Madame Sand--Lelia--Visit to Majorca--Exclusive Ideals.
In 1836 Madame Sand had not only published INDIANA, VALENTINE, and
JACQUES, but also LELIA, that prose poem of which she afterwards said:
"If I regret having written it, it is because I could not now write it.
Were I in the same state of mind now as when it was written, it would
indeed be a great consolation to me to be able to commence it." The
mere painting of romances in cold water colors must have seemed, without
doubt, dull to Madame Sand, after having handled the hammer and
chisel of the sculptor so boldly, in modeling the grand lines of that
semi-colossal statue, in cutting those sinewy muscles, which even in
their statuesque immobility, are full of bewildering and seductive
charm. Should we continue long to gaze upon it, it excites the most
painful emotion. In strong contrast to the miracle of Pygmalion, Lelia
seems a living Galatea, rich in feeling, full of love, whom the deeply
enamored artist has tried to bury alive in his exquisitely sculptured
marble, stifling the palpitating breath, and congealing the warm blood
in the vain hope of elevating and immortalizing the beauty he adores. In
the presence of this vivid nature petrified by art, we cannot feel
that admiration is kindled into love, but, saddened and chilled, we are
forced to acknowledge that love may be frozen into mere admiration.
Brown and olive-hued Lelia! Dark as Lara, despairing as Manfred,
rebellious as Cain, thou hast ranged through the depths of solitude!
But thou art more ferocious, more savage, more inconsolable than they,
because thou hast never found a man's heart sufficiently feminine to
love thee as they were loved, to pay the homage of a confiding and
blind submission to thy virile charms, to offer thee a mute yet ardent
devotion, to suffer its obedience to be protected by thy Amazonian
force! Woman-hero! Like the Amazons, thou hast been valiant and eager
for combats; like them thou hast not feared to expose the exquisite
loveliness of thy face to the fierceness of the summer's sun, or the
sharp blasts of winter! Thou hast hardened thy fragile limbs by the
endurance of fatigue, thus robbing them of the subtle power of their
weakness! Thou hast covered thy palpitating breast with a heavy cuirass,
which has pressed and torn it, dyeing its snow in blood;--that gentle
woman's bosom, charming as life, discreet as the grave, which is
always adored by man when his heart is permitted to form its sole, its
impenetrable buckler!
After having blunted her chisel in polishing this statue, which, by its
majesty, its haughty disdain, its look of hopeless anguish, shadowed
by the frowning of the pure brows and by the long loose locks shivering
with electric life, reminds us of those antique cameos on which we still
admire the perfect features, the beautiful yet fatal brow, the haughty
smile of the Medusa, whose gaze paralyzed and stopped the pulses of the
human heart;--Madame Sand in vain sought another form for the expression
of the emotions which tortured her insatiate soul. After having
draped this figure with the highest art, accumulating every species of
masculine greatness upon it in order to compensate for the highest
of all qualities which she repudiated for it, the grandeur of, "utter
self-abnegation for love," which the many-sided poet has placed in the
empyrean and called "the Eternal Feminine," (DAS EWIGWEIBLICHE,)--a
greatness which is love existing before any of its joys, surviving all
its sorrows;--after having caused Don Juan to be cursed, and a divine
hymn to be chanted to Desire by Lelia, who, as well as Don Juan,
had repulsed the only delight which crowns desire, the luxury of
self-abnegation,--after having fully revenged Elvira by the creation
of Stenio,--after having scorned man more than Don Juan had degraded
woman,--Madame Sand, in her LETTRES D'UN VOYAGEUR, depicts the shivering
palsy, the painful lethargy which seizes the artist, when, having
incorporated the emotion which inspired him in his work, his imagination
still remains under the domination of the insatiate idea without
being able to find another form in which to incarnate it. Such poetic
sufferings were well understood by Byron, when he makes Tasso shed his
most bitter tears, not for his chains, not for his physical sufferings,
not for the ignominy heaped upon him, but for his finished Epic, for the
ideal world created by his thought and now about to close its doors upon
him, and by thus expelling him from its enchanted realm, rendering him
at last sensible of the gloomy realities around him:--
"But this is o'er--my pleasant task is done:--
My long-sustaining friend of many years:
If I do blot thy final page with tears,
Know that my sorrows have wrung from me none.
