Studies in Modern Music Part 5

And of failure in any form Chopin had unusually little experience. Even at this dark time we hear of rapid recovery, of regained strength and courage, of a summer filled with pleasant days and n.o.ble achievement.

The cloud of trouble, which had hung over the forests of Valdemosa, lay far removed from the smooth lawns and sunny glades of Nohant; and there, amid music and children's laughter, and a concourse of friendly faces, the winter of discontent was very speedily forgotten. For the next few years, with the exception of 1840, he made a practice of spending his summer vacation at the chateau. Life looked more simple in the light of George Sand's simplicity and goodness; beneath her example it was easy to disregard all personal anxieties, and to turn with fresh resolution to the service of Art. Besides, under that hospitable roof, there were always other comrades to share the welcome. At one time Liszt would come, radiant with the triumphs of his last European tour; at another, Mickiewicz, ablaze with some fresh project of social regeneration; at another, Delacroix, busy with his _St Anne_; or Louis Blanc, intent on a new chapter of his History. Over the whole house was spread a clear, wholesome atmosphere of work, braced with a high seriousness of aim, and made genial with kindly aid and brilliant converse. We may well believe the statement of George Sand that Chopin always wrote his best at Nohant.

For some part of every winter, too, they were near neighbours in Paris.

At first they occupied two adjoining houses in the Rue Pigalle; later they moved to the Cour d'Orleans, where Chopin took No. 3 on one side of the court; George Sand No. 5 on the other; and their friend Madame Marliani completed the phalanstery by installing herself between them.

Here was established that famous _salon_, the memory of which recalls the better days of the Hotel Rambouillet. Indeed, though some few names of the cla.s.sic age are unsurpa.s.sed, at no time could Catherine de Vivonne have gathered so notable an a.s.semblage of talent as that which thronged the rooms of the new Arthenice. Chapelain, G.o.deau, Voiture, the Scuderys, even Boileau himself are but dim and uncertain lights beside Dumas and Balzac, Gautier and Heine, Lamennais and Arago and Sainte-Beuve. Here was something better than madrigals and anagrams and the _carte du tendre_; something which helped to mould the life of a nation, and bore its effect on the whole course of European thought. It was amid these surroundings--now at Paris, now at Nohant--that Chopin lived and worked, stimulated by all that was best in contemporary art, encouraged by the sympathy of his peers and the cordial admiration of his listeners.

Unlike most musicians, Chopin was fond of teaching, and was almost uniformly popular as a master. It is hard to understand how his finely-strung temperament could have endured the strain and irritation of pianoforte lessons, but we have abundant testimony as to the gentleness and tact with which he corrected errors or pointed out nuances of expression. Even on 'stormy days,' his anger was nothing more than a cry of physical pain, and he always softened at once if the culprit showed any symptoms of distress. When things went well, he was the most admirable of teachers; kindly alert, suggestive, often protracting the lesson for two or three hours, and sometimes closing it with the best of all rewards, an improvisation. The qualities which he regarded as paramount were delicacy of touch, intelligence of conception, purity of feeling: in his eyes the only sin worse than affectation was the correct mechanical dexterity that is too dull to be affected. Not, of course, that he undervalued accuracy; every student, however accomplished, had to begin with Clementi's _Gradus_, and to tread the whole course of studies and exercises; but he was far too great an artist to see any finality in a mere Academic precision.

'Mettez y donc toute votre ame' was his injunction; and in all education there is no better rule.

Yet it is curious that not one of his pupils has succeeded in making a name of European mark. Filtsch might have done so had not death cut short his career in the early promise of boyhood, but to the rest--Gutmann, Lysberg, Mikuli, Tellefsen--the record of public favour has been singularly indifferent. No doubt many members of his school were amateurs, who, with all their training, never entered the arena: some, like George Mathias, were satisfied to embody in their own teaching the traditions of their master's method; but when all allowances have been granted, it still remains true that Chopin never communicated his secret. Perhaps his secret was incommunicable; perhaps, like his style in composition, it was not so much a method as a manner; something too intimate and personal to be expressed in the concrete language of principle and formula. We know that in later years he began a systematic treatise on the pianoforte, but we may guess that it was not ill-health alone which led him to destroy it unfinished.

