Frederick Chopin, as a Man and Musician Part 23

As regards these etudes, I have the advantage of having heard most of them played by Chopin himself, and, as Florestan whispered in my ear at the time, "He plays them very much a la Chopin." Imagine an AEolian harp that had all the scales, and that these were jumbled together by the hand of an artist into all sorts of fantastic ornaments, but in such a manner that a deeper fundamental tone and a softly-singing higher part were always audible, and you have an approximate idea of his playing. No wonder that we have become fondest of those pieces which we heard him play himself, and therefore we shall mention first of all the first one in A flat, which is rather a poem than an etude. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that he brought out every one of the little notes with distinctness; it was more like a billowing of the A flat major chord, swelled anew here and there by means of the pedal; but through the harmonies were heard the sustained tones of a wondrous melody, and only in the middle of it did a tenor part once come into greater prominence amid the chords along with that princ.i.p.al cantilena. After listening to the study one feels as one does after a blissful vision, seen in a dream, which, already half awake, one would fain bring back. He soon came to the one in F minor, the second in the book, likewise one which impresses one indelibly with his originality; it is so charming, dreamy, and soft, somewhat like the singing of a child in its sleep. Beautiful also, although less new in character than in the figure, was the following one in F major; here the object was more to exhibit bravura, the most charming bravura, and we could not but praise the master highly for it....But of what use are descriptive words?

This time we cannot cite a letter of Mendelssohn's; he was elsewhere similarly occupied as Chopin in Marienbad. After falling in love with a Frankfort lady, Miss Jeanrenaud, he had gone to Scheweningen to see whether his love would stand the test of absence from the beloved object. It stood the test admirably, and on September 9, a few days before Chopin's arrival in Leipzig, Mendelssohn's engagement to the lady who became his wife on March 28, 1837, took place.

But another person who has been mentioned in connection with Chopin's first visit to Leipzig, Henrietta Voigt, [FOOTNOTE: The editor of "Acht Briefe und ein Facsimile van Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy" speaks of her as "the artistic wife of a Leipzig merchant, whose house stood open to musicians living in and pa.s.sing through Leipzig."] has left us an account of the impression made upon her. An entry in her diary on September 13, 1836, runs thus:--

Yesterday Chopin was here and played an hour on my piano--a fantasia and new etude of his--interesting man and still more interesting playing; he moved me strangely. The over- excitement of his fantastic manner is imparted to the keen- eared; it made me hold my breath. Wonderful is the ease with which his velvet fingers glide, I might almost say fly, over the keys. He has enraptured me--I cannot deny it--in a way which hitherto had been unknown to me. What delighted me was the childlike, natural manner which he showed in his demeanour and in his playing.

After this short break of his journey at Leipzig, which he did not leave without placing a wreath of flowers on the monument of Prince Joseph Poniatowski, who in 1812 met here with an early death, being drowned in the river Elster, Chopin proceeded on his homeward journey, that is toward Paris, probably tarrying again for a day or two at Heidelberg.

The non-artistic events of this period are of a more stirring nature than the artistic ones. First in time and importance comes Chopin's meeting with George Sand, which more than any other event marks an epoch in the composer's life. But as this subject has to be discussed fully and at some length we shall leave it for another chapter, and conclude this with an account of some other matters.

Mendelssohn, who arrived in London on August 24, 1837, wrote on September 1 to Hiller:--

Chopin is said to have suddenly turned up here a fortnight ago; but he visited n.o.body and made no acquaintances. He played one evening most beautifully at Broadwood's, and then hurried away again. I hear he is still suffering very much.

Chopin accompanied by Camille Pleyel and Stanislas Kozmian, the elder, came to London on the 11th of July and stayed till the 22nd. Pleyel introduced him under the name of M. Fritz to his friend James Broadwood, who invited them to dine with him at his house in Bryanston Square. The incognito, however, could only be preserved as long as Chopin kept his hands off the piano. When after dinner he sat down to play, the ladies of the family suspected, and, suspicion being aroused, soon extracted a confession of the truth.

Moscheles in alluding in his diary to this visit to London adds an item or two to its history:--

Chopin, who pa.s.sed a few days in London, was the only one of the foreign artists who visited n.o.body and also did not wish to be visited, as every conversation aggravates his chest- complaint. He went to some concerts and disappeared.

