never has the piano been so carefully studied as it is to-day, and, paradoxical as it may sound, never has the tendency of music been diverted to currents so contrary to the genius of the instrument. All this is better for woman—and for the development of her art along broader, nobler lines. The tone-poem and music-drama are now our ideals, and I dare publish my belief that in this year of grace there has been born one who will live to see the decay of the piano recital. He may be a centenarian before this change is wrought, but witness it he will, for music, of all arts, changes most its vesture.
Balzac, master of souls, knower of the heart feminine, made his lovely Princesse de Cadignan say to the enamored Daniel d’Arthez: “I have often heard miserable specimens regret that they were women, wish that they were men; I have always looked upon them with pity.... If I had to choose I would still prefer to be a woman. A fine pleasure it is to have to owe one’s triumph to strength, to all the powers thatare given you by the laws made by you! But when we see you at our feet, uttering and doing sillinesses, is it not then an intoxicating happiness to feel one’s self the weakness that triumphs? When we succeed we are obliged to keep silent under pain of losing our empire. Beaten women are still obliged to keep silent through pride. The silence of the slave frightens the master.”
This was written in 1839. If Balzac had lived a half-century, he would have painted full-length portraits of women who keep quiet neither in triumph nor in defeat; and at whose feet pedals, not men, register new emotional experiences—for the pedals of the piano are the soul of it. To be ashamed of one’s sex nowadays would be an insane confession wrung from some poor overworked creature, one to whom the French novelist might refuse even the name of woman. Females may deny the beauty of being born to wear petticoats; women, never. Indeed, the boot is now on the masculine leg. As the current phraseology runs, Woman has found herself. She has also found a panacea for irritated vanity and indigestion, at one time called in romances a broken heart. This prophylactic is art; and when it is used intelligently, misery flies forth from the window as music opens the door.
Once, for the sheer fun of it, I made an imaginary classification of music which various heroines of fiction preferred, or, rather, might prefer—formany of them are, as you know, tone-deaf. Mr. Howells remarked this years ago. But consider Clarissa Harlowe, or any of the immortal Jane’s brood—do they not all suggest musical possibilities? What a paper that would be to read before a mothers’ meeting on a sultry day in September!—The Musical Tastes of Fiction’s Heroines. And with what facile logic, the logic of numbers, a clever girl could unhorse her ruder opponents. The theme fascinates me; I am loath to leave it. Think of the year 1800! Beethoven had written some piano sonatas, but was not very well known abroad. In London town there were still harpsichords, and Scarlatti and Mozart. The modern grand piano was a dream that nestled in the later sonatas of Beethoven—and in the brain of their maker. Tone was not thought of; while a pearly touch, smooth scales, and crisp little rhythms were affected by such women as spared the time to practise from their social duties. The piano music of the eighteenth century was written for women, is woman’s music. All these virginals, spinets, clavecins, clavichords, harpsichords, are they not feminine? Are they not the musical rib plucked by an amiable fate from the side of the masculine church organ? Historical retrospects gall the mind at all times, but it may not be amiss to consider the century’s piano music which preceded ours. Out of the old dance suites burgeoned latter-daypiano music. Those graceful writers of old Italy and old France made gay melodies, full of the artificial life of their time, of their surroundings. You catch glimpses of delicate faces, with patches, powdered heads, courtly struttings, and the sounds of courtly wooing. The stately minuetto, lively courantes, decorous allemandes, smooth sarabands, tripping gavottes and gigues,—all these, and many more with high-colored titles, enchanted our great-great-grandmothers. The more tragic note was not missing, either. They had L’Homicide and the Fair Murderess, and any number of pieces named after tears, anger, caprice, sorrow, revenge and desire. Animals and the gods of Greece and Rome were quoted; flanked by wax candles, with suitors smirking at the side of them, and peering in front of them, fair women played music, played it with genteel gravity or bewitching coquetry; played Scarlatti and Emanuel Bach, and all for the love of art—and perhaps a matrimonial future. Let it be remarked,en passant, that the keyboard, vastly modified, developed and improved as it is, is still a favorite weapon of feminine offence. Just here get down your Browning from the shelf and consider A Toccata of Galuppi’s.
Of Bach, the giant, we do not read in the diaries, letters, and books of this fashionable epoch. That grim old forge-master of fugues would hardly have appealed to the dreams offair women, even had they been cognizant of his existence. Handel’s piano music was more to their taste; his suites, classical and solid in character, are full of brightly said things, and lie well for the instrument. Joseph Haydn, owing much to Bach’s son Emanuel, wrote pleasing music, light music, for the piano. His sonatas are not difficult, were not difficult for those ladies who could fluently finger Scarlatti. This Italian, with his witty skippings, rapid hand-crossings, and implacable vivacity, is still rainbow gold for most feminine wrists. Mozart, the sweetly lyric, the mellifluous and ever gay Mozart, made sonatas as gods carve the cosmos. Every form he touched he beautified. The piano sonatas, written for money, written with ease, were also written with both eyes on the fair amateur of the period. She admired Mozart more than Haydn; his music was melodious, his decorative patterns prettier. So Mozart raged in the hearts of the ladies, and slender fingers troubled the chaste outlines of his sonatas. His eighteenth sonata, preceded by a fantasia in the same key—C minor—alone impeded the flight of these butterflies. In it were mutterings of the music that awed and thrilled in Don Giovanni, and it was a precursor of Beethoven and his mighty thunderings.
