Part 19

The various situations determined for the more eminent of George Sand’s intimate associates would always be independently interesting, thanks to the intrinsic appeal of these characters and even without the light reflected withal on the great agent herself; which is why poor Chopin’s figuration in the events of the year 1847, as Madame Karénine so fully reconstitutes them, is all that is wanted to point their almost nightmare quality. Without something of a close view of them we fail of a grasp of our heroine’s genius—her genius for keeping her head in deep seas morally and reflectively above water, though but a glance at them must suffice us for averting this loss. The old-world quality of drama, which throughout so thickens and tones the air around her, finds remarkable expression in the whole picture of the moment. Every connection involved bristles like a conscious consequence, tells for all it is worth, as we say, and the sinister complexity of reference—for all the golden clearings-up that awaited it on the ideal plane—leaves nothing to be desired. The great and odd sign of the complications and convulsions, the alarms and excursions recorded, is that these are all the more or less direct fruits of sensibility, which had primarily been indulged in, under the doom of a preparation of them which no preparation of anything else was to emulate, with a good faith fairly touching in presence of the eventual ugliness. Madame Sand’s wonderful mother, commemorated for us in “L’Histoire de ma Vie” with the truth surely attaching in a like degree to no mother in all the literature of so-called confession, had had for cousin a “fille entretenue” who had married a mechanic. This Adèle Brault had had in the course of her adventures a daughter in whom, as an unfortunate young relative, Madame Dupin had taken an interest, introducing her to the heiress of Nohant, who viewed her with favour—she appears to have been amiable and commendable—and eventually associated her with her own children. She was thus the third member of that illegitimate progeny with which the Nohant scene was to have become familiar, George Sand’s natural brother on her father’s side and her natural sister on her mother’s representing this element from the earlier time on. The young Augustine, fugitive from a circle still less edifying, was thus made a companion of the son and the daughter of the house, and was especially held to compare with the latter to her great advantage in the matter of character, docility and temper. These young persons formed, as it were, with his more distinguished friend, the virtual family of Chopin during those years of specifically qualified domestication which affect us as only less of a mystification to taste than that phase of the unrestricted which had immediately preceded them. Hence a tangled tissue of relations within the circle that became, as it strikes us, indescribable for difficulty and “delicacy,” not to say for the perfection of their impracticability, and as to which the great point is that Madame Sand’s having taken them so robustly for granted throws upon her temperamental genius a more direct light than any other. The whole case belongs doubtless even more to the hapless history of Chopin himself than to that of his terrible friend—terrible for her power to flourish in conditions sooner or later fatal to weaker vessels; but is in addition to this one of the most striking illustrations possible of that view or theory of social life handed over to the reactions of sensibility almost alone which, while ever so little the ideal of the Anglo-Saxon world, has largely governed the manners of its sister societies. It has been our view, very emphatically, in general, that the sane and active social body—or, for that matter, the sane and active individual, addressed to the natural business of life—goes wrongly about it to _encourage_ sensibility, or to do anything on the whole but treat it as of no prime importance; the traps it may lay for us, however, being really of the fewest in a race to which the very imagination of it may be said, I think, to have been comparatively denied. The imagination of it sat irremovably, on the other hand, and as a matter of course, at the Nohant fireside; where indeed we find the play and the ravage chiefly interesting through our thus seeing the delicate Chopin, whose semi-smothered appeal remains peculiarly pathetic, all helpless and foredoomed at the centre of the whirl. Nothing again strikes us more in the connection than the familiar truth that interesting persons make everything that concerns them interesting, or seldom fail to redeem from what might in another air seem but meanness and vanity even their most compromised states and their greatest wastes of value. Every one in the particular Nohant drama here exposed loses by the exposure—so far as loss could be predicated of amounts which, in general, excepting the said sensibility, were so scant among them; every one, that is, save the ruling spirit of all, with the extraordinary mark in her of the practical defiance of waste and of her inevitable enrichment, for our measure, as by reflection from the surrounding shrinkage. One of the oddest aspects of the scene is also one of the wretchedest, but the oddity makes it interesting, by the law I just glanced at, in spite of its vulgar side. How could it not be interesting, we ask as we read, to feel that Chopin, though far from the one man, was the one gentleman of the association, the finest set of nerves and scruples, and yet to see how little that availed him, in exasperated reactions, against mistakes of perverted sympathy? It is relevant in a high degree to our view of his great protectress as reducible at her best to male terms that she herself in this very light fell short, missed the ideal safeguard which for her friend had been preinvolved—as of course may be the peril, ever, with the creature so transmuted, and as is so strikingly exemplified, in the pages before us, when Madame Karénine ingenuously gives us chapter and verse for her heroine’s so unqualified demolition of the person of Madame d’Agoult, devotee of Liszt, mother to be, by that token, of Richard Wagner’s second wife, and sometime intimate of the author of “Isidora,” in which fiction we are shown the parody perpetrated. If women rend each other on occasion with sharper talons than seem to belong on the whole to the male hand, however intendingly applied, we find ourselves reflect parenthetically that the loss of this advantage may well be a matter for them to consider when the new approximation is the issue.