The recovery of new vigour and new interests brought him back once more to the uncongenial atmosphere of the concert-room. In the winter of 1839, he played for a second time at the Tuileries; in 1841 and 1842, he appeared twice in Pleyel's rooms, where he presented some of his own most recent compositions to an audience mainly consisting of friends and pupils. And if his activity as a pianist was rare and intermittent, he made up for the deficiency by the number and importance of his published works. The Sonata in B flat minor was printed in May 1840, and then followed a long series of Scherzos and Ballades, of Nocturnes and Impromptus, of Waltzes, Polonaises, and Mazurkas, many of them incontestable masterpieces, all of them valuable contributions to the literature of Music. If we except the Studies and the Preludes, there is nothing in the whole of Chopin's previous production that may hold comparison with the harvest of these abundant years.

Meantime, his health was varying with an almost mercurial instability.

On his better days he would be buoyant, gay, even extravagant, playing fantastic tricks at the pianoforte, or mimicking his rivals with inimitable skill and good-natured satire: on his worse he would appear peevish and fretful, not from ill-humour, but from sheer exaggeration of sensibility. To his present mood there was no such thing as a trifle. He broke into fierce anger at a stupid joke of Meyerbeer's, which a moment's thought would have allowed him to disregard. He quarrelled permanently and irrevocably with Liszt over some trivial slight which would never have ruffled the composure of a healthier mind. Like many men of impulsive and nervous temper, Chopin could only half forgive.

George Sand says of him, finely and truly, that 'he had no hatreds;' but he equally lacked that broad humane sense of pardon which obliterates the fault as the tide obliterates a footprint upon the sh.o.r.e. If he once felt himself wounded, he could wish no ill to his adversary, but the scar remained.

At the beginning of May 1844, he was prostrated by the sudden news of his father's death. The shock, falling unexpectedly upon an enfeebled frame, was too heavy for him to resist, and during a long anxious fortnight he lay seriously, even dangerously ill. George Sand, with ready sympathy, at once came to the rescue. She wrote his letters to his mother. She summoned one of his sisters from Warsaw. She left her work to watch by his sickbed, nursed him with maternal solicitude, and at the first sign of recovery carried him off to Nohant for convalescence.

There he seems once more to have restored to equilibrium the delicate balance of his life. His correspondence with Franchomme catches something of its old lightness of tone; he discusses, with evident interest, the fortunes of his ma.n.u.scripts and the prospects of his coming work: best of all, he returns to his piano, and at last charms his sorrow asleep. The next two years pa.s.sed so quietly and uneventfully that they have left hardly any mark on the course of his career. In 1845 he published the Berceuse and the Sonata in B minor, in 1846 the Barcarolle, the Polonaise-Fantasie, and a few Mazurkas and Nocturnes; but even in his art the record is meagre, and in his life it is almost non-existent. We have half-a-dozen unimportant letters, we have half-a-dozen lines of anecdote or conjecture, and the rest is silence.

It was the dead, heavy, ominous stillness which precedes a storm.

In 1847 the storm broke, shattering in its fall the closest and most intimate of Chopin's friendships. Its occasion was a quarrel with Maurice Sand, the causes of which, though they are nowhere explicitly related, are by no means difficult to divine. A short time before, George Sand had adopted a distant cousin called Augustine Brault, a quiet, colourless, inoffensive girl, whom she had rescued from the influences of a bad home.[36] Maurice was fond of his cousin; indeed, idle report accredited him with a deeper feeling: Chopin disliked her, and rather resented her appearance as an intrusion. Again, in May 1847, occurred the marriage of Solange Sand with M. Clesinger, a marriage of which, at the time, Chopin alone disapproved. Given Maurice's impetuous character and Chopin's nervous irritability, the matter needs no more recondite explanation. We can well imagine the words of pointed criticism and disdainful rejoinder, the interchange of sharp retorts, the gradual development of a contention which, as we know, culminated in Maurice's threat to leave his home. George Sand tried to make peace: Chopin, barely recovered from a new attack of illness,[37] regarded her interference as an act of hostility: and after a few words of bitter reproach, 'the first,' she says, 'which he ever offered me,' he turned and left her in open anger. It is easy to bring charges of ingrat.i.tude, of fickleness, of help forgotten and services ill requited. We are more concerned to note that a rage so sudden and implacable can be traced to no other than a physical origin. Chopin's condition was still serious enough to cause grave anxiety, and his outburst of petulance was not an aggression of deliberate unkindness, but a half-conscious aberration of disease. George Sand herself had no thought that the breach was permanent. Early in 1848 she voluntarily sought a reconciliation, and when the attempt failed--for busy tongues had been at work in the meantime--she bore her trouble without a word of complaint or a thought of rancour. Years afterwards she could write of Chopin, 'He was always the same to me.'

