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Solange—sound together now in fusion, now in a mutual grip, now simply side by side, in all Madame Sand’s unpublished letters and in the few (of the moment) that have been published.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.