Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians — Frederic Chopin, Part 2

* * * * * A woman who beholds her thirtieth birthday in sight, and girlhood gone, is approaching a climacteric in her career.

Flaubert has named twenty-nine as the eventful year in the life of woman, and thirty-three for men.

Every normal woman craves love and tenderness--these are her God-given right.

If they have not come to her by the time the bloom is fading from her cheeks, there is danger of her reaching out and clutching for them.

The strongest instinct in young girls is self-protection--they fight on the defensive.

But at thirty, women have been known to grow a trifle anxious, just as did the Sabine women who dispatched a messenger to the Romans asking this question, "How soon does the program begin?"

And thus are conditions reversed, for it is the youth of twenty or so who seeks conquest with fiery soul.

Alexander was only nineteen when he sighed for more worlds to conquer.

He didn't have to wait long before he found that this one had conquered him.

Youth considers itself immortal, and its powers without limit, but as a man approaches thirty he grows economical of his resources and parsimonious of his emotions.

Men of thirty, or so, are apt to be coy.

And so one might say that it is around thirty that for the first time the man and the woman meet on an equality, without sham, shame or pretense.

Before that time the average woman abounds in affectation and untruth; the man is absurdly aggressive and full of foolish flattery.

As to the question, "Should women propose?"

the answer is, "Yes, certainly, and they do when they are twenty-nine."

Aurora Dudevant saw her thirtieth birthday looming on the horizon of her life.

Nine years before she had been married to an ex-army-officer, who dyed his whiskers purple.

Aurora had been a dutiful wife, intent for the first few years on filling her husband's heart and home with joy.

She had failed in this, and the proof of failure lay in that he much preferred his dogs, guns and horses to her society.

For days he would absent himself on his hunting excursions, and at home he did not have the tact to hide the fact that he was awfully bored.

Thackeray, once for all, has given us a picture of the heavy dragoon with a soul for dogs--one to whom all music, save the bay of a fox-hound, makes its appeal in vain.

Aurore detested dogs for dogs' sake, yet she rode horses astride with a daring that made her husband's bloodshot eyes bulge in alarm.

He didn't much care how fast and hard she rode at the fences and over the ditches, but he was supposed to follow her, and this he did not care to do.

He had reached an age when a man is mindful of the lime in his bones, and his 'cross-country riding was mostly a matter of memory and imagination, and best done around the convivial table.

Aurore was putting him to a test, that's all.

She was proving to him that she could meet him on his own preserve, give him choice of weapons, and make him cry for mercy.

Her bent was literature, with music, science and art as side-lines.

She read Montaigne, Rochefoucald, Racine and Moliere, and a modern by the name of Alfred de Musset, and quoted her authors at inconvenient times.

She flashed quotations and epigrams upon the doughty dragoon in a way he could neither fend nor parry.

At other times she was deeply religious and tearfully penitent.

In fact, she was living on a skimped allowance of love, and had never received the attention that a good woman deserves.

Her chains were galling her.

She sighed for Paris--forty miles away--Paris and a career.

The epigrams were coming faster, shot in a sort of frenzy and fever.

And when she asked her liege for leave to go to Paris, he granted her prayer, and agreed to give her ten dollars a week allowance.

She grabbed at the offer, and he bade her Godspeed and good riddance.

So leaving her two children behind, until such a time as she could provide a home for them, with scanty luggage and light heart and purse, she started away.

Other women have gone up to Paris from country towns, too, and the chances are as one to ten thousand that the maelstrom will sweep them into hades.

But Madame Dudevant was different--in two years she had won her way to literary fame, and was commanding the jealous admiration of the best writers of Paris.

Her first work was a collaboration with Jules Sandeau in a novel.

Every woman who ever wrote well began by collaborating with a man.

Sandeau had formerly come from Nohant, and how much he had to do with Madame Dudevant's breaking loose from her homes-ties no one knows.

Anyway, the second novel was written by the Madame alone, and as a tribute to her friend the name "George Sand" was placed upon the title-page as author.

Jules Sandeau, all-'round hack-writer and critic, was greatly pleased by the compliment of having his name anglicized and printed on the title-page of "Indiana," but later he was not so proud of it.

George Sand soon proved herself to be a bigger man than Sandeau.

She was not handsome, either in face or in form.

She was inclined to be stout--was rather short--and her complexion olive.

But she lured with her eyes--great sphinx-like eyes of hazel-brown--that looked men through and through.

Liszt has told us that "she had eyes like a cow," which is not so bad as Thomas Carlyle's remark that George Eliot had a face like a horse.

George Sand was silent when other women talked, and her look told in a half-proud, half-sad way that she knew all they knew, and all she herself knew beside.

Without going into the issue as to what George Sand was not, let us frankly admit that pain, deprivation, misunderstanding and maternity had taught her many things not found in books, and that she looked at Fate out of her wide-open eyes with a gaze that did not blink.

She was wise beyond the lot of women.

I was just going to say she was a genius, but I remember the remark of the De Goncourts to the effect that, "There are no women of genius--women of genius are men."

