Chopin: The Man and His Music, James Huneker [free e books to read online txt] 📗

The break had to come. It was the inevitable end of such a friendship. The dynamics of free-love have yet to be formulated. This much we know: two such natures could never entirely cohere. When the novelty wore off the stronger of the two—the one least in love—took the initial step. It was George Sand who took it with Chopin. He would never have had the courage nor the will.

 

The final causes are not very interesting. Niecks has sifted all the evidence before the court and jury of scandal-mongers. The main quarrel was about the marriage of Solange Sand with Clesinger the sculptor. Her mother did not oppose the match, but later she resented Clesinger’s actions. He was coarse and violent, she said, with the true mother-in-law spirit—and when Chopin received the young woman and her husband after a terrible scene at Nohant, she broke with him. It was a good excuse. He had ennuied her for several years, and as he had completed his artistic work on this planet and there was nothing more to be studied,—the psychological portrait was supposedly painted—Madame George got rid of him. The dark stories of maternal jealousy, of Chopin’s preference for Solange, the visit to Chopin of the concierge’s wife to complain of her mistress’ behavior with her husband, all these rakings I leave to others. It was a triste affair and I do not doubt in the least that it undermined Chopin’s feeble health. Why not! Animals die of broken hearts, and this emotional product of Poland, deprived of affection, home and careful attention, may well, as De Lenz swears, have died of heart-break. Recent gossip declares that Sand was jealous of Chopin’s friendships—this is silly.

 

Mr. A. B. Walkley, the English dramatic critic, after declaring that he would rather have lived during the Balzac epoch in Paris, continues in this entertaining vein:

 

And then one might have had a chance of seeing George Sand in the thick of her amorisms. For my part I would certainly rather have met her than Pontius Pilate. The people who saw her in her old age—Flaubert, Gautier, the Goncourts—have left us copious records of her odd appearance, her perpetual cigarette smoking, and her whimsical life at Nohant. But then she was only an “extinct volcano;” she must have been much more interesting in full eruption. Of her earlier career—the period of Musset and Pagello—she herself told us something in “Elle et Lui,” and correspondence published a year or so ago in the “Revue de Paris” told us more. But, to my mind, the most fascinating chapter in this part of her history is the Chopin chapter, covering the next decade, or, roughly speaking, the ‘forties. She has revealed something of this time—naturally from her own point of view—in “Lucrezia Floriana” (1847). For it is, of course, one of the most notorious characteristics of George Sand that she invariably turned her loves into “copy.” The mixture of passion and printer’s ink in this lady’s composition is surely one of the most curious blends ever offered to the palate of the epicure.

 

But it was a blend which gave the lady an unfair advantage for posterity. We hear too much of her side of the matter. This one feels especially as regards her affair with Chopin. With Musset she had to reckon a writer like herself; and against her “Elle et Lui” we can set his “Confession d’un enfant du siecle.” But poor Chopin, being a musician, was not good at “copy.” The emotions she gave him he had to pour out in music, which, delightful as sound, is unfortunately vague as a literary “document.” How one longs to have his full, true, and particular account of the six months he spent with George Sand in Majorca! M. Pierre Mille, who has just published in the “Revue Bleue” some letters of Chopin (first printed, it seems, in a Warsaw newspaper), would have us believe that the lady was really the masculine partner. We are to understand that it was Chopin who did the weeping, and pouting, and “scene”-making while George Sand did the consoling, the pooh-poohing, and the protecting. Liszt had already given us a characteristic anecdote of this Majorca period. We see George Sand, in sheer exuberance of health and animal spirits, wandering out into the storm, while Chopin stays at home, to have an attack of “nerves,” to give vent to his anxiety (oh, “artistic temperament”!) by composing a prelude, and to fall fainting at the lady’s feet when she returns safe and sound.

There is no doubt that the lady had enough of the masculine temper in her to be the first to get tired. And as poor Chopin was coughing and swooning most of the time, this is scarcely surprising. But she did not leave him forthwith. She kept up the pretence of loving him, in a maternal, protecting sort of way, out of pity, as it were, for a sick child.

 

So much the published letters clearly show. Many of them are dated from Nohant. But in themselves the letters are dull enough. Chopin composed with the keyboard of a piano; with ink and paper he could do little. Probably his love letters were wooden productions, and George Sand, we know, was a fastidious critic in that matter. She had received and written so many!

But any rate, Chopin did not write whining recriminations like Mussel. His real view of her we shall never know—and, if you like, you may say it is no business of ours. She once uttered a truth about that (though not apropos of Chopin), “There are so many things between two lovers of which they alone can be the judges.”

 

Chopin gave his last concert in Paris, February 16, 1848, at Pleyel’s.

He was ill but played beautifully. Oscar Commettant said he fainted in the artist’s room. Sand and Chopin met but once again. She took his hand, which was “trembling and cold,” but he escaped without saying a word. He permitted himself in a letter to Grzymala from London dated November 17-18, 1848, to speak of Sand. “I have never cursed any one, but now I am so weary of life that I am near cursing Lucrezia. But she suffers too, and suffers more because she grows older in wickedness.