But thou, my young creation! my soul's child!
Which ever playing round me came and smiled,
And woo'd me from myself with thy sweet sight,
Thou too art gone--and so is my delight."
LAMENT OF TASSO.--BYRON.
At this epoch, Madame Sand often heard a musician, one of the friends
who had greeted Chopin with the most enthusiastic joy upon his arrival
at Paris, speak of him. She heard him praise his poetic genius even more
than his artistic talent. She was acquainted with his compositions,
and admired their graceful tenderness. She was struck by the amount of
emotion displayed in his poems, with the effusions of a heart so noble
and dignified. Some of the countrymen of Chopin spoke to her of the
women of their country, with the enthusiasm natural to them upon that
subject, an enthusiasm then very much increased by a remembrance of
the sublime sacrifices made by them during the last war. Through their
recitals and the poetic inspiration of the Polish artist, she perceived
an ideal of love which took the form of worship for woman. She thought
that guaranteed from dependence, preserved from inferiority, her role
might be like the fairy power of the Peri, that ethereal intelligence
and friend of man. Perhaps she did not fully understand what innumerable
links of suffering, of silence, of patience, of gentleness, of
indulgence, of courageous perseverance, had been necessary for the
formation of the worship for this imperious but resigned ideal,
beautiful indeed, but sad to behold, like those plants with the
rose-colored corollas, whose stems, intertwining and interlacing in a
network of long and numerous branches, give life to ruins; destined ever
to embellish decay, growing upon old walls and hiding only tottering
stones! Beautiful veils woven by beneficent Nature, in her ingenious and
inexhaustible richness, to cover the constant decay of human things!
As Madame Sand perceived that this artist, in place of giving body to
his phantasy in porphyry and marble, or defining his thoughts by the
creation of massive caryatides, rather effaced the contour of his works,
and, had it been necessary, could have elevated his architecture itself
from the soil, to suspend it, like the floating palaces of the Fata
Morgana, in the fleecy clouds, through his aerial forms of almost
impalpable buoyancy, she was more and more attracted by that mystic
ideal which she perceived glowing within them. Though her arm was
powerful enough to have sculptured the round shield, her hand was
delicate enough to have traced those light relievos where the shadows
of ineffaceable profiles have been thrown upon and trusted to a stone
scarcely raised from its level plane. She was no stranger in the
supernatural world, she to whom Nature, as to a favored child, had
unloosed her girdle and unveiled all the caprices, the attractions,
the delights, which she can lend to beauty. She was not ignorant of the
lightest graces; she whose eye could embrace such vast proportions, had
stooped to study the glowing illuminations painted upon the wings of the
fragile butterfly. She had traced the symmetrical and marvellous network
which the fern extends as a canopy over the wood strawberry; she had
listened to the murmuring of streams through the long reeds and stems of
the water-grass, where the hissing of the "amorous viper" may be heard;
she had followed the wild leaps of the Will-with-a-wisp as it bounds
over the surface of the meadows and marshes; she had pictured to herself
the chimerical dwelling-places toward which it perfidiously attracts
the benighted traveller; she had listened to the concerts given by the
Cicada and their friends in the stubble of the fields; she had learned
the names of the inhabitants of the winged republics of the woods which
she could distinguish as well by their plumaged robes, as by their
jeering roulades or plaintive cries. She knew the secret tenderness of
the lily in the splendor of its tints; she had listened to the sighs of
Genevieve, [Footnote: ANDRE] the maiden enamored of flowers.