Particularly interesting are the reminiscences of the writer of an enthusiastic review [Footnote: Probably J. W. Davison.]of some of Chopin's nocturnes and a scherzo in the "Musical World" of February 23, 1838:--

Were he [Chopin] not the most retiring and unambitious of all living musicians, he would before this time have been celebrated as the inventor of a new style, or school, of pianoforte composition. During his short visit to the metropolis last season, but few had the high gratification of hearing his extemporaneous performance. Those who experienced this will not readily lose its remembrance. He is, perhaps, par eminence, the most delightful of pianists in the drawing- room. The animation of his style is so subdued, its tenderness so refined, its melancholy so gentle, its niceties so studied and systematic, the tout-ensemble so perfect, and evidently the result of an accurate judgment and most finished taste, that when exhibited in the large concert- room, or the thronged saloon, it fails to impress itself on the ma.s.s. The "Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik" of September 8, 1837, brought the piece of news that Chopin was then at a Bohemian watering-place. I doubt the correctness of this statement; at any rate, no other information to that effect has come to my knowledge, and the ascertained facts do not favour the a.s.sumption of its truth.

Never robust, Chopin had yet hitherto been free from any serious illness. Now, however, the time of his troubles begins. In a letter, undated, but very probably written in the summer of 1837, which he addressed to Anthony Wodzinski, who had been wounded in Spain, where civil war was then raging, occur remarks confirmatory of Mendelssohn's and Moscheles' statements:--

My dearest life! Wounded! Far from us--and I can send you nothing....Your friends are thinking only of you. For mercy's sake recover as soon as possible and return. The newspaper accounts say that your legion is completely annihilated.

Don't enter the Spanish army....Remember that your blood may serve a better purpose....t.i.tus [Woyciechowski] wrote to ask me if I could not meet him somewhere in Germany. During the winter I was again ill with influenza. They wanted to send me to Ems. Up to the present, however, I have no thought of going, as I am unable to move. I write and prepare ma.n.u.script. I think far more of you than you imagine, and love you as much as ever.

F. C.

Believe me, you and t.i.tus are enshrined in my memory.

On the margin, Chopin writes--

I may perhaps go for a few days to George Sand's, but keep your mind easy, this will not interfere with the forwarding of your money, for I shall leave instructions with Johnnie [Matuszynski].

With regard to this and to the two preceding letters to members of the Wodzinski family, I have yet to state that I found them in M. A. Szulc's "Fryderyk Chopin."

CHAPTER XIX.

GEORGE SAND: HER EARLY LIFE (1804--1836); AND HER CHARACTER AS A WOMAN, THINKER, AND LITERARY ARTIST.

It is now necessary that the reader should be made acquainted with Madame Dudevant, better known by her literary name, George Sand, whose coming on the scene has already been announced in the preceding chapter.

The character of this lady is so much a matter of controversy, and a correct estimate of it so essential for the right understanding of the important part she plays in the remaining portion of Chopin's life, that this long chapter--an intermezzo, a biography in a biography--will not be regarded as out of place or too lengthy. If I begin far off, as it were before the beginning, I do so because the pedigree has in this case a peculiar significance.

The mother of George Sand's father was the daughter of the Marschal de Saxe (Count Maurice of Saxony, natural son of August the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, and the Countess Maria Aurora von Konigsmark) and the dame de l'opera, Mdlle. de Verrieres, whose real name was Madame de la Riviere, nee Marie Rinteau. This daughter, Marie Aurore, married at the age of fifteen Comte de Home, a natural son of Louis XV., who died soon after; and fifteen years later she condescended to accept the hand of M. Dupin de Francueil, receveur general, who, although of an old and well-connected family, did not belong to the high n.o.bility. The curious may read about Mdlle. de Verrieres in the "Memoires" of Marmontel, who was one of her many lovers, and about M. Dupin, his father, mother-in-law, first wife &c., in Rousseau's "Confessions," where, however, he is always called De Francueil.

Notwithstanding the disparity of age, the husband being twice as old as his wife, the marriage of M. Dupin and the Comtesse de Home proved to be a very happy one. They had one child, a son, Maurice Francois Elisabeth Dupin. He entered the army in 1798, and two years later, in the course of the Italian campaign, became first lieutenant and then aide-de-camp to General Dupont.

In Italy and about the same time Maurice Dupin saw and fell in love with Sophie Victoire Antoinette Delaborde, the daughter of a Paris bird-seller, who had been a supernumerary at some small theatre, and whose youth, as George Sand delicately expresses it, "had by the force of circ.u.mstances been exposed to the most frightful hazards."

