Having failed to drag Caroline into her own game, the Brunetti tried to keep Von Weber from breathing the better air of her presence. As we have seen, she drove him almost to distraction, and sent him a wreck to the baths in Friedland.

Caroline's mother had permitted Von Weber to pay his court to her, and her father and brother had found his intentions worthy. Caroline had not hesitated to confess that her affection was growing with Carl's. But what she had seen of his life with the Brunetti, and what she must have heard of his magnificent dissipations, gave her pause. Therefore, when Carl went away for his health, he took with him a riddle, and left behind "a sweet, beloved being who might—who may—make me happy." "The absence of three months shall test our love." They wrote each other long and daily letters; his were all of yearning, while hers were mingled with fear, lest he be, as she wrote him, "a sweet poison harmful to the soul."

After taking the baths, he went on to Berlin, arriving there August 3d in the very ferment of rapture over the downfall of Napoleon at Prague. He was moved to write a number of patriotic songs from Koerner's "Leier und Schwert." These choruses for men were sung throughout the Fatherland, as they still are sung.

But from the height of glory to which he was now borne, as the living voice of the nation, he was dragged back to the depths by the little hand and the little finger-nails of Caroline, who could be jealous enough to suspect that not all the adoration Von Weber was receiving from the women of Berlin was pure and impersonal patriotism.

Von Weber had from the first insisted that no marriage of theirs could have hope of success, unless she left the stage. This sacrifice of herself and her career and her large following among the public was a deal to ask, and a deal to grant. Her combined reluctance to sacrifice her all, and her jealous fears that he would not find her all in all, at last led her to write him that they would better give up their dream, and break their troth.

In his first bitterness at this inopportune humiliation, coming like a drop of vinegar in the honey of royal favour, he wrote furiously to Gansbacher, "I see now that her views of high art are not above the usual pitiful standard—namely, that art is but a means of procuring soup, meat, and shirts." To another friend, Lichtenstein, he wrote more solemnly:

"All my fondest hopes are vanishing day by day. I live like a drunken man who dances on a thin coating of ice, and spite of his better reason would persuade himself that he is on solid ground. I love with all my heart and soul; and if there be no truth in her affection, the last chord of my whole life has been struck. I shall still live on,—marry perhaps some day,—who knows? But love and trust again, never more."

In September he returned to Prague with an anxious heart, and took up in person a new battle for Caroline's hand. They were agreed upon the subject of affection, but wrangled upon the clauses in the treaty of marriage. While this debate was waging, Weber took care of her money and her mother's. A benefit being given her, he announced that he himself would sell the tickets at the box-office, and he spent a whole day bartering his quick wit and his social influence, for increased prices. Such public devotion brought scandal buzzing about the ears of the two. But still Caroline would not give up her career, nor Weber his opinion of stage marriages.

Even his patriotic songs, "The Lyre and the Sword," were a cause of disagreement, for Caroline, like so many women, deified Napoleon, and her lover's lyric assaults upon him were so much sacrilege; while to him her adoration of that personified prairie-fire, who had devastated the Fatherland, was treason. The Brunetti, being well out of the running, Caroline found new cause of jealousy in the newly engaged actress, Christine Bohler. Indeed, Carl and Caroline did little but fight and make up for months, until even Caroline was convinced that one of the two must leave Prague, at least for a period of probation. It was Carl who left, and in a condition of almost complete spiritual collapse.

How little music has to do with one's state of mind, may be seen from the fact that in his weak and complaining despair, he composed one of his sturdiest works, "Kampf und Sieg." He settled in Munich, and continued to correspond with Caroline, writing her the most minute descriptions of his life and his lodgings, and begging her to write him with equal fulness. His loneliness, however, at length told upon his spirits, and gradually stifled his creativeness.

At length it became time for him to return to Prague again, and on the eve of his home-going he received a letter from Caroline, which she said she had been for weeks trying in vain to write. She was now convinced that they must absolutely give up all thought of love and marriage. This blow smote him to the ground. He had no strength even for wrath; he could only write in abject meekness, as if thanking her for delaying the blow so long:

"Be not angry, my beloved one, that I repeat my words of love and sorrow again and again. They flow from a pure heart, that knows no other wish than your happiness. When time shall have gone by, and you can look back in peace and quiet on the broken tie between us, you will then acknowledge that never was a truer heart than mine. Thanks, my dearest life, my never-to-be-forgotten love, for the many sweet flowers you have woven into the garland of my life, for all your love, for all your care. Forgive me for my excess of love—forgive the passion that may have torn many a wound, when it should have soothed and healed—forgive me all the sorrow I have caused you, though Heaven knows it was through no will of mine—forgive me for having stolen one whole sweet year of your precious life, for which I would willingly give ten of my own, could I but buy it back for you.... Farewell—farewell."