She was visited in her dreams by those "unknown friends" who came to
rejoin her "when she was seized with distress upon a desolate shore,"
brought by a "rapid stream... in large and full bark"... upon which she
mounted to leave the unknown shores, "the country of chimeras which make
real life appear like a dream half effaced to those, who enamored from
their infancy of large shells of pearl, mount them to land in those
isles where all are young and beautiful... where the men and women
are crowned with flowers, with their long locks floating upon their
shoulders... holding vases and harps of a strange form... having songs and
voices not of this world... all loving each other equally with a divine
love... where crystal fountains of perfumed waters play in basins of
silver... where blue roses bloom in vases of alabaster... where the
perspectives are all enchanted... where they walk with naked feet upon
the thick green moss, soft as carpets of velvet... where all sing as they
wander among the fragrant groves." [Footnote: LETTRES D'UN VOYAGEUR]
She knew these unknown friends so well that after having again seen
them, "she could not dream of them without palpitations of the heart
during the whole day." She was initiated into the Hoffmannic world--"she
who had surprised such ineffable smiles upon the portraits of the dead;"
[Footnote: SPIRIDSON] who had seen the rays of the sun falling through
the stained glass of a Gothic window form a halo round loved heads,
like the arm of God, luminous and impalpable, surrounded by a vortex of
atoms;--she who had known such glorious apparitions, clothed with the
purple and golden glories of the setting sun. The realm of fantasy had
no myth with whose secret she was not familiar!
Thus she was naturally anxious to become acquainted with one who
had with rapid wing flown "to those scenes which it is impossible to
describe, but which must exist somewhere, either upon the earth, or in
some of the planets, whose light we love to gaze upon in the forests
when the moon has set." [Footnote: LETTRES D'UN VOYAGEUR] Such scenes
she had prayed never to be forced to desert--never desiring to bring
her heart and imagination back to this dreary world, too like the gloomy
coasts of Finland, where the slime and miry slough can only be escaped
by scaling the naked granite of the solitary rocks. Fatigued with the
massive statue she had sculptured, the Amazonian Lelia; wearied with
the grandeur of an Ideal which it is impossible to mould from the gross
materials of this earth; she was desirous to form an acquaintance with
the artist "the lover of an impossible so shadowy"--so near the starry
regions. Alas! if these regions are exempt from the poisonous miasmas
of our atmosphere, they are not free from its desolating melancholy!
Perhaps those who are transported there may adore the shining of new
suns--but there are others not less dear whose light they must see
extinguished! Will not the most glorious among the beloved constellation
of the Pleiades there disappear? Like drops of luminous dew the
stars fall one by one into the nothingness of a yawning abyss,
whose bottomless depths no plummet has ever sounded, while the soul,
contemplating these fields of ether, this blue Sahara with its wandering
and perishing oases,--is stricken by a grief so hopeless, so profound,
that neither enthusiasm nor love can ever soothe it more. It ingulfs and
absorbs all emotions, being no more agitated by them than the sleeping
waters of some tranquil lake, reflecting the moving images thronging
its banks from its polished surface, are by the varied motions and eager
life of the many objects mirrored upon its glassy bosom. The drowsy
waters cannot thus be wakened from their icy lethargy. This melancholy
saddens even the highest joy. "Through the exhaustion always
accompanying such tension, when the soul is strained above the region
which it naturally inhabits... the insufficiency of speech is felt for
the first time by those who have studied it so much, and used it so
well--we are borne from all active, from all militant instincts--to
travel through boundless space--to be lost in the immensity of
adventurous courses far, far above the clouds... where we no longer
see that the earth is beautiful, because our gaze is riveted upon the
skies... where reality is no longer poetically draped, as has been so
skilfully done by the author of Waverley, but where, in idealizing
poetry itself, the infinite is peopled with the spirits belonging only
to its mystic realm, as has been done by Byron in his Manfred."
Could Madame Sand have divined the incurable melancholy, the will which
cannot blend with that of others, the imperious exclusiveness, which
invariably seize upon imaginations delighting in the pursuit of dreams
whose realities are nowhere to be found, or at least never in the
matter-of-fact world in which the dreamers are constrained to dwell?
Had she foreseen the form which devoted attachment assumes for such
dreamers; had she measured the entire and absolute absorption which they
will alone accept as the synonyme of tenderness? It is necessary to be
in some degree shy, shrinking, and secretive as they themselves are, to
be able to understand the hidden depths of characters so concentrated.
Like those susceptible flowers which close their sensitive petals before
the first breath of the North wind, they too veil their exacting souls
in the shrouds of self concentration, unfolding themselves only under
the warming rays of a propitious sun. Such natures have been called
"rich by exclusiveness;" in opposition to those which are "rich by
expansiveness." "If these differing temperaments should meet and
approach each other, they can never mingle or melt the one into the
other," (says the writer whom we have so often quoted) "but the one must
consume the other, leaving nothing but ashes behind." Alas! it is the
natures like that of the fragile musician whose days we commemorate,
which, consuming themselves, perish; not wishing, not indeed being able,
to live any life but one in conformity with their own exclusive Ideal.
