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 shore. 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 manuscripts 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 passed 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 ingratitude,
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 circumstantial 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 assault 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 compassion 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 analysis of the more unamiable aspect
of passion. 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'Orléans, 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 Petite Fadette, now charged with the electric passion
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 manuscripts, 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 'passed,' 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.
[Illustration: 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 Père
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 Étude 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 entitled _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 fühlt 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.
[40] Liszt declares that the rupture took place at Nohant. If so, this
alternative is settled.
[41] See Professor Niecks' _Chopin_, Vol. ii. p. 318.
III
A LYRIC POET
It is intelligible that any attempt to explain the charm of Chopin's
music should provoke some attitude of impatience and revolt. His spirit,
we may be told, is too volatile for our clumsy alembics, too intangible
for our concrete methods of investigation; it eludes our glance, it
vanishes at our touch, it mocks with a foregone failure all our efforts
at description or analysis. The lyric gift, indeed, has always been
allowed a special immunity from criticism. In the larger fields of epic
and drama, the poet turns more directly to ourselves: he bids us
approach, he confers with us, he interprets for our hearing some great
truth of humanity, or some wise and searching judgment of life. But the
lyric poet stands apart, careless of our presence, oblivious of our
attention, pouring out his heart in a transport of purely personal joy
or sorrow, singing because he must, and not because there are any to
listen. Of his voice we may say, in the truest sense of the phrase, that
it is 'not heard but overheard.' Of his thought we may say, with most
justification, that it is self-centred, individual, characteristic. And
hence, in estimating him, it would seem that we are confronted by a
natural dilemma. Either we sympathise with his mood, and therefore
approve, or we fail to sympathise, and therefore stand outside the
limits of fair judgment.
Upon this conclusion there are two words of comment to offer. In the
first place, the distinction itself is of far less importance in music
than in poetry; for music, as such, has no truth of life or nature to
interpret. When we speak of a symphony as epic, we are merely using a
convenient formula by which we may call attention to its breadth and
scale; we do not imply that it has any story to tell, or any record of
events to communicate. When we call an overture 'Tragic,' we mean that
it can evoke certain undefined impressions of gloom and grandeur; we do
not imply that it contains any outline of a plot or any suggestion of
_dramatis personæ_. No doubt there are in music differences of style,
consequent upon differences of dimension, just as in painting the manner
of a fresco will differ from that of a miniature. But in spirit the
whole art of music is equally subjective: equally intent on expressing,
through a medium of beautiful sound, the psychological conditions of the
composer. It stands in no direct relation to the external world; it
neither observes, nor depicts, nor criticises; its entire function is
the embodiment, so far as embodiment is possible, of an abstract idea.
If, therefore, when we apply the name 'lyric' to a musician, we mean to
lay stress on a certain quality of style, then we are using a term which
does not preclude, but invite, the application of the critical faculty.
If we mean by it a certain temper of mind, then the term ceases to be
distinctive as among musicians, for it belongs to all alike.
In the second place, it is obvious that musical criticism must attach
itself primarily to questions of form. Grant that the art has room for
certain spiritual distinctions, which bear some remote and shadowy
resemblance to those of the great poets or of the great painters;
grant that we can describe Schumann's prevailing tone as manly, or
Mendelssohn's as tender; that we can notice a want of sternness in
Spohr, and a want of reticence in Berlioz; yet such judgments as these
are always liable to misuse, and, at best, are speedily exhausted. We
cannot imagine ourselves asking of the musicians, as Matthew Arnold asks
of the poets, whether their art contains an adequate criticism of life,
whether it is marked by insight and benignity. We feel at once that such
phrases are inapplicable to music, that they make it too articulate, too
definite, too precise. Again, when we read such a line as--
In la sua voluntade è nostra pace,