On the 7th of September he arrived in Prague. His first view of Caroline was as she sang the Cinderella on the stage. The sight of her was too much; he broke down and ran home. But still, as director, he must frequently meet her in more or less familiar situations. And as for her, she later confessed that she was suffering even more than Carl.

Her every strength and resolution melted away one afternoon in the autumn, at a reception, where the lovers met face to face. Their gaze blended; their hands blended; the war was over.

Instantly, with the resumption of his love-life, his interest in music began again. Caroline, apparently alarmed at the condition of his health, never robust, persuaded her mother to let him board at her house. New health and old-time gaiety began again. But he was tired of Prague, and determined to find a larger field elsewhere. While he was hunting for a place for himself, he secured a starring engagement for Caroline at the then high salary of ten gold louis, per performance. Before he left Prague, he announced his engagement publicly. By a curious coincidence, the engagement was announced at a reception, just after a total eclipse of the sun. When the daylight came out of the darkness, Carl rose and proclaimed his conquest.

On Christmas morning he received a costly ring from the King of Hanover, a splendid snuff-box from the King of Bavaria, and an appointment as Kapellmeister to the King of Saxony.

At Dresden there were honours enough and jealousies more. But Carl assailed them with new strength. And now, he took up an opera on a subject he had thought of but discarded, fortunately for himself and the world. He wrote Caroline that a friend of his was writing a libretto based on the old national legend, "Der Freischuetz." Kind, the librettist, wrote night and day for ten days, and Carl, in great enthusiasm, forwarded the libretto for Caroline's opinion. She sent it back with violent criticisms, based upon her long stage experience and her intuition of stage effects. We can never thank her sufficiently for cutting out endless pages of songs and recitative by the melancholious old Hermit who, in the original version, was to commence the opera, and wander in and out of it incessantly. Caroline wrote, like Horace:

"Away, with all these scenes.... Plunge at once into the popular element. Begin with the scene before the tavern." This seemed outrageous mutilation at first to the composer, and the librettist took it with still more violence; threatening for a time to withdraw his book completely. But often, thereafter, did Carl express his gratitude to her, whom he called his "Public with two eyes." Would to heaven, that there had been some Caroline Brandt to give similar advice to Wagner concerning his Wotan and his King Mark!

Meanwhile, during the composition of "Der Freischuetz," which was to mean so much for the happiness of Germany and the betterment of opera generally, Carl, the genius who struck out the magnificent work, was spending almost less time upon the details of composition and scoring than upon the purchase of articles for the home he was making for his bride-to-be. He wrote her long letters, describing his purchases of "chairs, crockery, curtains, knives, forks, spoons, pails, brooms, and mustard-pot."

She had ceased to be in his mind the brilliant and fascinating soubrette, and had become in the silly lover's-Latin, his "pug, his duck, his bird." He answered a letter she wrote him describing her success in the "Magic Flute:"

"I was amused with your account of the 'Zauberfloete,' but you know I hope soon to see you lay by all your pretty Papagena feathers. All your satins and ermines must give place to a coarse apron then. You will be only applauded by my hungry stomach, called out before the cook-wench, and saluted with 'da capo' when you kiss your Carl. It is very shocking, I know. What will my own pearl say to be dissolved in the sour vinegar of domestic life, and swallowed by a bear of a husband?"

In March, 1817, Weber was called to Prague, on business connected with his opera company; he was overjoyed at the thought of seeing Caroline, who was still singing there. Just as he was stepping into the travelling-carriage, a letter was handed him, saying that the firm in Prague, with which he had deposited all his savings and those of Caroline, was about to go into bankruptcy. There was indeed, of his long and careful hoardings only as much left as Caroline had deposited on his advice. Her savings were quite swept away.

But, without saying a word to her, he transferred the last penny he had in the world to her name, and left himself, except for his strength and fame, a pauper. It was many years after, and then only by chance, that Caroline learned the beautiful sacrifice he had made from his great love for her. When he reached Prague, he concealed from her all the distress he had suffered, and there was nothing but happiness in their reunion.