Chopin seemed to dread Madame Sand more than any other woman, the modern
Sibyl, who, like the Pythoness of old, had said so many things that
others of her sex neither knew nor dared to say. He avoided and put
off all introduction to her. Madame Sand was ignorant of this. In
consequence of that captivating simplicity, which is one of her noblest
charms, she did not divine his fear of the Delphic priestess. At last
she was presented to him, and an acquaintance with her soon dissipated
the prejudices which he had obstinately nourished against female
authors.
In the fall of 1837, Chopin was attacked by an alarming illness, which
left him almost without force to support life. Dangerous symptoms forced
him to go South to avoid the rigor of winter. Madame Sand, always so
watchful over those whom she loved, so full of compassion for their
sufferings, would not permit him, when his health required so much care,
to set out alone, and determined to accompany him. They selected the
island of Majorca for their residence because the air of the sea, joined
to the mild climate which prevails there, is especially salubrious for
those who are suffering from affections of the lungs. Though he was
so weak when he left Paris that we had no hope of his ever returning;
though after his arrival in Majorca he was long and dangerously ill;
yet so much was he benefited by the change that big health was improved
during several years.
Was it the effect of the balmy climate alone which recalled him to
health? Was it not rather because his life was full of bliss that he
found strength to live? Did he not regain strength only because he now
wished to live? Who can tell how far the influence of the will extends
over the body? Who knows what internal subtle aroma it has the power of
disengaging to preserve the sinking frame from decay; what vital force
it can breathe into the debilitated organs? Who can say where the
dominion of mind over matter ceases? Who knows how far our senses are
under the dominion of the imagination, to what extent their powers may
be increased, or their extinction accelerated, by its influence? It
matters not how the imagination gains its strange extension of power,
whether through long and bitter exercise, or, whether spontaneously
collecting its forgotten strength, it concentrates its force in some new
and decisive moment of destiny: as when the rays of the sun are able to
kindle a flame of celestial origin when concentrated in the focus of the
burning glass, brittle and fragile though the medium be.
All the long scattered rays of happiness were collected within this
epoch of the life of Chopin; is it then surprising that they should have
rekindled the flame of life, and that it should have burned at this time
with the most vivid lustre? The solitude surrounded by the blue waves of
the Mediterranean and shaded by groves of orange, seemed fitted in
its exceeding loveliness for the ardent vows of youthful lovers, still
believing in their naive and sweet illusions, sighing for happiness
in "some desert isle." He breathed there that air for which natures
unsuited for the world, and never feeling themselves happy in it,
long with such a painful home-sickness; that air which may be found
everywhere if we can find the sympathetic souls to breathe it with us,
and which is to be met nowhere without them; that air of the land of
our dreams; and which in spite of all obstacles, of the bitter real, is
easily discovered when sought by two! It is the air of the country of
the ideal to which we gladly entice the being we cherish, repeating with
poor Mignon: DAHIN! DAHIN!... LASST UNS ZIEHN!
As long as his sickness lasted, Madame Sand never left the pillow of him
who loved her even to death, with an attachment which in losing all its
joys, did not lose its intensity, which remained faithful to her even
after all its memories had turned to pain: "for it seemed as if
this fragile being was absorbed and consumed by the strength of his
affection.... Others seek happiness in their attachments; when they no
longer find it, the attachment gently vanishes. In this they resemble
the rest of the world. But he loved for the sake of loving. No amount
of suffering was sufficient to discourage him. He could enter upon a new
phase, that of woe; but the phase of coldness he could never arrive at.