The great sign of the Nohant circle on all this showing, at any rate, is the intense personalism, as we may call it, reigning there, or in other words the vivacity, the acuity and irritability of the personal relations—which flourished so largely, we at the same time feel, by reason of the general gift for expression, that gift to which we owe the general superiority of every letter, from it scarce matters whom, laid under contribution by our author. How could people not feel with acuity when they could, when they had to, write with such point and such specific intelligence?—just indeed as one asks how letters could fail to remain at such a level among them when they incessantly generated choice matter for expression. Madame Sand herself is of course on this ground easily the most admirable, as we have seen; but every one “knows how” to write, and does it well in proportion as the matter in hand most demands and most rewards proper saying. Much of all this stuff of history seems indeed to have been susceptible of any amount of force of statement; yet we note all the while how in the case of the great mistress of the pen at least some shade of intrinsic beauty attends even the presentation of quite abominable facts. We can only see it as abominable, at least, so long as we have Madame Sand’s words—which are somehow a different thing from her word—for it, that Chopin had from the first “sided” with the atrocious Solange in that play of her genius which is characterised by our chronicler as wickedness for the sake of wickedness, as art for the sake of art, without other logic or other cause. “Once married,” says Madame Karénine, “she made a double use of this wickedness. She had always hated Augustine; she wished, one doesn’t know why, to break off her marriage, and by calumnies and insinuations she succeeded. Then angry with her mother she avenged herself on her as well by further calumnies. Thereupon took place at Nohant such events that”—that in fine we stop before them with this preliminary shudder. The cross-currents of violence among them would take more keeping apart than we have time for, the more that everything comes back, for interest, to the intrinsic weight of the tone of the principal sufferer from them—as we see her, as we wouldn’t for the world not see her, in spite of the fact that Chopin was to succumb scarce more than a year later to multiplied lacerations, and that she was to override and reproduce and pre-appointedly flourish for long years after. If it is interesting, as I have pronounced it, that Chopin, again, should have consented to be of the opinion of Solange that the relations between her brother Maurice and the hapless Augustine were of the last impropriety, I fear I can account no better for this than by our sense that the more the _genius loci_ has to feed her full tone the more our faith in it, as such a fine thing in itself, is justified. Almost immediately after the precipitated marriage of the daughter of the house has taken place, the Clésinger couple, avid and insolent, of a breadth of old time impudence in fact of which our paler day has lost the pattern, are back on the mother’s hands, to the effect of a vividest picture of Maurice well-nigh in a death-grapple with his apparently quite monstrous “bounder” of a brother-in-law, a picture that further gives us Madame Sand herself smiting Clésinger in the face and receiving from him a blow in the breast, while Solange “coldly,” with an iciness indeed peculiarly her own, fans the rage and approves her husband’s assault, and while the divine composer, though for that moment much in the background, approves the wondrous approval. He still approves, to all appearance, the daughter’s interpretation of the mother’s wish to “get rid” of him as the result of an amorous design on the latter’s part in respect of a young man lately introduced to the circle as Maurice’s friend and for the intimate relation with whom it is thus desirable that the coast shall be made clear. How else than through no fewer consistencies of the unedifying on the part of these provokers of the expressional reaction should we have come by innumerable fine epistolary passages, passages constituting in themselves verily such adornments of the tale, such notes in the scale of all the damaged dignity redressed, that we should be morally the poorer without them? One of the vividest glimpses indeed is not in a letter but in a few lines from “L’Histoire de ma Vie,” the composition of which was begun toward the end of this period and while its shadow still hung about—early in life for a projected autobiography, inasmuch as the author had not then reached her forty-fifth year. Chopin at work, improvising and composing, was apt to become a prey to doubts and depressions, so that there were times when to break in upon these was to render him a service.