Returning to Dresden, he took up more seriously the composition of "Der Freischuetz." The first note of it that he wrote was the second act duet between Agathe and Aennchen; he took Caroline as his ideal. Indeed, through the whole composition of the work, he declared that he saw Caroline always presiding. He seemed to hear her voice singing every note, and saw her fingers playing it on the piano; now smiling, over what she liked; now shaking her head over what displeased her. This spirit he took as the critic and judge of the whole work. There have rarely been such instances of actual personal inspiration in any work of art, and certainly none which do more credit to the absorption of the artist-mind in the worship of its idol. Furthermore, much of the composition was done at the home preparing for Caroline's actual presence, and he wrote those suave and optimistic pages of music to an accompaniment of hammers and saws, the wrangling of carpenters, painters, upholsterers, and scrub-women; sleeping at nights in the kitchen, and glad to find a kitchen-table to compose upon. The longed-for marriage could not take place until a court wedding for which he was writing music. This was postponed and postponed, until he was driven to distraction. But at last, when the royal bridegroom was sent on his way the composer fled toward Prague. Caroline surprised him by coming part way to meet him. On November 4, 1817, they were married. Carl gave Caroline's mother a pension of nine hundred thalers, though her husband and son were living. The honeymoon was paid for by concerts here and there, in which both took part, and by a benevolent royal commission to hunt for artists. Caroline, though her matrimonial treaty forbade her singing on the stage, was allowed to sing at concerts, and at some of them she sang duets, with Carl at the piano, while she played the guitar.

Carl had often told Caroline that she must expect a chaos in her new home in Dresden. When she arrived, and found everything beautiful and in perfect order, she wept with rapture. Late on the last night of the year 1817, Carl wrote in a diary these words; they show what depths there were in the soul and what heights in the ambition of one whose youth and training and early recklessness had promised so little of solidity and solemnity.

"The great important year has closed. May God still grant me the blessing He has hitherto so graciously accorded me; that I may have the power to make the dear one happy; and, as a brave artist, bring honour and advantage to my Fatherland! Amen!"

As for Caroline, who had been so volatile a soubrette and so happy in the footlight glitter, she turned out to be even a greater success as a Haus-frau. She began to win a more limited, but an equally profound, reputation for her perfect dinners and receptions, and for the minute care with which she kept all her "account-books, housekeeping-books, cellar-books." Finally, she even learned to cook, and the household became a dove-cote!

The instinct of jealousy is one that is not easily uprooted, and Caroline did not permit Carl's life to grow too monotonous. His high favour at court kept her in subjects for uneasiness. He finally attempted a violent cure. He began to absent himself from the house with unusual frequence, but would not explain where he had been, even though Caroline wept and wailed. At length he wrought her to the pitch of desperation by his heartless indifference; then, one day, he brought home a portrait bust which a sculptor friend had made and with it a signed record of every hour and minute of his absence. This, if not a permanent cure, was at least a partial remedy.

Weber's home became a proverb of hospitality and good cheer. The two sang duets, or Caroline recited poems, while Carl improvised accompaniments; excursions to the fields, and water parties, and hilarious reunions of the opera-troupe kept life busy. Later, he took a country home, where he surrounded himself with the dumb animals whose society he so enjoyed; these included a large hound, a raven, a starling, an Angora cat, and an ape.

On December 22, 1818, the first child, a girl, was born. Caroline was dangerously ill; the child was not strong, and Carl's own health, always at the brink of wreckage, broke down. Caroline, hardly able to be about, nursed her husband and concealed from him the serious condition of the child. Just as he was beginning to recover, in April, his firstborn died. The news could not be kept from him, and he was sent into delirium. Caroline's health gave way completely, and "the unhappy couple lay in neighbouring rooms, where they could only cry 'Comfort!' to each other through the wall; and where, in the still hours of night, each smothered the sobs of grief in the pillows, that the other might not hear."

Caroline was the first to recover. Carl's health and strength were on the final ebb—the long, slow ebb that made of his last years one dismal tragedy, which only his superb devotion to his wife and his immitigable optimism could brighten. In July, 1820, they decided to take a tour. They met with great success, but he found his weakness almost unbearable. At Hanover, he and Caroline were both prostrated, and could not join in the concert planned. On the road to Bremen, the postilion fell asleep and the coach was overturned into the ditch. The driver was stunned and the sick Carl had himself to revive the man, untie the baggage from the roof, unharness the horses, put everything in place again, and drive the postilion to the next station. At Hamburg, Caroline was too ill to continue the tour; she was about to become a mother, and Carl was compelled to go on without her, but he wrote her daily letters full of devotion. It was the first separation of their married life.