Such is the simplest and most credible version of the story. It offends against no inductions, it violates no probabilities, it is supported by the plain statement of the only authority who had first-hand knowledge, as well as by circ.u.mstantial evidence from outside. Of the two other accounts, the more serious and important is that of M. Karasowski. M.

Franchomme, who begins by accusing George Sand of literal a.s.sault and battery,[38] may, perhaps, be disregarded in spite of the uncertainty of Professor Niecks. But the attack on _Lucrezia Floriani_ involves such grave issues, and contains such perilous half-truths, that it merits some detailed consideration. We must remember that there are two separate points at stake: first, whether the novel had any share in bringing about the rupture; second, whether it was or was not unjustifiable.

To both these questions M. Karasowski returns answer in the affirmative.

George Sand, he tells us, finding it impossible to effect a separation by cold looks and petty slights, 'resorted to the heroic expedient' of caricaturing Chopin in a romance. The portrait of Prince Karol was drawn by her with the deliberate intent to wound, with the desire of forcing a quarrel upon the lover whose fidelity had outlasted her own. Let the reader consider this charge for a moment. Here is a sick man, near to death, weak, helpless, sensitive to the least injury, and we are asked to believe that the woman who has held unbroken friendship with him for ten years, the woman whose generosity and compa.s.sion are admitted even by her enemies, has taken the opportunity to stab him with a poisoned weapon. The crime is so base, so wanton, so far removed not only from George Sand's character, but from the common level of sane humanity, that we should require the strongest testimony before we could believe it possible. Until it be proved, we have only one view upon the case--_reclamitat istiusmodi suspicionibus ipsa natura_.

Fortunately, on the first point we have the clear evidence of fact.

_Lucrezia Floriani_ was written during the winter of 1846, and was read by Chopin, chapter after chapter, as it proceeded. If, then, Chopin had taken offence at the book, the rupture would have occurred, as M.

Karasowski positively declares that it did, 'in the beginning of 1847.'

This is certainly not the case. Chopin, who spent the spring at Paris, was in friendly correspondence with George Sand in May,[39] and either paid, or at least projected, his usual visit to Nohant in the summer.[40] It is not credible that he, of all men, would have offered himself as a guest to the woman whom he believed to have held him up to ridicule. Add to this George Sand's poignant distress at the estrangement; add her categorical denial of the charge of portraiture; add the fact that there is a perfectly simple explanation outside of the whole matter, and this side of the case may be regarded as closed.

Whatever may be said about the merits of _Lucrezia Floriani_, two things are certain--one that it was not intended by George Sand as a cause of quarrel, the other that it was not so accepted at the time by Chopin.

Grant that, at a later period, his friends persuaded him of a resemblance, which, but for them, he would never have imagined. They knew that he had broken with George Sand; they took his side with a natural partisanship; the weapon lay ready to their grasp; without further thought or consideration they put it in employment. There are some minds which always look for the 'originals' in a work of fiction.

Any chance trick of manner or turn of phrase is sufficient for recognition--Numa Roumestan is Gambetta, Harold Skimpole is Leigh Hunt, Falstaff is Sir John Oldcastle, and the rest of it. The scandal is easily set afloat, and no man ever listens to a contradiction.