But it was not always possible to induce him to leave the piano, often so much more his torment than his joy, and he began gradually to resent my proposing he should do so. I never ventured on these occasions to insist. Chopin in displeasure was appalling, and as with me he always controlled himself it was as if he might die of suffocation.

It is a vision of the possibilities of vibration in such organisms that does in fact appal, and with the clash of vibrations, those both of genius and of the general less sanctioned sensibility, the air must have more than sufficiently resounded. Some eight years after the beginning of their friendship and the year after the final complete break in it she writes to Madame Pauline Viardot:

Do you see Chopin? Tell me about his health. I have been unable to repay his fury and his hatred by hatred and fury. I think of him as of a sick, embittered, bewildered child. I saw much of Solange in Paris, the letter goes on, and made her my constant occupation, but without finding anything but a stone in the place of her heart. I have taken up my work again while waiting for the tide to carry me elsewhere.

All the author’s “authority” is in these few words, and in none more than in the glance at the work and the tide. The work and the tide rose ever as high as she would to float her, and wherever we look there is always the authority. “I find Chopin _magnificent_,” she had already written from the thick of the fray, “to keep seeing, frequenting and approving Clésinger, who struck me because I snatched from his hands the hammer he had raised upon Maurice—Chopin whom every one talks of as my most faithful and devoted friend.” Well indeed may our biographer have put it that from a certain date in May 1847 “the two _Leitmotive_ which might have been called in the terms of Wagner the _Leitmotif_ of soreness and the _Leitmotif_ of despair—Chopin, Solange—sound together now in fusion, now in a mutual grip, now simply side by side, in all Madame Sand’s unpublished letters and in the few (of the moment) that have been published. A little later a third joins in—Augustine Brault, a motive narrowly and tragically linked to the _basso obligato_ of Solange.” To meet such a passage as the following under our heroine’s hand again is to feel the whole temper of intercourse implied slip straight out of our analytic grasp. The allusion is to Chopin and to the “defection” of which he had been guilty, to her view, at the time when it had been most important that she might count on him. What we have first, as outsiders, to swallow down, as it were, is the state of things, the hysteric pitch of family life, in which any ideal of reticence, any principle, as we know it, of minding one’s business, for mere dignity’s sake if for none other, had undergone such collapse.

I grant you I am not sorry that he has withdrawn from me the government of his life, for which both he and his friends wanted to make me responsible in so much too absolute a fashion. His temper kept growing in asperity, so that it had come to his constantly blowing me up, from spite, ill-humour and jealousy, in presence of my friends and my children. Solange made use of it with the astuteness that belongs to her, while Maurice began to give way to indignation. Knowing and seeing _la chasteté de nos rapports_, he saw also that the poor sick soul took up, without _wanting to_ and perhaps without being able to help it, the attitude of the lover, the husband, the proprietor of my thoughts and actions. He was on the point of breaking out and telling him to his face that he was making me play, at forty-three years of age, a ridiculous part, and that it was an abuse of my kindness, my patience, and my pity for his nervous morbid state. A few months more, a few days perhaps, of this situation, and an impossible frightful struggle would have broken out between them. Foreseeing the storm, I took advantage of Chopin’s predilection for Solange and left him to sulk, without an effort to bring him round. We have not for three months exchanged a word in writing, and I don’t know how such a cooling-off will end.

She develops the picture of the extravagance of his sick irritability; she accepts with indifference the certainty that his friends will accuse her of having cast him out to take a lover; the one thing she “minds” is the force of evil in her daughter, who is the centre of all the treachery. “She will come back to me when she needs me, that I know. But her return will be neither tender nor consoling.” Therefore it is when at the beginning of the winter of this same dreadful year she throws off the free rich summary of what she has been through in the letter to M. Charles Poncy already published in her Correspondence we are swept into the current of sympathy and admiration. The preceding months had been the heaviest and most painful of her life.

I all but broke down under them utterly, though I had for long seen them coming. But you know how one is not always overhung by the evil portent, however clear one may read it—there are days, weeks, even whole months, when one lives on illusion and fondly hopes to divert the blow that threatens. It is always at last the most probable ill that surprises us unarmed and unprepared. To this explosion of unhappy underground germs joined themselves sundry contributive matters, bitter things too and quite unexpected; so that I am broken by grief in body and soul. I believe my grief incurable, for I never succeed in throwing it off for a few hours without its coming upon me again during the next in greater force and gloom. I nevertheless struggle against it without respite, and if I don’t hope for a victory which would have to consist of not feeling at all, at least I have reached that of still bearing with life, of even scarcely feeling ill, of having recovered my taste for work and of not showing my distress. I have got back outside calm and cheer, which are so necessary for others, and everything in my life seems to go on well.