Later she rejoined him, and at Hamburg, the oyster entered once more into Weber's domestic career. The Brunetti had cured him of his love for her by her inordinate fondness for bivalves. Caroline, on the other hand, hated them. But Weber said:

"There can be no true sympathy between us while you detest a food I relish. For the love of me, swallow this oyster."

The first three were a severe trial, but, as the French might say, "Ce n'est pas que la premiere huitre qui coute." Afterward Weber would groan, "Alas, why did I ever teach you the trick?"

In 1821, there rose a famous operatic war between Spontini and Weber at Berlin. Caroline was prostrated with terror. Spontini's "Olympic" was given first with enormous success, and "Der Freischuetz," in which Caroline had had so large a share, and which meant so much to the two, was forced into a dramatic comparison. In spite of a somewhat dubious beginning, the first night was one of the greatest ovations a musician has ever lived to see. In the midst of the tempestuous applause, every one looked for the composer, who was "sitting in a dark corner of his wife's box and kissing away her tears of joy."

When they returned to Dresden in July, Caroline's health was undermined by the emotions of the Berlin triumph, and it was necessary for her to be taken to Switzerland, where Carl was compelled to leave her. An accident in crossing the Elbe led him to write his will, leaving Caroline everything without reserve, and his dying curse upon any one who should disturb his wishes.

Now consumption began to fasten its claws more deeply on him, and when his wife returned she found him constantly racked with cough and fever. One day he saw the first fatal spot of blood upon his handkerchief; he turned pale and sighed: "God's will be done."

From that moment neither his conviction that he was doomed to an early death, nor his courage to die pluckily, ever left him. When "Der Freischuetz" was given in Dresden, Caroline was ill at home. Carl arranged a courier service by which he received, after every scene, news of his wife. In February of the next year, he was compelled to leave Dresden; he placed in his wife's hands a sealed letter only to be opened in case of his death. This letter gave a complete account of all his affairs, and a last expression of his immense love for her. On his many tours, he met almost uninterrupted triumph, but as he wrote to Caroline:

"I would rather be in my still chamber with you, my beloved life. Without you all pride is shorn of its splendour; my only real joy can be in that which gives you joy too."

From now on he spent a large part of his time away from her, always tormented to the last degree by homesickness, always harrowed by the fear that he might die out of the reach of his adored wife and two children, and never feeling that he had laid by money enough to leave them free of the danger of want, after he should have drifted into the grave that yawned just before his weary feet.

It is hard to find in story or history a more pitiful struggle against fate and the frustration of every deep desire than the last days of Carl Maria von Weber, hurrying from triumph to triumph, and dying as he jolted along his way, or stood bowing with hollow heart before uproarious multitudes. Homesickness grew to be a positive frenzy with him.

"They carry me in triumph," he wrote to Caroline: "they watch for every wink to do me kindnesses. But I feel I can only be happy there, where I can hear my lambs bleat, and their mother low, and can beat my dog, or turn away my maids, if they are at all too troublesome."

In 1825, Christmas found him at a distance, and he could not reach home. "I shall think of you all on Christmas-eve," he wrote, "But that I never cease to do. All my labours are for you—all my joy is with you." "Can I but be with you on New Year's eve," he wrote again, with that tinge of superstition which always more or less pervaded his character, "I shall be with you all the year."

Now London beckoned to him, as she had to so many German musicians, to whom she always has stood for the city of gold and of rescue from pauperdom. Ghastly as Von Weber looked in the clutches of his disease; hungry as his heart and body were for a long, an eternal rest, he felt that he must not shrink from this final goal. As his son writes with aching heart in the biography:

"To Gublitz, who doubted of his ability to undertake the journey to London, he replied, in a tone of melancholy irony: 'Whether I can or no, I must. Money must be made for my family—money, man. I am going to London to die there. Not a word! I know it as well as you.' The bright, cheery, lively Weber, who revelled in the triumph of his 'Freischuetz,' was already dead and gone.

"Before his departure, Weber regulated all his affairs in the most punctilious manner. The presentiment of the fast-approaching end rendered him doubly careful that all should be in order; and, in his last conferences with his legal friends, he was always anxious to insure the presence of his wife, whose strong practical good sense he knew. During these painful duties his personal appearance became so fearfully changed, that most of his friends began to fear he would no longer find strength sufficient for his journey. His form sank together: his voice was almost totally gone: his cough was incessant.

"In the circle of intimates who still visited him at that tea-table, of which his wit, and pleasantry, and genial humour had so long made the charm, he would often murmur, with a faint smile, 'Don't take it ill, good people, if I drop asleep: indeed I cannot help it.'