This brings us to the second point. Is Prince Karol a portrait of Chopin? and is his relation with Lucrezia a description of the ten-years' friendship? To answer these questions in the negative, it is only necessary to read the novel. Prince Karol is an idle, disconsolate dreamer, and his story a tedious a.n.a.lysis of the more unamiable aspect of pa.s.sion. Their points of resemblance with their supposed prototypes are exhausted in a few superficial accidents; in their essential qualities they are far removed. Where is Chopin's humour, or his buoyancy, or his generosity, or his genius? Where is the life of work which it was the function of friendship to solace and encourage? The whole book is one discordant love-duet, full of recriminations and complaints, of selfish affection and suspicion and jealousy. Nothing could be more unlike the phalanstery of the Cour d'Orleans, or the frank, free comradeship of Nohant. And more, it is notorious that in all George Sand's novels there is no real characterisation, much less its attendant vice of portraiture. 'The artistic weakness of Madame Sand,'

says Mr Henry James, 'is that she never described the actual.' Here, then, as elsewhere, Chopin's biographers are accusing her of the one fault which is diametrically opposite to her nature. So far from her characters being drawn from life, they were never even corrected by life. They breathe a romantic atmosphere of their own, now fresh with the purity of La Pet.i.te Fadette, now charged with the electric pa.s.sion of Valentine or Indiana, but at no time identical with the warm vital air of true experience.

Here, then, the case may be summed up. The novel was not conceived with the intention of describing Chopin; the character of the hero is not Chopin's character; the story of the hero is not Chopin's story. At the time when the book was written, George Sand had no expectation of a quarrel with her friend; she had certainly no desire to provoke one. He, for his part, read the work through 'without the least inclination to deceive himself,' without umbrage, without suspicion. The estrangement, to whatever cause it was due, did not take place until after the interval of some months; and among all conflicting explanations, that of a breach with Maurice Sand is the most complete and the most probable.

Surely, in the face of this evidence, it is not too much to ask that the accusation of portraiture be withdrawn.

Another winter of illness and inaction filled the measure of Chopin's trouble with the further anxiety of straitened means. In February 1848, he was forced by sheer poverty to drag himself from his lodging, and endure once more the labour and fatigue of a concert. It is worth noting that he had at the time a score of ma.n.u.scripts, the sale of which would have relieved him: but they fell below his standard of self-criticism, and he chose rather to sacrifice his inclination than to offer to the world any work which he regarded as unworthy of his powers. Possibly he looked upon his recent Violoncello Sonata as the beginning of the end: in any case, he held his hand for the future, and allowed no other of his compositions to be published. There is a real heroism in this determination to give only of his best. We might well have forgiven him if he had yielded to pressing need, and taken the readiest means of evading an ordeal which, even in his days of health, he had always feared and detested. But, from first to last, his artistic career was singularly free from any taint of money-worship. The generosity, which had so often aided poor dependents or exiled compatriots, found its complement in a pride that would buy neither ease nor comfort at the cost of reputation.

In the latter part of February came the outbreak of the revolution, and Chopin's further stay in Paris was rendered impossible. At no time could he have heard the presage of war with the enthusiasm of Wagner or the carelessness of Haydn: in his present state of infirmity and depression it would have been mere madness to remain. He therefore accepted a cordial invitation to England, crossed the channel with his pupil Tellefsen for companion, and, about the end of April, established himself in London, where he was soon surrounded with all the help which kindness and sympathy can bestow. His visit to this country, which was of little less than a year's duration, seems at first to have been beneficial to him. His rooms in Dover Street were crowded with visitors, his days 'pa.s.sed,' as he says, 'like lightning;' he was even persuaded to leave his retirement and give two recitals at the house of his friend Mrs Sartoris. From August to October he travelled northward, giving concerts at Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and enjoying with evident pleasure the hospitality that met him at every stage. Yet even here we may notice a tone of weariness in his letters, a sense of effort, made rather to satisfy some external claim than to answer to any inward stimulus. Now and again he can shake it off, and write with something of his old buoyancy of spirits; then the burden returns, heavy with a weight of listless indifference, or with a galling load of pain. And at the approach of November there came an ominous change for the worse. The stress of the summer produced an inevitable reaction, the frail body sank back into weakness and suffering, the ebbing life throbbed every day with a fainter pulse. Through the winter months he lay tossing with impatience till he could regain strength enough to escape. London had become unbearable. 'Another day here,' he writes in January, 'and I shall go mad or die.' The whole mind is overstrung, jarred into discord at a touch, or relapsing, not into quietude, but into the silence of despair.