Sacrificing all the advantages she was then enjoying, she followed Maurice Dupin to France. From this liaison sprang several children, all of whom, however, except one, died very young. A month before the birth of her in whom our interest centres, Maurice Dupin married Sophie Delaborde. The marriage was a civil one and contracted without the knowledge of his mother, who was opposed to this union less on account of Sophie's plebeian origin than of her doubtful antecedents.

It was on July 5, 1804, that Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, who under the name of George Sand became famous all the world over, saw for the first time the light of day. The baby, which by a stratagem was placed in the arms of her grandmother, mollified the feelings of the old lady, whom the clandestine marriage had put in a great rage, so effectually that she forgave her son, received his wife, and tried to accommodate herself to the irremediable. After the Spanish campaign, during which he acted as aide-de-camp to Murat, Maurice Dupin and his family came to Nohant, his mother's chateau in Berry. There little Aurora lost her father when she was only four years old. Returning home one evening from La Chatre, a neighbouring town, he was thrown off his horse, and died almost instantly.

This was an event that seriously affected the future of the child, for only the deceased could keep in check the antagonism of two such dissimilar characters as those of Aurora's mother and grandmother.

The mother was "dark-complexioned, pale, ardent, awkward and timid in fas.h.i.+onable society, but always ready to explode when the storm was growling too strongly within"; her temperament was that "of a Spaniard--jealous, pa.s.sionate, choleric, and weak, perverse and kindly at the same time." Abbe Beaumont (a natural son of Mdlle. de Verrieres and the Prince de Turenne, Duke de Bouillon, and consequently grand-uncle of Aurora) said of her that she had a bad head but a good heart. She was quite uneducated, but had good natural parts, sang charmingly, and was clever with her hands. The grandmother, on the other hand, was "light-complexioned, blonde, grave, calm, and dignified in her manners, a veritable Saxon of n.o.ble race, with an imposing demeanour full of ease and patronising goodness." She had been an a.s.siduous student of the eighteenth century philosophers, and on the whole was a lady of considerable culture. For about two years these two women managed to live together, not, however, without a feeling of discord which was not always successfully suppressed, and sometimes broke out into open dissension. At last they came to an arrangement according to which the child was to be left in the keeping of the grandmother, who promised her daughter-in-law a yearly allowance which would enable her to take up her abode in Paris. This arrangement had the advantage for the younger Madame Dupin that she could henceforth devote herself to the bringing-up of another daughter, born before her acquaintance with Aurora's father.

From her mother Aurora received her first instruction in reading and writing. The taste for literary composition seems to have been innate in her, for already at the age of five she wrote letters to her grandmother and half-brother (a natural son of her father's). When she was seven, Deschartres, her grandmother's steward, who had been Maurice Dupin's tutor, began to teach her French grammar and versification, Latin, arithmetic, botany, and a little Greek. But she had no liking for any of these studies. The dry cla.s.sifications of plants and words were distasteful to her; arithmetic she could not get into her head; and poetry was not her language. History, on the other hand, was a source of great enjoyment to her; but she read it like a romance, and did not trouble herself about dates and other unpleasant details. She was also fond of music; at least she was so as long as her grandmother taught her, for the mechanical drilling she got from the organist of La Chatre turned her fondness into indifference. That subject of education, however, which is generally regarded as the foundation of all education--I mean religion--was never even mentioned to her. The Holy Scriptures were, indeed, given into the child's hands, but she was left to believe or reject whatever she liked. Her grandmother, who was a deist, hated not only the pious, but piety itself, and, above all, Roman Catholicism. Christ was in her opinion an estimable man, the gospel an excellent philosophy, but she regretted that truth was enveloped in ridiculous fables. The little of religion which the girl imbibed she owed to her mother, by whose side she was made to kneel and say her prayers. "My mother," writes George Sand in her "Histoire de ma Vie,"

from which these details are taken, "carried poetry into her religious feeling, and I stood in need of poetry." Aurora's craving for religion and poetry was not to remain unallayed. One night there appeared to her in a dream a phantom, Corambe by name. The dream-created being took hold of her waking imagination, and became the divinity of her religion and the t.i.tle and central figure of her childish, unwritten romance.

Corambe, who was of no s.e.x, or rather of either s.e.x just as occasion might require--for it underwent numberless metamorphoses--had "all the attributes of physical and moral beauty, the gift of eloquence, and the all-powerful charm of the arts, especially the magic of musical improvisation," being in fact an abstract of all the sacred and secular histories with which she had got acquainted.