"And his head would fall upon his breast. His poor wife suffered cruel agonies: she could not but feel that he was really spending the small remaining breath of life for the sake of her and the children. She manoeuvred in secret to induce friends to persuade him that he ought to renounce his fearful journey, when all her own affectionate efforts to this intent had failed. But the response was ever the same sad one.

"'Whether I undertake this journey, or no, it is all one! Within a year I am a dead man. But if I go, my children will have bread, when their father is gone: if I do not, want may stare them in the face. What is to be done?' On one occasion he added, 'I should like to come back once more and see my dear ones' faces again: and then, in God's name, let God's will be done! But to die there, it would be hard, very hard!'

"The morning of the 7th of February had not yet dawned, after a night of bitter tears, when Weber's travelling-carriage drove up to his door. The time was come for the separation of the husband, who scarcely hoped to see his home again, from the loving wife, who felt that he was a dying man. Another tear upon the forehead of his sleeping children—another long lingering kiss—the suffering man dragged his swollen feet into the carriage, huddled feverishly in his furs—the door was closed—and he rolled away from home, on that cold winter's morning, sobbing till the shattered chest might almost burst at once.

"Caroline rushed back to her room, and sank on her knees, with the cry: 'It is his coffin I have closed upon him!'

"At the first post, Weber parted with his own coachman and his own horses. It was the last wrench from home and its remembrances. His voluminous correspondence with his wife was the only tie left to Weber; and nothing can be more touching than these letters, amounting in all to fifty-three, in which the sufferer was always trying to conceal, as far as he could, his sufferings; the anxious woman left behind, always repressing her own bitter anguish lest it should increase the other's sorrow."

Carl had been lured to London by reports of the enormous craze of the whole people over his work. It was his fate to reach there just after the tide of enthusiasm had turned, and was lapsing into the ebb of weariness and impatience. After the first rapturous curiosity of personal greeting, he found that the public would take little of him but "Der Freischuetz," and of this opera he had grown weary, as composers always grow of their spoiled children of fortune.

His health, too, was in tragic state. Frightful spasms and hemorrhages seemed to tear him asunder. At a dinner given him, two of the guests had to carry him up the stairs. He was hardly strong enough to stand during the cheers that greeted him when he came before his audience. But the worst disease of all, the one that would not cease gnawing at his heart, was his homesickness. To a doctor who offered him a new remedy, he cried:

"Go! go! no doctor's tinkering can help me now. The machine is shattered. But, ah, would but God in His mercy grant that it might hold together till I could embrace my Lina and my boys once more!" His effort to keep Caroline from knowing his illness was kept up. When she wrote him that the children were begging to know why he remained so long away, he answered:

"Yes, the father is long, long away; ah, and how long is the time to him! how every day is counted! Patience! patience! Day crawls after day."

"God bless you, my deeply beloved ones!" he wrote once more. "I count days, hours, minutes, until we meet again. We have often been parted before, and loved each other dearly, God knows. But this terrible yearning I have never known before."

At last he grew so desperately sad that he broke his rule and wrote his wife full details of his suffering; he had given up hope of ever seeing his home again.

At this time, a singer wished to bring out a new song of his, and furnished him with words. His once alert fancy groped long for a melody, but, as his son writes:

"At last on the morning of the 18th of May, the great artist's flitting genius came back to him, and for the last time gave him a farewell kiss upon that noble forehead now bedewed with the cold sweat of death—for the last time! But the trembling hands were unable to write down more than the notes for the voice."

Fate had still reserved a bitter blow for him. He had fastened his hopes upon a farewell concert, and grew morbid upon the importance of it to his future.

"This day week is my concert," he wrote on the 19th of May. "How my poor heart beats when I think of it! What will be the result? The last chances left me are this concert and my benefit. When I think on all they cost me, should they not turn out so as to meet my modest expectations, it were hard indeed. But I must not let my courage fail me. I will rely on Him, who has already been so infinitely merciful to us. You will think, my beloved life, that I lay far too much stress on this. But remember that my hope of fortune for us was the only purpose of this weary journey. Can you not comprehend, then, why I now hold for so important that which has always played but a subordinate part in my life? Pray, dearest heart, pray that poor old papa's wishes, which are all for your dear sakes, may yet be fulfilled."

To complete the mockery of his last days, fashion declined to interest itself in his concert, and, to keep even the common public away, the skies poured down floods of rain. The house was almost empty. The enthusiasm of the few good hearts there were Job's consolation. At the end of the concert he was led to his room, where he sank down, a complete wreck in mind and hope, muttering:

"What do you say to that? That, that is 'Weber in London'!"

