An Enigmatic Character

Chopin : His Life. By 1Villiam Murdoch. (John Murray. 16s.) IT was high time some competent person turned his attention to Chopin, for it is long since a full-length life of him appeared. The reasons for this neglect become obvious in reading Mr.

Murdoch's valiant effort. They are : (1) the comparative

monotony of Chopin's life ; and (2) the elusive and somehow unbelievable nature of his personality. I say " valiant effort " because I do not feel that, with all his enthusiasm and knowledge. Mr. Murdoch has succeeded in overcoming either

of the difficulties. His book (a second volume, to be devoted puiely to Chopin's works, is on the way) is very carefully documented, very full and very sensible ; and it is only partly the author's fault that it makes reading that is sometimes dull and always perplexing.

The difficulty in dealing with Chopin's character is not to

find names for the qualities which he displayed. Vanity, affection, melancholy, remoteness, snobbishness, malicious-

ness, patriotic fervour--these have been the components of many an artist's character ; but in Chopin they showed them-

selves in such a way, and in such combinations, that the whole refuses to ccmpose a single, recognizable character. The surface is clear, but the underlying Counterpoint remains obstinately foggy. The mind somehow refuses to entertain the idea of a man who, at some moments, exhibited a violent and staccato patriotism (" Moscow rules the world Oh God, do you exist ? You're there, and you don't avenge it. How many more Russian crimes do you want—or—or are you a Russian too ? ") ; who wrote letters full of shrill affection to his friends, but failed to make them love him ; who was melancholy and remote in himself, yet delighted in high society and passed on gossip of the silliest and most malicious sort in letters full of glittering heartlessness ; who suffered from a lingering sickness about which he was for the most part heroically silent ; who indulged in a noisy affair with George Sand, but who was at the same time painfully prim and fastidious . . .

What is one to make of such a creature ? Our perplexit) was obviously shared by Chopin's contemporaries. No one, with the possible exception of Delacroix (whose journal contains the most revealing half-portrait of Chopin which we possess) seems to have been able really to like him. They were puzzled, 'fascinated and finally repelled by his strange remoteness, his lizard-like opacity of character, the soft brilliance of his lovely playing and the jarring falsetto of his comments on other people. There was something equivocal- hermaphroditic—about him. " The natural child of Weber and a duchess - : Ernest Legouve's too oft-quoted joke rises, nevertheless, inevitably into the mind, at the thought of him. The unconscious homosexuality which glares out of his early letters to Titus Wojciechowski (these must be read to be believed) and shows itself, in obvious disguise, in his liaison

with the virile George Sand. is probably the clue to his enig- matic personality. But Mr. Murdoch evades this issue*

thereby failing, in my opinion, to integrate the character of hiS subject. Lacking a firm basis for his analysis of the man, the statements about his various qualities and emotions seem insufficiently supported ; and this is a very bad fault in a biography. Perhaps the most candid and revealing passage in the letters runs as follows :

" I am gay on the outside, especially among my own folk (I count Poles my own I ; but inside something gnaws at me ; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams- --or sleeplessness—melancholy, in- difference--desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death : some kind of sweet peace. some kind of numbness, absentminded- ness ; and sometimes definite memories worry me. My mind is sour, bitter, salt ; some hideous jumble -of feelings shakei me !

I am stupider than ever. My life, forgive me." .. •

That was written in 1831, five years before the composer's first meeting with George Sand ; but it is the truest word ever

spoken of his character. both early and late. It voices' the terrible pathos of a nature at odds with itself, a prey to an inner cleavage (" My Life was > -Titus Wojciechowski) which exposed it, defenceless, to the claims of contrary impulses and dreams. The resolution of those conflicts—the knitting together of

EDWARD ,SACKVILLE WEST.