Behold the conqueror approaches, the Bonaparte, the Buonarroti, the Balzac of music—Ludwig van Beethoven. In the track of hisgrowling tempests followed women, nobly nurtured, charming women of fashion, Nanette Streicher, Baroness Ertmann, Julia Guicciardi, Thérèse, Bettina, and many more besides. They played for him, and he, great genius and despiser of idle conventions, stretched his stout short body out upon drawing-room couches.
It is not a pretty picture this, but is a characteristic. It must please latter-day pagans who flout the niceties of society. Not all the Beethoven sonatas were admired to the studying point. The early ones—mere exercises of a young athlete juggling with the weapons of his grandsire—alone called for commendation. Dedicated to Haydn, the first three did not excite the ire of critics or teachers. But as the man grew, as he felt, suffered, and knew, then his canvases began to excite fear and repulsion. “Why these gloomy tints, Herr van Beethoven?” they cried, and listened eagerly to his rivals, the Wölffls, the Gelineks, the Hummels. There is a modishness even in the art of writing for the piano, and Beethoven despised modishness, as would have Diana of the Ephesians the millinery of Lutetia. So he was neglected for a half-century, and the long-fingered, long-haired virtuosi overran Europe, with their variations, their fantasias, their trills, and their trickeries. From Hummel to Thalberg effect was their god, and before the shrine of the titillating, the ornamental and the suave, womankind prostratedherself, pouring out homage and gold—the latter provided by patient fathers and husbands. It was a carnage, a musical rout, and a superior warrior like Liszt trailed thousands of scalps after his chariots during triumphal tours. The mediæval dancing manias were as nothing when compared with the hysteria evoked by the new Pied Piper of Hungary. Chopin never had the physique, and Mendelssohn was too moral, to copy Liszt. These two men wrote lovely music, feminine music; while down in Vienna a young man named Schubert died, after writing incomparable songs and much beautiful piano music. His sonatas are not so feminine in texture as his musical Moments, impromptus and dances. This music is made for woman, with its intimate, tender feeling, its loose and variegated structure. Von Weber composed chivalric sonatas and that marvellous epitome of the dance, The Invitation. Schumann, broken in fingers through too curious experimentings, dreamed twilight music, which his gifted wife Clara interpreted to an incredulous world.
Since then the rest is history. Women virtuosi are as plentiful as the shining sands, beginning with Clara Schumann and ending with the prodigy of yesterday. Such thunderers as Sophie Menter and Teresa Carreño, women of iron will and great muscular power, and a subtle interpreter like Annette Essipoff, challenge men in their own sphere, and relatively holdtheir own. I say relatively; and now comes into view a serious question. It is this: Should women essay the music of all composers? The answer is in the affirmative, for who shall assert that a severe course of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms may result in aught else but good. But do women interpret all composers with equal success? The answer is here decidedly a negative one. Though I have heard Menter play Liszt’s rhapsodies with overwhelming brilliancy, though I have listened to Carreño in amazement as she crashed out Chopin’s F sharp minor polonaise on her Steinway, yet I know that the brawn and brain of this pair are exceptional. Half a dozen such do not appear during a century. Therefore big tonal effects, called orchestral by the critics, are usually not to be found in the performances of women. For that reason I enjoy the playing of women who are genuinely feminine in their style—Essipoff or Madame Zeisler. Smoothness, neatness, delicacy, brilliancy, and a certain grace are common enough. The average woman pianist is a hard student, and strives to achieve that which men easily accomplish. As a rule she has finger facility, a plentiful lack of rhythm, and no particular interpretative power—exactly the qualities of the average male pianist. When Maud Powell plays Bach or Beethoven on her violin we are amazed and say, “Why, this is virile!” When Fanny Bloomfield-Zeisler delivers the scherzo from the Litolffconcerto, we are surprised—not at her swiftness, ease, or delicacy, but at her nervous force and bravura—these latter being selfishly annexed by men as eminently masculine attributes. Are they? Certain feminine Wagner singers possess them, and in opera they are accepted as a matter of course. A genuine paradox, is it not?
The muscular conformation of a woman’s arm militates against her throwing a stone as far as a man; it also operates adversely in modern piano-playing, where the triceps muscles are a necessity for a broad, sonorous tone. I have considered the pros and cons of emotional intensity in writing of woman as a Chopin player, and shall not again traverse that barren and ungrateful region. The intellect remains to be discussed. Are women intellectual in the interpretative sense? Yes. Without hesitation I answer this question, for music, apart from the creative side, is a feminine art, and one in which woman’s intuitions lead her many leagues toward success. That women have as yet—you mark my use of a future contingency!—that women have as yet exhibited powers of interpretation as keen, as original, or even on a par with men, I am not prepared to say. Illuminative in Bach or Beethoven they are not, though delightfully poetic in Schumann and Chopin. I have never heard a woman play the Hammer-Klavier Sonata, opus 106, of Beethoven with force, lucidity, or imaginative lift.