What a pity about Soli! Alas! everything goes wrong with the world!” I wonder what Mr. Hadow thinks of this reference to Sand!

 

“Soli” is Solange Sand, who was forced to leave her husband because of ill-treatment. As her mother once boxed Clesinger’s ears at Nohant, she followed the example. In trying to settle the affair Sand quarrelled hopelessly with her daughter. That energetic descendant of “emancipated woman” formed a partnership, literary of course, with the Marquis Alfieri, the nephew of the Italian poet. Her salon was as much in vogue as her mother’s, but her tastes were inclined to politics, revolutionary politics preferred. She had for associates Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet, Taine, Herve, Weiss, the critic of the “Debats,”

Henri Fouquier and many others. She had the “curved Hebraic nose of her mother and hair coal-black.” She died in her chateau at Montgivray and was buried March 20, 1899, at Nohant where, as my informant says, “her mother died of over-much cigarette smoking.” She was a clever woman and wrote a book “Masks and Buffoons.” Maurice Sand died in 1883. He was the son of his mother, who was gathered to her heterogeneous ancestors June 8, 1876.

 

In literature George Sand is a feminine pendant to Jean Jacques Rousseau, full of ill-digested, troubled, fermenting, social, political, philosophical and religious speculations and theories. She wrote picturesque French, smooth, flowing and full of color. The sketches of nature, of country life, have positive value, but where has vanished her gallery of Byronic passion-pursued women? Where are the Lelias, the Indianas, the Rudolstadts? She had not, as Mr. Henry James points out, a faculty for characterization. As Flaubert wrote her: “In spite of your great Sphinx eyes you have always seen the world as through a golden mist.” She dealt in vague, vast figures, and so her Prince Karol in “Lucrezia Floriana,” unquestionably intended for Chopin, is a burlesque—little wonder he was angered when the precious children asked him “Cher M. Chopin, have you read ‘Lucrezia’? Mamma has put you in it.” Of all persons Sand was pre-elected to give to the world a true, a sympathetic picture of her friend. She understood him, but she had not the power of putting him between the coversof a book.

If Flaubert, or better still, Pierre Loti, could have known Chopin so intimately we should possess a memoir in which every vibration of emotion would be recorded, every shade noted, and all pinned with the precise adjective, the phrase exquisite.

 

III. ENGLAND, SCOTLAND AND PERE LA CHAISE.

 

The remaining years of Chopin’s life were lonely. His father died in 1844 of chest and heart complaint, his sister Emilia died of consumption—ill-omens these!—and shortly after, John Matuszynski died. Titus Woyciechowski was in far-off Poland on his estates and Chopin had but Grzymala and Fontana to confide in; they being Polish he preferred them, although he was diplomatic enough not to let others see this. Both Franchomme and Gutmann whispered to Niecks at different times that each was the particular soul, the alter ego, of Chopin. He appeared to give himself to his friends but it was usually surface affection. He had coaxing, coquettish ways, playful ways that cost him nothing when in good spirits. So he was “more loved than loving.” This is another trait of the man, which, allied with his fastidiousness and spiritual brusquerie, made him difficult to decipher. The loss of Sand completed his misery and we find him in poor health when he arrived in London, for the second and last time, April 21, 1848.

 

Mr. A. J. Hipkins is the chief authority on the details of Chopin’s visit to England. To this amiable gentleman and learned writer on pianos, Franz Hueffer, Joseph Bennett and Niecks are indebted for the most of their facts. From them the curious may learn all there is to learn. The story is not especially noteworthy, being in the main a record of ill-health, complainings, lamentations and not one signal artistic success.

 

War was declared upon Chopin by a part of the musical world. The criticism was compounded of pure malice and stupidity. Chopin was angered but little for he was too sick to care now. He went to an evening party but missed the Macready dinner where he was to have met Thackeray, Berlioz, Mrs. Procter and Sir Julius Benedict. With Benedict he played a Mozart duet at the Duchess of Sutherland’s. Whether he played at court the Queen can tell; Niecks cannot. He met Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt and liked her exceedingly—as did all who had the honor of knowing her. She sided with him, woman-like, in the Sand affair—echoes of which had floated across the channel—and visited him in Paris in 1849. Chopin gave two matinees at the houses of Adelaide Kemble and Lord Falmouth—June 23 and July 7. They were very recherche, so it appears. Viardot-Garcia sang. The composer’s face and frame were wasted by illness and Mr. Solomon spoke of his “long attenuated fingers.” He made money and that was useful to him, for doctors’ bills and living had taken up his savings. There was talk of his settling in London, but the climate, not to speak of the unmusical atmosphere, would have been fatal to him. Wagner succumbed to both, sturdy fighter that he was.

 

Chopin left for Scotland in August and stopped at the house of his pupil, Miss Stirling. Her name is familiar to Chopin students, for the two nocturnes, opus 55, are dedicated to her. He was nearly killed with kindness but continually bemoaned his existence. At the house of Dr.