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

or six
persons; Chopin, who resembles those enchanted isles where so many
marvels are said to abound that one regards them as fabulous; Chopin,
whom one can never forget after having once heard him; Chopin has
just given a grand concert at Rouen before 500 people for the benefit of
a Polish professor. Nothing less than a good action to be done and the
remembrance of his country 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
.

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