His friends carried him back to Paris, where he lingered in slow wasting disease until the autumn. A few days before his death, George Sand, whose daughter was among the watchers at his bedside, came to his lodging and asked to see him. We can well imagine the yearning anxiety with which she stood for a moment on the threshold of reconciliation, and the bitter disappointment when Gutmann closed the door and refused her admittance. He was afraid, he tells us, that Chopin was too weak to bear the agitation of such a meeting, that the memories of past friendship and past estrangement were too heavily fraught with peril to be recalled.[41] It may be that the decision was right, and yet Chopin spoke of her and wondered at her absence. The fire of life is sacred in its lowest embers, yet a breath of love might have fanned them into a purer flame. In all Chopin's story, there is nothing more pathetic than the narrow chasm which kept asunder two severed hearts at the very point of union.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Frederick Chopin.]

On the morning of October 17, it was known that the end had come. The tidings, though they could hardly have been unexpected, were heard through the length and breadth of Paris with the greatest regret and consternation. Everyone who had known Chopin felt his death as a personal sorrow; one had been honoured by his friendship, another enriched by his bounty, another gladdened by some kind word or some pleasant greeting; there was no chance acquaintance but had felt his ray of reflection from the master's life. For the rest, the whole world was poorer for the loss of a genius, whose bare forty years of time had sufficed to create a new musical language, and uphold a new idea of art.

All preparations were made to celebrate the funeral with befitting pomp.

At the Madeleine Mozart's _Requiem_ was sung over the bier, the procession was joined by almost every man of note in Paris, and at Pere la Chaise, the coffin, covered with flowers and sprinkled with Polish earth, was laid in a place of honour among the great French musicians.

The country of his adoption had cherished the exile in his life; in his death, it was her privilege to show him honour.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] The so-called etude in C minor, Op. 10, No. 12.

[21] Letter to Dziewanowski (abridged), Jan. 1833.

[22] Chopin had certainly composed some of these before his arrival in Paris.

[23] Professor Niecks' _Chopin_, Vol. i. p. 284.

[24] Valse in A flat, Op. 69, No. 1.

[25] See the pamphlet ent.i.tled _Une Contemporaine_, published during the Revolution of 1848.

[26] Karasowski, Vol. ii. p. 327.

[27] George Sand, by Matthew Arnold. _Fortnightly Review_, June 1877.

[28] Sainte-Beuve. _Portraits Contemporains_, i. 523.

[29] Letter to Pierret, June 22, 1842.

[30] 'Alles was sie fuhlt und denkt haucht Tiefsinn und Anmuth.' Heine, _Lutetia_, 'George Sand.'

[31] See the letters of Feb. 15 and Ap. 7, 1852, quoted in Mrs Sutherland Orr's _Life of Robert Browning_.

[32] _Journal_, Vol. iii. p. 242 (Dec. 1, 1868).

[33] Professor Niecks' _Chopin_, Vol. ii. p. 197.

[34] See the Essay on George Sand, in Mr Henry James' _French Poets and Novelists_.

[35] There was a short visit to Genoa in the early part of May.

[36] M. Brault's character can best be gauged from his pamphlet, _Une Contemporaine_. See also the _Histoire de ma vie_, and George Sand's letter of Aug. 9.

[37] See George Sand's letter to Gutmann, May 12.

[38] 'George Sand was a woman with a woman's ideal of gentleness, of the "charm of good manners" as essential to civilisation.'--Matthew Arnold, _Fortnightly Review_, June 1877. See Professor Niecks' _Chopin_, Vol.

ii. p. 200.

[39] See George Sand's letter to Gutmann, May 12, 1847.