It would have been indeed a phase of physical agony--for his love was
his life--and delicious or bitter, he had not the power of withdrawing
himself a single moment from its domination." [Footnote: LUCRESIA
FLORIANA] Madame Sand never ceased to be for Chopin that being of magic
spells who had snatched him from the valley of the shadow of death,
whose power had changed his physical agony into the delicious languor of
love. To save him from death, to bring him back to life, she struggled
courageously with his disease. She surrounded him with those divining
and instinctive cares which are a thousand times more efficacious than
the material remedies known to science. While engaged in nursing him,
she felt no fatigue, no weariness, no discouragement. Neither her
strength, nor her patience, yielded before the task. Like the mothers in
robust health, who appear to communicate a part of their own strength to
the sickly infant who, constantly requiring their care, have also their
preference, she nursed the precious charge into new life. The disease
yielded: "the funereal oppression which secretly undermined the spirit
of Chopin, destroying and corroding all contentment, gradually vanished.
He permitted the amiable character, the cheerful serenity of his friend
to chase sad thoughts and mournful presentiments away, and to breathe
new force into his intellectual being."
Happiness succeeded to gloomy fears, like the gradual progression of a
beautiful day after a night full of obscurity and terror, when so dense
and heavy is the vault of darkness which weighs upon us from above, that
we are prepared for a sudden and fatal catastrophe, we do not even dare
to dream of deliverance, when the despairing eye suddenly catches a
bright spot where the mists clear, and the clouds open like flocks of
heavy wool yielding, even while the edges thicken under the pressure
of the hand which rends them. At this moment, the first ray of hope
penetrates the soul. We breathe more freely like those who lost in the
windings of a dark cavern at last think they see a light, though indeed
its existence is still doubtful. This faint light is the day dawn,
though so colorless are its rays, that it is more like the extinction of
the dying twilight,--the fall of the night-shroud upon the earth. But it
is indeed the dawn; we know it by the vivid and pure breath of the
young zephyrs which it sends forth, like avant-coureurs, to bear us the
assurance of morn and safety. The balm of flowers fills the air, like
the thrilling of an encouraged hope. A stray bird accidentally commences
his song earlier than usual, it soothes the heart like a distant
consolation, and is accepted as a promise for the future. As the
imperceptibly progressive but sure indications multiply, we are
convinced that in this struggle of light and darkness it is the shadows
of night which are to yield. Raising our eyes to the Dome of lead above
us, we feel that it weighs less heavily upon us, that it has already
lost its fatal stability.
Little by little the long gray lines of light increase, they stretch
themselves along the horizon like fissures into a brighter world. They
suddenly enlarge, they gain upon their dark boundaries, now they break
through them, as the waters bounding the edge of a lake inundate in
irregular pools the arid banks. Then a fierce opposition begins, banks
and long dikes accumulate to arrest the progress. The clouds are oiled
like ridges of sand, tossing and surging to present obstructions, but
like the impetuous raging of irresistible waters, the light breaks
through them, demolishes them, devours them, and as the rays ascend, the
rolling waves of purple mist glow into crimson. At this moment the young
dawn shines with a timid yet victorious grace, while the knee bends in
admiration and gratitude before it, for the last terror has vanished,
and we feel as if new born.
Fresh objects strike upon the view, as if just called from chaos. A
veil of uniform rose-color covers them all, but as the light augments in
intensity, the thin gauze drapes and folds in shades of pale carnation,
while the advancing plains grow clear in white and dazzling splendor.
The brilliant sun delays no longer to invade the firmament, gaining
new glory as he rises. The vapors surge and crowd together, rolling
themselves from right to left, like the heavy drapery of a curtain moved
by the wind. Then all breathes, moves, lives, hums, sings; the sounds
mingle, cross, meet, and melt into each other. Inertia gives place to
motion, it spreads, accelerates and circulates. The waves of the lake
undulate and swell like a bosom touched by love. The tears of the dew,
motionless as those of tenderness, grow more and more perceptible, one
after another they are seen glittering on the humid herbs, diamonds
waiting for the sun to paint with rainbow-tints their vivid
scintillations. The gigantic fan of light in the East is ever opening
larger and wider. Spangles of silver, borders of scarlet, violet
fringes, bars of gold, cover it with fantastic broidery. Light bands of
reddish brown feather its branches. The brightest scarlet at its centre
has the glowing transparency of the ruby; shading into orange like a
burning coal, it widens like a torch, spreads like a bouquet of flames,
which glows and glows from fervor to fervor, ever more incandescent.