His hand trembled so that he could hardly write any more to his wife; still, in a quivering scrawl, he bade her address her answer not to London, but to a city on the way home, for he is starting homeward—homeward at last! But he is not coming home through Paris, as he had planned. He writes:

"What should I do there? I cannot walk—I cannot speak. I will have nothing more to do with business for years to come. So it is far better I should take the straight way home by Calais, through Brussels, Cologne, Coblenz, and thus by the Rhine to Frankfort. What a charming journey! I must travel very slowly, however, and probably rest for half a day now and then. I shall gain a good fortnight thus; and by the end of June I hope to be in your arms.

"How will you receive me? In Heaven's name, alone. Let no one disturb my joy of looking again upon my wife and my children, my dearest and my best... Thank God! the end of all is fast approaching."

The end of all was fast approaching. He sent his friends out to purchase souvenirs of unhappy London, as gifts for his family. He was so impatient to be off that he would listen to no advice to postpone his starting.

"I must go back to my own, I must!" he sobbed incessantly. "Let me see them once more—and then God's will be done." The attempt appeared impossible to all. With great unwillingness he yielded to his friend's request to have a consultation of physicians. "Be it so," he answered. "But come of it what may, I go!"

His only thought, his only word, was "Home!" On the 2d of June he wrote his last letter to his beloved,—the last lines his hand ever traced. "What a joy, my own dear darling, your letter gave me! What a happiness to me to know that you are well! ... As this letter requires no answer, it will be but a short one. What a comfort it is not to have to answer... God bless you all and keep you well! Oh, were I but amongst you all again! I kiss you with all my heart and soul, my dearest one! Preserve all your love for me, and think with pleasure on him who loves you above all, your Carl."

He was to leave London on the 6th of June; on the night of the 4th he could talk to his friends only of their kindness and of his eagerness to be home. To a friend, who stayed to help him through the painful ordeal of undressing, he murmured his thanks and said, "Now let me sleep."

The next morning, when they came to his room, he had been dead for hours. London was full of words of regret for the man whose music had added so much to the beauty and cheerfulness of the world. A great benefit for his family was arranged, but fate would not cease mocking him in his grave,—the receipts hardly equalled the expenses!

A committee petitioned the Dean of Westminster to allow the funeral to be held in the Abbey. The courteous answer of regret reminded the committee that Von Weber was a Roman Catholic! The musicians volunteered, however, to give him a splendid funeral, and at least music was not wanting when his body was lowered into the grave in an alien land. Von Weber's son, Max, describes how the news was sent to Caroline by Von Weber's devoted friend, Fuerstenau:

"It was the death-warrant of the purest wedded bliss that had ever made two mortals happy; it was nigh a fatal cup of poison to one of the noblest hearts of womankind: it told two little blooming boys that they were orphaned. No wonder that Fuerstenau had not the courage to address Caroline von Weber herself: his letter had been sent to her dearest friend, Fraeulein von Hanmann. The sad messenger of death went down to Kosterwitz, the letter in hand.

"But she, too, had not the courage to break the fearful news to the impulsive little woman, unaided and alone. She stopped her carriage at a little distance from the house, to beg the support of Roth, who lived close by. But Caroline had heard the carriage-wheels—had looked out—had seen her friend descend on that unaccustomed spot, and disappear into Roth's house. A fearful presentiment seized her—she rushed toward the spot—she saw the two standing in the little garden, wringing their hands and weeping—she knew all—and she lay senseless at their feet. Her little boy Max had followed her in childish alarm. Nigh forty years have gone by since then; but he has never forgotten the sound of that terrible cry, when his mother, slowly recovering from her swoon, clasped him convulsively in her arms, and wetted his face with a flood of tears."

Nearly twenty years later it was before Von Weber's body at last reached the Fatherland. The agonies of homesickness he had endured seemed to haunt even the cold clay. In 1841, a writer made an ardent appeal for the restoration of this glory of German song, to the German soil. The idea became a crusade. But it was not until 1844, and then chiefly by the aid of Wagner, then conductor in Dresden, and a close friend of Caroline and her children, that success was attained. The younger son, Alexander, had already been buried; on December 14, 1844, the father's body was placed by his side. It had been carried through the streets of Dresden behind a black banner, on which were inscribed words which once would have meant so much: "Weber in Dresden."

