Frederic Chopin as a Man and Musician, vol 2 | Page 9

could have overcome his repugnance to playing in public. Well! the success was immense! immense! All these enchanting melodies, these ineffable delicacies of execution, these melancholy and impassioned inspirations, and all that poesy of playing and of composition which takes hold at once of your imagination and heart, have penetrated, moved, enraptured 500 auditors, as they do the eight or ten privileged persons who listen to him religiously for whole hours; every moment there were in the hall those electric fremissements, those murmurs of ecstasy and astonishment which are the bravos of the soul. Forward then, Chopin! forward! let this triumph decide you; do not be selfish, give your beautiful talent to all; consent to pass for what you are; put an end to the great debate which divides the artists; and when it shall be asked who is the first pianist of Europe, Liszt or Thalberg, let all the world reply, like those who have heard you..."It is Chopin."
Chopin's artistic achievements, however, were not unanimously received with such enthusiastic approval. A writer in the less friendly La France musicale goes even so far as to stultify himself by ridiculing, a propos of the A flat Impromptu, the composer's style. This jackanapes--who belongs to that numerous class of critics whose smartness of verbiage combined with obtuseness of judgment is so well-known to the serious musical reader and so thoroughly despised by him--ignores the spiritual contents of the work under discussion altogether, and condemns without hesitation every means of expression which in the slightest degree deviates from the time-honoured standards. We are told that Chopin's mode of procedure in composing is this. He goes in quest of an idea, writes, writes, modulates through all the twenty-four keys, and, if the idea fails to come, does without it and concludes the little piece very nicely (tres- bien). And now, gentle reader, ponder on this momentous and immeasurably sad fact: of such a nature was, is, and ever will be the great mass of criticism.

CHAPTER XXI
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CHOPIN'S VISITS TO NOHANT IN 1837 AND 1838.--HIS ILL HEALTH.--HE DECIDES TO GO WITH MADAME SAND AND HER CHILDREN TO MAJORCA.-- MADAME SAND'S ACCOUNT OF THIS MATTER AND WHAT OTHERS THOUGHT ABOUT IT.--CHOPIN AND HIS FELLOW--TRAVELLERS MEET AT PERPIGNAN IN THE BEGINNING OF NOVEMBER, 1838, AND PROCEED BY PORT-VENDRES AND BARCELONA TO PALMA.--THEIR LIFE AND EXPERIENCES IN THE TOWN, AT THE VILLA SON-VENT, AND AT THE MONASTERY OF VALDEMOSA, AS DESCRIBED IN CHOPIN'S AND GEORGE SAND'S LETTERS, AND THE LATTER'S "MA VIE" AND "UN HIVER A MAJORQUE."--THE PRELUDES.--RETURN TO FRANCE BY BARCELONA AND MARSEILLES IN THE END OF FEBRUARY, 1839.

In a letter written in 1837, and quoted on p. 313 of Vol. I., Chopin said: "I may perhaps go for a few days to George Sand's." How heartily she invited him through their common friends Liszt and the Comtesse d'Agoult, we saw in the preceding chapter. We may safely assume, I think, that Chopin went to Nohant in the summer of 1837, and may be sure that he did so in the summer of 1838, although with regard to neither visit reliable information of any kind is discoverable. Karasowski, it is true, quotes four letters of Chopin to Fontana as written from Nohant in 1838, but internal evidence shows that they must have been written three years later.
We know from Mendelssohn's and Moscheles' allusions to Chopin's visit to London that he was at that time ailing. He himself wrote in the same year (1837) to Anthony Wodzinski that during the winter he had been again ill with influenza, and that the doctors had wanted to send him to Ems. As time went on the state of his health seems to have got worse, and this led to his going to Majorca in the winter of 1838-1839. The circumstance that he had the company of Madame Sand on this occasion has given rise to much discussion. According to Liszt, Chopin was forced by the alarming state of his health to go to the south in order to avoid the severities of the Paris winter; and Madame Sand, who always watched sympathetically over her friends, would not let him depart alone, but resolved to accompany him. Karasowski, on the other hand, maintains that it was not Madame Sand who was induced to accompany Chopin, but that Madame Sand induced Chopin to accompany her. Neither of these statements tallies with Madame Sand's own account. She tells us that when in 1838 her son Maurice, who had been in the custody of his father, was definitively entrusted to her care, she resolved to take him to a milder climate, hoping thus to prevent a return of the rheumatism from which he had suffered so much in the preceding year. Besides, she wished to live for some time in a quiet place where