Chopin : the Man and His Music. James Huneker

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.