Possibly the point could be covered by saying George Sand had a man's head and a woman's heart.

Women did not like her, yet what other woman was ever so honored by woman as was George Sand in those two matchless sonnets addressed to her by Elizabeth Barrett Browning?

The amazing energy of George Sand, her finely flowing sentences--all charged with daring satire and insight into the heart of things--made her work sought by readers and publishers.

Her pen brought her all the money she needed; and she had secured a divorce from "That Man," and now had her two children with her in Paris.

That she could do her literary work and still attend to her manifold social duties must ever mark her as a phenomenon.

She was no mere adventuress.

That she was systematic, orderly and abstemious in her habits must go without saying, otherwise her vitality would not have held out and allowed her to attend the funerals of nearly all her retainers.

In throwing overboard the Grub Street Sandeau for Franz Liszt, Madame Dudevant certainly showed discrimination; but in retaining the name of "Sand," she paid a delicate compliment to the man who first introduced her to the world of art.

Liszt was too strong a man to remain long captive--he refused to supply the doglike and abject devotion which Aurore always demanded.

Then came Michael de Bourges the learned counsel, Calmatto the mezzotinter, Delacroix the artist, De Musset the poet, and Chopin the musician.

It was in the year Eighteen Hundred Thirty-nine, that Chopin and Sand first met at a parlor musicale, where Chopin was taken by Liszt, half against his will, simply because George Sand was to be there.

Chopin did not want to meet her.

All Paris had rung with the story of how she and De Musset had gone together to Venice, and then in less than a year had quarreled and separated.

Both made good copy of the "poetic interval," as George Sand called it.

Chopin was not a stickler for conventionalities, but George Sand's history, for him, proved her to be coarse and devoid of all the finer feeling that we prize in women.

Chopin had no fear of her--not he--only he did not care to add to his circle of acquaintances one so lacking in inward grace and delicacy.

He played at the musicale--it was all very informal--and George Sand pushed her way up through the throng that stood about the piano and looked at the handsome boy as he played--she looked at him with her big, hazel, cow eyes, steadfastly, yearningly, and he glancing up, saw the eyes were filled with tears.

When the playing ceased, she still stood looking at the great musician, and then she leaned over the piano and whispered, "Your playing makes me live over again every pain that has ever wrung my heart; and every joy, too, that I have ever known is mine again."

* * * * * After their first meeting, when Chopin played at a musicale, George Sand was apt to be there too--they often came together.

She was five years older than he, and looked fifteen, for his slight figure and delicate, boyish face gave him the appearance of youth unto the very last.

In letters to Madame Mariana, George Sand often refers to Chopin as "My Little One," and when some one spoke of him as "The Chopinetto," the name seemed to stick.

That she was the man in the partnership is very evident.

He really needed some one to look after him, provide mustard-plasters and run for the camphor and hot-water bottle.

He was the one who did the weeping and pouting, and had the "nerves" and made the scenes; while she, on such occasions, would viciously roll a cigarette, swear under her breath, console and pooh-pooh.

Liszt has told us how, on one occasion, she had gone out at night for a storm-walk, and Chopin, being too ill, or disinclined to go, remained at home.

Upon her return she found him in a conniption, he having composed a prelude to ward off an attack of cold feet, and was now ready to scream through fear that something had happened to her.

As she entered the door he arose, staggered and fell before her in a fainting fit.

A whole literature has grown up around the relations of Chopin and George Sand, and the lady in the case has, herself, set forth her brief with painstaking detail in her "Histoire de Ma Vie."

With De Musset, George Sand had to reckon on dealing with a writing man, and his accounts of "The Little White Blackbird" had taught her caution.

Thereafter she abjured the litterateurs, excepting when in her old age she allowed Gustave Flaubert to come within her sacred circle--but her friendship with Flaubert was placidly platonic, as all the world knows.

And so were her relations with Chopin, provided we accept her version as gospel fact.

George Sand lacked the frankness of Rousseau; but I think we should be willing to accept the lady's statements, for she was present and really the only one in possession of the facts, excepting, of course, Chopin, and he was not a writer.

He could express himself only at the keyboard, and the piano is no graphophone, for which let us all be duly thankful.

So we are without Chopin's side of the story.

We, however, have some vigorous writing by a man by the name of Hadow.

Mr. Hadow enters the lists panoplied with facts, and declares that the friendship was strictly platonic, being on the woman's side of a purely maternal order.

Chopin was sick and friendless, and Madame Dudevant, knowing his worth to the art world, succored him--nursing him as a Sister of Charity might, sacrificing herself, and even risking her reputation in order to restore him to life and health.

And this view of the case I am quite willing to accept.

Mr. Hadow is no joker, like that man who has recently written an appreciation of Xantippe, showing that the wife of Socrates was one of the most patient women who ever lived, and only at times resorted to heroic means in order to drive her husband out into the world of thought.

She willingly sacrificed her own good name that another might have literary life.

Hadow has gotten all the facts together and then dispassionately drawn his conclusions; and these conclusions are eminently complimentary to all parties concerned.

It was only a few months after Chopin met George Sand that he was attacked with a peculiar hacking cough.