The jarrings between her mother and grandmother continued; for of course their intercourse did not entirely cease. The former visited her relations at Nohant, and the latter and her grandchildren occasionally pa.s.sed some weeks in Paris. Aurora, who loved both, her mother even pa.s.sionately, was much hara.s.sed by their jealousy, which vented itself in complaints, taunts, and reproaches. Once she determined to go to Paris and live with her mother, and was only deterred from doing so by the most cruel means imaginable--namely, by her grandmother telling her of the dissolute life which her mother had led before marrying her father.

I owe my first socialistic and democratic instincts to the singularity of my position, to my birth a cheval so to speak on two cla.s.ses--to my love for my mother thwarted and broken by prejudices which made me suffer before I could comprehend them. I owe them also to my education, which was by turns philosophical and religious, and to all the contrasts which my own life has presented to me from my earliest years.

At the age of thirteen Aurora was sent to the convent of English Augustines in Paris, the only surviving one of the three or four inst.i.tutions of the kind that were founded during the time of Cromwell.

There she remained for the next three years. Her knowledge when she entered this educational as well as religious establishment was not of the sort that enables its possessor to pa.s.s examinations; consequently she was placed in the lowest cla.s.s, although in discussion she could have held her own even against her teachers. Much learning could not be acquired in the convent, but the intercourse with other children, many of them belonging, like the nuns, to English-speaking nations, was not without effect on the development of her character. There were three cla.s.ses of pupils, the diables, betes, and devotes (the devils, blockheads, and devout). Aurora soon joined the first, and became one of their ringleaders. But all of a sudden a change came over her. From one extreme she fell into the other. From being the wildest of the wild she became the most devout of the devout: "There was nothing strong in me but pa.s.sion, and when that of religion began to break out, it devoured everything in my heart; and nothing in my brain opposed it." The acuteness of this attack of religious mania gradually diminished; still she harboured for some time the project of taking the veil, and perhaps would have done so if she had been left to herself.

After her return-to Nohant her half-brother Hippolyte, who had recently entered the army, gave her riding lessons, and already at the end of a week she and her mare Colette might be seen leaping ditches and hedges, crossing deep waters, and climbing steep inclines. "And I, the eau dormante of the convent, had become rather more daring than a hussar and more robust than a peasant." The languor which had weighed upon her so long had all of once given way to boisterous activity. When she was seventeen she also began seriously to think of self-improvement; and as her grandmother was now paralytic and mentally much weakened, Aurora had almost no other guidance than that of chance and her own instinct.

Thomas a Kempis' "Imitation of Christ," which had been her guide since her religious awakening, was now superseded, not, however, without some struggles, by Chateaubriand's "Le Genie du Christianisme." The book was lent her by her confessor with a view to the strengthening of her faith, but it produced quite the reverse effect, detaching her from it for ever. After reading and enjoying Chateaubriand's book she set to work on the philosophers and essayists Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, &c. But she was not a metaphysician; the tendencies of her mind did not impel her to seek for scientific solutions of the great mysteries. "J'etais," she says, "un etre de sentiment, et le sentiment seul tranchait pour moi les questions a man usage, qui toute experience faite, devinrent bientot les seules questions a ma, portee." This "le sentiment seul tranchait pour moi les questions" is another self-revelation, or instance of self-knowledge, which it will be useful to remember. What more natural than that this "being of sentiment"

should prefer the poets to the philosophers, and be attracted, not by the cold reasoners, but by Rousseau, "the man of pa.s.sion and sentiment."

It is impossible to describe here the various experiences and doings of Aurora. Without enlarging on the effects produced upon her by Byron's poetry, Shakespeare's "Hamlet," and Chateaubriand's "Rene"; on her suicidal mania; on the long rides which, clad in male attire, she took with Deschartres; on the death of her grandmother, whose fortune she inherited; on her life in Paris with her extravagantly-capricious mother; on her rupture with her father's family, her aristocratic relations, because she would not give up her mother--I say, without enlarging on all this we will at once pa.s.s on to her marriage, about which there has been so much fabling.

Aurore Dupin married Casimir Dudevant in September, 1822, and did so of her own free will. Nor was her husband, as the story went, a bald-headed, grey-moustached old colonel, with a look that made all his dependents quake. On the contrary, Casimir Dudevant, a natural son of Colonel Dudevant (an officer of the legion of honour and a baron of the Empire), was, according to George Sand's own description, "a slender, and rather elegant young man, with a gay countenance and a military manner." Besides good looks and youth--he was twenty-seven--he must also have possessed some education, for, although he did not follow any profession, he had been at a military school, served in the army as sub-lieutenant, and on leaving the army had read for the bar and been admitted a barrister. There was nothing romantic in the courts.h.i.+p, but at the same time it was far from commonplace.

