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Then he throws off a volley of witty impromptus which set the ring in a roar of laughter; to these are added comical imitations of the cries of various animals; next he addresses some chieftain present in a strain of mock eloquence; and finally, the laughing devil leaping out of his eye, ends his buffoonery with dealing a pretty good whack or two over the shoulders of the most reverend seignor in the company, who, if he himself is a serf, may be his own master.
Go out into that if you want sonnets. Of course, he never takes his friends' advice; he has long known that they know nothing whatever about it. 'Impromptus' are the quackery of the poetaster. One may take it for granted, as a general rule, that anything written 'on the spot' is worthless.
His poetic impromptus for piano became the model for Mendelssohn's "Songs without Words," and the multitudinous forms of modern short pieces, while his melodious, dainty, graceful valses were the forerunners of the exquisite dance-music which subsequently made Vienna famous, and which reached its climax in Johann Strauss the younger, universally known as "the waltz king."
At one of the numerous banquets at which he was present, he replied to the speech of the chairman by an impromptu in honour of those who had so splendidly entertained him. But, as he had already said: "Impromptus may be good money of the heart, but they are often the worst money of the head."
In the sonatas and concertos he sees the princely Pole bravely carrying his banner amid classical currents. For the impromptus alone he has found no name and says of them: "To write of the four impromptus in their own key of unrestrained feeling and pondered intention would not be as easy as recapturing the first 'careless rapture of the lark."
Among his compositions at this time are a set of impromptus on a theme by Clara, and it is significant of his regard for her that later he worked them over, as if he did not consider them in their original shape good enough for her.
And this for the simple reason that the aristocrats are not more witty than the poor, but a very great deal less so. A man does not hear, as in the smart novels, these gems of verbal felicity dropped between diplomatists at dinner. Where he really does hear them is between two omnibus conductors in a block in Holborn. The witty peer whose impromptus fill the books of Mrs.
Churchill speaks of the German fleet as a "luxury"; but this is only one of those cold-storage impromptus that a reputation for cleverness must keep on hand, and when Lord Haldane in a clumsy attempt to praise the German Emperor speaks of him as "half English" I laugh, as one laughs at the story of fat Gibbon kneeling to propose to a lady and requiring a servant to get him on his legs again.
Jasmin said of the last description of verse: "One can only pay a poetical debt by means of impromptus, and though they may be good money of the heart, they are almost always bad money of the head." It was composed in 1825, when he was twenty-seven years old; and dedicated to M. Duprount, the Advocate, who was himself a poetaster.
M. Fouquet's friends had transported thither, some their actors and their dresses, others their troops of sculptors and artists; not forgetting others with their ready-mended pens, floods of impromptus were contemplated.
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