At last the god of day appears! His blazing front is adorned with
luminous locks of long floating hair. Slowly he seems to rise--but
scarcely has he fully unveiled himself, than he starts forward,
disengages himself from all around him, and, leaving the earth far below
him, takes instantaneous possession of the vaulted heavens....
The memory of the days passed in the lovely isle of Majorca, like the
remembrance of an entrancing ecstasy, which fate grants but once in life
even to the most favored of her children, remained always dear to the
heart of Chopin. "He [Footnote: Lucrezia Fioriani] was no longer upon
this earth, he was in an empyrean of golden clouds and perfumes, his
imagination, so full of exquisite beauty, seemed engaged in a monologue
with God himself; and if upon the radiant prism in whose contemplation
he forgot all else, the magic-lantern of the outer world would even cast
its disturbing shadow, he felt deeply pained, as if in the midst of
a sublime concert, a shrieking old woman should blend her shrill yet
broken tones, her vulgar musical motivo, with the divine thoughts of
the great masters." He always spoke of this period with deep emotion,
profound gratitude, as if its happiness had been sufficient for a
life-time, without hoping that it would ever be possible again to find a
felicity in which the fight of time was only marked by the tenderness
of woman's love, and the brilliant flashes of true genius. Thus did the
clock of Linnaeus mark the course of time, indicating the hours by
the successive waking and sleeping of the flowers, marking each by
a different perfume, and a display of ever varying beauties, as each
variegated calyx opened in ever changing yet ever lovely form!
The beauties of the countries through which the Poet and Musician
travelled together, struck with more distinctness the imagination of
the former. The loveliness of nature impressed Chopin in a manner less
definite, though not less strong. His soul was touched, and immediately
harmonized with the external enchantment, yet his intellect did not
feel the necessity of analyzing or classifying it. His heart vibrated in
unison with the exquisite scenery around him, although he was not able
at the moment to assign the precise source of his blissful tranquillity.
Like a true musician, he was satisfied to seize the sentiment of the
scenes he visited, while he seemed to give but little attention to the
plastic material, the picturesque frame, which did not assimilate
with the form of his art, nor belong to his more spiritualized sphere.
However, (a fact that has been often remarked in organizations such as
his,) as he was removed in time and distance from the scenes in which
emotion had obscured his senses, as the clouds from the burning incense
envelope the censer, the more vividly the forms and beauties of such
scenes stood out in his memory. In the succeeding years, he frequently
spoke of them, as though the remembrance was full of pleasure to him.
But when so entirely happy, he made no inventory of his bliss. He
enjoyed it simply, as we all do in the sweet years of childhood, when we
are deeply impressed by the scenery surrounding us without ever thinking
of its details, yet finding, long after, the exact image of each object
in our memory, though we are only able to describe its forms when we
have ceased to behold them.
Besides, why should he have tasked himself to scrutinize the beautiful
sites in Spain which formed the appropriate setting of his poetic
happiness? Could he not always find them again through the descriptions
of his inspired companion? As all objects, even the atmosphere itself,
become flame-colored when seen through a glass dyed in crimson, so he
might contemplate these delicious sites in the glowing hues cast around
them by the impassioned genius of the woman he loved. The nurse of his
sick-room--was she not also a great artist? Rare and beautiful union!
If to the depths of tenderness and devotion, in which the true and
irresistible empire of woman must commence, and deprived of which she is
only an enigma without a possible solution, nature should unite the most
brilliant gifts of genius,--the miraculous spectacle of the Greek firs
would be renewed,--the glittering flames would again sport over the
abysses of the ocean without being extinguished or submerged in the
chilling depths, adding, as the living hues were thrown upon the surging
waves, the glowing dyes of the purple fire to the celestial blue of the
heaven-reflecting sea!
Has genius ever attained that utter self-abnegation, that sublime
humility of heart which gives the power to make those strange sacrifices
of the entire Past, of the whole Future; those immolations, as
courageous as mysterious; those mystic and utter holocausts of self,
not temporary and changing, but monotonous and constant,--through whose
might alone tenderness may justly claim the higher name, devotion? Has
not the force of genius its own exclusive and legitimate exactions, and
does not the force of woman consist in the abdication of all exactions?
Can the royal purple and burning flames of genius ever float upon the
immaculate azure of woman's destiny?...