"In the richly decorated chapel of the cemetery, all the ladies of the theatre, with Schroeder-Devrient at their head, awaited the body, and covered the coffin with their laurels. The ceremony was at an end. The torches were extinguished; the crowd dispersed. But, by the light of two candles still burning on the altar, might be seen the form of a small, now middle-aged woman who had flung herself upon the bier, whilst a pale young man knelt praying by her side."

This pale young man was the Baron Max Maria von Weber, to whose pen we owe a wonderful portrait of a wonderful man. It was the son's love, strangely tempered with wisdom, that showed us all the phases of this character, which, by revealing its worser side, made the better side convincing, complete, alive.

Weber had lived hardly more than half of the allotted three score and ten, but he had lived life in all its phases, from riotous dissipation amid royal splendour and insolence to a brave and whole-souled battle for the welfare of his home. It is futile to attempt judging the effect of music upon life, and of life upon music. Too many sorts of man have written too many sorts of music and lived too many sorts of life. But, if you wish to use Von Weber's life as an example of the influence of music, surely, you would write Von Weber's name on the credit side of the ledger, for he reached his best music when his life was best managed. He took a musician for his wife, and her high ideals of art and life made him a man and a soldier against Fate.

Home they brought his body, a pride to his Fatherland, and the greater Wagner who owed the great Weber so much, spoke over his grave these words:

"Here rest thee, then! ... Wherever thy genius bore thee, to whatsoever distant lands, it stayed for ever linked by a thousand tendrils to the German people's heart; that heart with which it wept and laughed, a child believing in the tales and legends of his country. And though the Briton may yield thee justice; the Frenchman, admiration; yet, the German alone can love thee. His thou art; a beautiful day in his life, a warm drop of his own blood, a morsel of his heart—and who shall blame us that we wished thy ashes, too, to mingle with this earth, to form a part of our dear German soil."



CHAPTER XVI.

THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN

Happy, they say, is the country that hath no history. Happy, too, the man whose love affairs make tame reading.

It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments and rebuffs,—being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as human lives go, one of complete felicity.

Well begun is half done, and half the struggle for happiness is achieved if one's childhood years are made pleasant. Mendelssohn's home life was so brilliantly joyous, and so busy with artistic and domestic comforts, that it has almost passed into proverb as ideal. Mendelssohn is described as having been "enthusiastically, almost fanatically, fond of his father," who, without possessing musical technic, possessed a remarkable spiritual grasp of it. His mother was something of a pianist, and a woman of great sweetness and firmness of character, to whom the children were devoted and with whom they were confidential to the utmost degree. In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn's genius bore early fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his Overture to "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," a wonderful fabric of harmony and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed of writing music, nor had even turned out that old-fangled and empty sonata which is beautiful only because it was his first and last offence of the sort.

Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life. Some of her compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many things. At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at the age of forty-two she died.

Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men; he was small and excitable, but was counted handsome. He was versatile to an unusual degree, being an adept at painting, as well as billiards, chess, riding, swimming, and general athletics. He was also something of a scholar in Greek and Latin, and his correspondence was so enthusiastically kept up that his published letters take a high place in such literature, overflowing as they are with comment of all kinds on the people and things he saw in his wide travels. As an aunt of his once wrote his mother: "If God spare him, his letters will in long, long years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a holy relic; indeed, they are sacred already as the effusion of so pure and childlike a mind."

His heart was indeed remarkably clean. Stratton says of him: "He was always falling in love, as his letters show, but no breath of scandal bedimmed the shining brightness of his character." "He wore his heart upon his sleeve," says Stratton. He also wore it on the tip of his pen, and one who wishes to know how possible it is to be both a good and joyous man and a great, busy musician can find such an one in Mendelssohn's published letters, though the most personal family matters have been omitted from them as printed, and his wife before her death burned all the letters he had written her.

We, however, are concerned only in his amours. When he was twenty years old, he went to England and thence to Scotland and Wales, where he spent a time composing, sketching, and exercising his fascinations; he wrote home: "Yes, children, I do nothing but flirt, and that in English." Wherever he went, he saw something beautiful in nature or in womankind, and at Munich, in 1830, he was, as his sister wrote, "the darling in every house, the centre of every circle." The fifteen-year-old Josephine or "Peppi" Lang and Delphine von Schauroth seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough. In Italy, in 1831, he found his heart captured easily, and, as once in Schumann's case, it was an English girl who entangled him. She was a beauty whom he first met at a ball at Torlonia's; he danced with her again at the Palazzo Albani. But music held him fast through all, though he could on occasion impatiently vow that he would be more serious and no longer alter his compositions to suit the whims of pretty girls.