He did not speak to me of love [writes George Sand], and owned that he was little inclined to sudden pa.s.sion, to enthusiasm, and in any case no adept in expressing it in an attractive manner. He spoke of a friends.h.i.+p that would stand any test, and compared the tranquil happiness of our hosts [she was then staying with some friends] to that which he believed he could swear to procure me.

She found sincerity not only in his words, but also in his whole conduct; indeed, what lady could question a suitor's sincerity after hearing him say that he had been struck at first sight by her good-natured and sensible look, but that he had not thought her either beautiful or pretty?

Shortly after their marriage the young couple proceeded to Nohant, where they spent the winter. In June, 1823, they went to Paris, and there their son Maurice was born. Their only other offspring, the daughter Solange, did not come into the world till fiveyears later. The discrepancies of the husband and wife's character, which became soon apparent, made themselves gradually more and more felt. His was a practical, hers a poetic nature. Under his management Nohant a.s.sumed an altogether different aspect--there was now order, neatness, and economy, where there was previously confusion, untidiness, and waste. She admitted that the change was for the better, but could not help regretting the state of matters that had been--the old dog Phanor taking possession of the fire-place and putting his muddy paws upon the carpet; the old peac.o.c.k eating the strawberries in the garden; and the wild neglected nooks, where as a child she had so often played and dreamed.

Both loved the country, but they loved it for different reasons. He was especially fond of hunting, a consequence of which was that he left his wife much alone. And when he was at home his society may not always have been very entertaining, for what liveliness he had seems to have been rather in his legs than in his brain. Writing to her mother on April i, 1828, Madame Dudevant says: "Vous savez comme il est paresseux de l'esprit et enrage des jambes." On the other hand, her temper, which was anything but uniformly serene, must have been trying to her husband.

Occasionally she had fits of weeping without any immediate cause, and one day at luncheon she surprised her husband by a sudden burst of tears which she was unable to account for. As M. Dudevant attributed his wife's condition to the dulness of Nohant, the recent death of her grandmother, and the air of the country, he proposed a change of scene, which he did the more readily as he himself did not in the least like Berry. The pleasant and numerous company they found in the house of the friends with whom they went to stay at once revived her spirits, and she became us frolicsome as she had before been melancholy. George Sand describes her character as continually alternating between "contemplative solitude and complete giddiness in conditions of primitive innocence." It is hardly to be wondered at that one who exhibited such glaring and unaccountable contrasts of character was considered by some people whimsical (bizarre) and by her husband an idiot. She herself admits the possibility that he may not have been wrong. At any rate, little by little he succeeded in making her feel the superiority of reason and intelligence so thoroughly that for a long time she was quite crushed and stupefied in company. Afraid of finding themselves alone at Nohant, the ill-matched pair continued their migration on leaving their friends. Madame Dudevant made great efforts to see through her husband's eyes and to think and act as he wished, but no sooner did she accord with him than she ceased to accord with her own instincts. Whatever they undertook, wherever they went, that sadness "without aim and name" would from time to time come over her. Thinking that the decline of her religiousness was the cause of her lowness of spirits, she took counsel with her old confessor, the Jesuit Abbe de Premord, and even pa.s.sed, with her husband's consent, some days in the retirement of the English convent. After staying during the spring of 1825 at Nohant, M. and Madame Dudevant set out for the south of France on July 5, the twenty-first anniversary of the latter's birthday. In what George Sand calls the "History of my Life," she inserted some excerpts from a diary kept by her at this time, which throw much light on the relation that existed between wife and husband. If only we could be sure that it is not like so much in the book the outcome of her powerful imagination! Besides repeated complaints about her husband's ill-humour and frequent absences, we meet with the following ominous reflections on marriage:--

Marriage is beautiful for lovers and useful for saints.

Besides saints and lovers there are a great many ordinary minds and placid hearts that do not know love and cannot attain to sanct.i.ty.

Marriage is the supreme aim of love. When love has left it, or never entered it, sacrifice remains. This is very well for those who understand sacrifice. The latter presupposes a measure of heart and a degree of intelligence which are not frequently to be met with.

For sacrifice there are compensations which the vulgar mind can appreciate. The approbation of the world, the routine sweetness of custom, a feeble, tranquil, and sensible devotion that is not bent on rapturous exaltation, or money, that is to say baubles, dress, luxury--in short, a thousand little things which make one forget that one is deprived of happiness.