Enfin: The lesson of the years seems to be that women can play anything written for the piano, and play it well. In all the music of the eighteenth century, in the sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven, in Hummel, Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, some of Schumann, some of Chopin, a goodly portion of Liszt, all of Field, Heller, Hiller, Moszkowski, Grieg, Scharwenka, and a moiety of Brahms,—all these composers have been essayed with success. Bach’s Well-tempered Clavichord should be the bread and butter of a woman’s musicalmenu; it should begin and end her day. One may quote Balzac again—that dear Princesse de Cadignan, sometimes called Madame la Duchesse Maufrigneuse, “Women know how to give to their words a peculiar saintliness; they communicate to them I know not what of vibration, which extends the sense of their ideas and lends them profundity; if later, their charmed auditor no longer recalls what they have said, the object has been completely attained, which is the proper quality of eloquence.” And of this species of eloquence is a woman’s playing of Bach and Beethoven and Brahms. It is often charming; but is it ever great, spiritual, moving art?
The woman question—is it not one to be shunned? I mean the question, not the theme itself, though one may recommend Laura Marholm’s volumes. Frau Marholm is a Scandinavian, and Northern women must have beenbound with iron social gyves, to judge by the quality of their protestant literature. Ibsen, Björnson, even Strindberg—whose erratic pendulum swings to the other extreme—are full of the heady polemics of sex. Sex—why, one sickens of the subject after reading problem plays and novels. To all American women between the ages of eighteen and eighty I say study Laura Marholm’s Studies in the Psychology of Woman. The dissatisfied ones, those who really believe all they read, may perhaps realize how much better off is The Unquiet Sex—this capital phrase is of Helen Watterson Moody’s coining—in America. Little wonder that there is a woman movement in Europe. For its psychology read Marholm. Best of all, here is a woman telling us secrets, secrets not to be captured by men watchful of the Sphinx that Defies. And it is a sad corrective for masculine presumption, masculine vanity.Weare only tolerated. Some of us have known that for years; here it is elevated to the dignity of a psychological system. These long-haired, soft-eyed animals, as Guy de Maupassant described them, are our true critics weighing us ever in scales that are mortifyingly candid, excusing us if they love us, but after all onlytolerating us, allowing the lords of creation to kneel in humble attitudes at the shrine and rewarded at the end by—toleration. And if this is the case on the Continent, where the equality of womenis as yet a half-hatched idea, how is it in America, where she is queen, queen from kitchen to palace? I think Mrs. Marholm herself would be amazed, and mayhap after five years’ residence here would write a book about the Wrongs of Man. Her Six Famous Women betrays the writer’s keenness of vision, the Studies reveal breadth of idea and judgments. She does not belong to the “Shrieking Sisterhood.” She is a woman, a defender of home and family. I assure you I enjoyed her book far better than Zola’s Fecondité—that most miraculously dull and moral tract. Tolstoy is the remote parent of both books, though Marholm has her own feminine point of attack. No man may hope to understand women as does a woman. It was Zangwill, I think, who said that all women writers are of value—do they not tell us the secrets of their sex? This is hardly polite, but it is true. When the “messages” of George Eliot and Charlotte Bronté have grown stale from usage—all truths breed rust after a time—their unconscious self-portraitures will preserve them from those giant moths, the critics.
The Marholm knows better than any envious male the limitations of woman as artist, politician, and writer. In the admirable study of Mrs. Besant she writes: “She has always possessed the wholly feminine capacity of assimilating the most varied and incompatible mental food, without disturbance or indigestion, and of giving itforth with a certain accuracy; her brain was like a photographic plate upon which the exposed picture is clearly and mechanically printed. These characteristics, the quick perception and exact repetition, are frequently praised by professors who examine feminine students, and many have declared that in eagerness for knowledge and ability to acquire it, women excel men. It is undeniable that in these characteristics they excel most men; it would be a pity if most men excelled them, for these characteristics rest upon the lesser power and capacity for original thought, independent selection, and deeper affinity to the appropriate idea; they depend upon a mechanical instead of an organic process.”
This is not a pleasing paragraph, but it shows the writer’s style of argument. She girds with something approaching violence at the milk-and-water men of the day, declaring that Woman’s Emancipation is the result of some deficiency in modern manhood. However, read Marholm and draw your own pictures of what women should or should not be. A charming woman told me that she had asked Jean de Reszké if he cared to sing Romeo or Tristan with any particular singer.
“I always sing to my ideal woman,” replied the artist. And I fancy that we all pursue that illuding composite. It is Woman who composes all the great music, paints all the great pictures, writes all the great poems—Woman the inspirerof all art! IsShe, after all, our coast of Bohemia? Then mankind, from the torrid time of undifferentiated protozoa, has been frantically striving to acquire a footing upon that fascinating territory.