His friends were sure it was consumption, and a leading physician gave it as his opinion that if the patient spent the approaching Winter in Paris, it would be death in March.

The facts being brought to the notice of George Sand, she had but one thought--to save the life of this young man.

He was too ill to decide what was best to do, and was never able by temperament to take the initiative, anyway, so this strong and capable woman, forgetful of self and her own interests, made all the arrangements and took him to the Isle of Majorca in the Mediterranean Sea.

There she cared for him alone as she might for a babe, for six long, weary months.

They lived in the cells of an old monastery at Valdemosa, away up on the mountainside overlooking the sea.

Here where the roses bloomed the whole year through, surrounded by groves of orange-trees, shut in by vines and flowers, with no society save that of the sacristan and an aged woman servant, she nursed the death-stricken man back to life and hope.

To better encourage him she sent for and surprised him with his piano, which had to be carried up the mountain on the backs of mules.

In the quiet cloisters she cared for him with motherly tenderness, and there he learned again to awake the slumbering echoes with divine music.

Several of his best pieces were composed at Majorca during his convalescence, where the soft semi-tropical breeze laved his cheek, the birds warbled him their sweetest carols, and away down below, the sea, mother of all, sang her ceaseless lullaby.

When they returned to France the following Spring, M. Dudevant had accommodatingly vacated the family residence at Nohant in favor of his wife.

It was here she took the convalescent Chopin.

He was charmed with the rambling old house, its walled-in gardens with their arbors of clustering grapes, and the green meadows stretching down to the water's edge, where the little river ran its way to the ocean.

Back of the house was a great forest of mighty trees, beneath whose thick shade the sun's rays never entered, and a half-mile away arose the spire of the village church.

There were no neighbors, save a cheery old priest, and the simple villagers who made respectful obeisance as they passed.

Here it was that Matthew Arnold came to pay his tribute to genius, also Liszt and the fair Countess d'Agoult, Delacroix, Renan, Lamennais, Lamartine, and so many others of the great and excellent.

Chopin was enchanted with the place, and refused to go back to Paris.

Madame Dudevant insisted, and explained to him that she took him to Majorca to spend the Winter, but she had no intention or thought of caring for him longer than the few months that might be required to restore him to health.

But he cried and clung to her with such half-childish fright that she had not the heart to send him away.

The summer months passed and the leaves began to turn scarlet and gold, and he only consented to return to Paris on her agreeing to go with him.

So they returned together, and had rooms not so very far apart.

He went back sturdily to his music-teaching, with an occasional musicale, yet gave but one public concert in the space of ten years.

The exquisite quality of Chopin's playing appealed only to the sacred few, but his piano scores were slowly finding sale, through the advertisement they received by being played by Liszt, Tausig and others.

Yet the critics almost uniformly condemned his work as bizarre and erratic.

Each Summer he spent at lovely Nohant, and there found the rest and quiet which got nerves back to the norm and allowed him to go on with his work.

So passed the years away.

Of this we are very sure--no taint exists on the record of Chopin excepting possibly his relationship with George Sand.

That he endeavored to win her full heart's love, for the purpose of honorable marriage, Mr. Hadow is fully convinced.

But when his suit failed, after an eight years' courtship, and the lover was discarded, he ceased to work.

His heart was broken; he lingered on for two years, and then death claimed him at the early age of forty years.

* * * * * There is a tendency to judge a work of art by its size.

Thus the sculptor who does a "heroic figure" is the man who looms large to the average visitor at the art-gallery.

Chopin wrote no lengthy symphonies, oratorios or operas.

His music is poetry set to exquisite sounds.

Poetry is an ecstasy of the spirit, and ecstasies in their very nature are not sustained moods.

The poetic mood is transient.

A composition by Chopin is a soul-ecstasy, like unto the singing of a lark.

No other man but Chopin should have been allowed to set the songs of Shelley to music.

With such names as Shelley, Keats, Poe and Crane must Chopin's name be linked.

In Chopin's music there is much loose texture; there are wide-meshed chords, daring leaps and abrupt arpeggios.

These have often been pointed out as faults, but such harmonious discords are now properly valued, and we see that Chopin's lapses all had meaning and purpose, in that they impart a feeling--making their appeal to souls that have suffered--souls that know.

More of Chopin's music is sold in America every year than was sold altogether during the lifetime of the composer.

His name and fame grow with each year.

Everywhere--wherever a piano is played--on concert platform, in studio or private parlor, there you will find the work of Frederic Chopin.

That such a widespread distribution must have a potent and powerful effect upon the race goes without argument, although the furthest limit of that influence no man can mark.

It is registered with Infinity alone.

And thus does that modest, mild and gentle revolutionist Frederic Chopin live again in minds made better.

[Illustration: SCHUMANN] ROBERT SCHUMANN

Beneath these flowers I dream, a silent chord.

I can not wake my own strings to music; but under the hands of those who comprehend me, I become an eloquent friend.

Wanderer, ere thou goest, try me!

The more trouble thou takest with me, the more lovely will be the tones with which I shall reward thee.

--_Robert Schumann_