We had already become aware, through commemorations previous to the present, of that first or innermost line of defence residing in George Sand’s splendid mastery of the letter, the gift that was always so to assure her, on every issue, the enjoyment of the first chance with posterity. The mere cerebral and manual activity represented by the quantity no less than the quality of her outflow through the post at a season when her engagements were most pressing and her anxieties of every sort most cruel is justly qualified by Madame Karénine as astounding; the new letters here given to the world heaping up the exhibition and testifying even beyond the finest of those gathered in after the writer’s death—the mutilations, suppressions and other freedoms then used, for that matter, being now exposed. If no plot of her most bustling fiction ever thickened at the rate at which those agitations of her inner circle at which we have glanced multiplied upon her hands through the later ’forties, so we are tempted to find her rather less in possession of her great _moyens_ when handling the artificial presentation than when handling what we may call the natural. It is not too much to say that the long letter addressed to the cynical Solange in April ’52, and which these pages give us _in extenso_, would have made the fortune of any mere interesting “story” in which one of the characters might have been presented as writing it. It is a document of the highest psychological value and a practical summary of all the elements of the writer’s genius, of all her indefeasible advantages; it is verily the gem of her biographer’s collection. Taken in connection with a copious communication to her son, of the previous year, on the subject of his sister’s character and vices, and of their common experience of these, it offers, in its ease of movement, its extraordinary frankness and lucidity, its splendid apprehension and interpretation of realities, its state, as it were, of saturation with these, exactly the kind of interest for which her novels were held remarkable, but in a degree even above their maximum. Such a letter is an effusion of the highest price; none of a weight so baffling to estimation was probably ever inspired in a mother by solicitude for a clever daughter’s possibilities. Never surely had an accomplished daughter laid under such contribution a mother of high culture; never had such remarkable and pertinent things had to flow from such a source; never in fine was so urgent an occasion so admirably, so inimitably risen to. Marvellous through it all is the way in which, while a common recognition of the “facts of life,” as between two perfectly intelligent men of the world, gives the whole diapason, the abdication of moral authority and of the rights of wisdom never takes place. The tone is a high implication of the moral advantages that Solange had inveterately enjoyed and had decided none the less to avail herself of so little; which advantages we absolutely believe in as we read—_there_ is the prodigious part: such an education of the soul, and in fact of every faculty, such a claim for the irreproachable, it would fairly seem, do we feel any association with the great fluent artist, in whatever conditions taking place, inevitably, necessarily to have been. If we put ourselves questions we yet wave away doubts, and with whatever remnants of prejudice the writer’s last word may often have to clash, our own is that there is nothing for grand final rightness like a sufficiently _general_ humanity—when a particularly beautiful voice happens to serve it.

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO 1902

The great feast-days of all, for the restless critic, are those much interspaced occasions of his really meeting a “case,” as he soon enough learns to call, for his convenience and assistance, any supremely contributive or determinant party to the critical question. These are recognitions that make up for many dull hours and dry contacts, many a thankless, a disconcerted gaze into faces that have proved expressionless. Always looking, always hoping for his happiest chance, the inquirer into the reasons of things—by which I mean especially into the reasons of books—so often misses it, so often wastes his steps and withdraws his confidence, that he inevitably works out for himself, sooner or later, some handy principle of recognition. It may be a rough thing, a mere home-made tool of his trade, but it serves his purpose if it keeps him from beginning with mistakes. He becomes able to note in its light the signs and marks of the possible precious identity, able to weigh with some exactitude the appearances that make for its reality. He ends, through much expenditure of patience, by seeing when, how, why, the “case” announces and presents itself, and he perhaps even feels that failure and felicity have worked together to produce in him a sense for it that may at last be trusted as an instinct. He thus arrives at a view of all the candidates, frequently interesting enough, who fall short of the effective title, because he has at need, perhaps even from afar, scented along the wind the strongest member of the herd. He may perhaps not always be able to give us the grounds of his certainty, but he is at least never without knowing it in presence of one of the full-blown products that are the joy of the analyst. He recognises as well how the state of being full-blown comes above all from the achievement of consistency, of that last consistency which springs from the unrestricted enjoyment of freedom.