Mendelssohn's life flowed on in smoothness, in thorough contrast with the violent ups and downs of Beethoven's mind and music, for he was, as Stratton says, "on the most excellent terms with himself," as with the world in general. He was extremely sensitive to criticism and to false friendship, but he was never stung into those virulent humours which poisoned Beethoven's career. So placid a life his was, indeed, that some of his admirers have wished that he had met with more tragedy, in order that he might have written more poignant music. Against this view, Grove wisely protested, comparing Schubert's words: "My music is the product of my genius and my misery; and that which I have written in my greatest distress is that which the world seems to like best." Grove moralises thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy:

"He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or Schumann. Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure, aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony? It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure. But let us take the man as we have him. Surely there is enough of conflict and violence in life and in art. When we want to be made unhappy we can turn to others. It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters, and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and pure, brilliant and solid. For the enjoyment of such shining heights of goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow."

In November, 1835, Mendelssohn's father died, among his last wishes being the wish that his son should marry, as the two sisters already had. The blow to Mendelssohn was exceedingly severe, and his condition alarmed his sister, who urged upon him his father's advice. Mendelssohn told her that he would look about him on the Rhine next summer.

In 1836 he visited Frankfort, and made the acquaintance of the widow of a French clergyman who had preached at the French Reformed Church. The widow was Madame Jeanrenaud (nee Souchay); she was so well preserved and handsome that she was credited with having won Mendelssohn's love. But it was her second daughter, Cecile Charlotte Sophie, who had stuck the first pin of permanence through his butterfly heart. She was seventeen and he twenty-seven; he loved beauty, and she was beautiful.

The hyper-romantic Elise Polko often saw Cecile, and described her:

"To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly fascination and loveliness. Her figure was slight, of middle height, and rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and eyebrows.... Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach so beautifully calls Marienhaft. Her manner was generally thought too reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called 'the fair Mimosa,' In music we have an expressive term, 'calm but impassioned,' and this I deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of Cecile."

Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young girl had made upon him that he was worried. To make sure that he was really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at Scheveningen, near The Hague. But salt water would not wash away his emotion, and after a month's absence he returned, proposed, and on the 9th of September, 1836, was betrothed. He wrote his mother at once:

"My head is quite giddy from the events of the day; it is already late at night and I have nothing else to say; but I must write to you, I feel so rich and happy."

It is a proof of the fondness the people cherished for Mendelssohn that, when the engagement became noised abroad, the directors of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig put on the programme the second finale in "Fidelio," "He who has gained a charming wife" ("Wer ein holdes Weib errungen"). The audience saw the meaning at once and shouted in its enthusiasm, until Mendelssohn was forced to seat himself at the piano and extemporise upon the theme.

Felix and Cecile were married March 28, 1837, at the Walloon French Reformed Church in Frankfort, and his friend Hiller surprised them with a new bridal chorus. The wedding tour lasted nearly a month, and the honeymooners kept a journal, in which they both sketched and wrote humourous nothings. The home they chose was in Leipzig, where Fanny Hensel visited them, and found Cecile possessed not only of "the beautiful eyes" Felix had raved over so much, "but possessed also of a wonderfully soothing temperament, that calmed her husband's whims and promised to cure him of his irritability."

The married life of the two was interrupted by the journeys the husband had to make for his important engagements, till he growled vigorously, and regretted being a conductor at all.

In February, 1838, the first child was born, and Cecile was dangerously ill. On other tours of his, even to England, she accompanied him. She bore him five children, three boys and two girls. Their life together was almost perfect. He writes, in 1841, to a friend who is to be married:

"If I have still a wish to form it is that your blissful betrothal-mood may be continued in marriage, that is, may you be like me, who feel every day of my life that I cannot be sufficiently thankful to God for my happiness."

In another letter he thus pictures his private paradise: "Eating and sleeping, without dress coat, without piano, without visiting-cards, without carriage and horses, but with donkeys, with wild flowers, with music-paper and sketch-book, with Cecile and the children." Again, in 1844, he writes of a return home:

"I found all my family well, and we had a joyful meeting. Cecile looks so well again,—tanned by the sun, but without the least trace of her former indisposition; my first glance told this when I came into the room, but to this day I cannot cease rejoicing afresh every time I look at her. The children are as brown as Moors, and play all day long in the garden. And so I am myself again now, and I take one of the sheets of paper that Cecile painted for me, to write to you.

"I am sitting here at the open window, looking into the garden at the children, who are playing with their 'dear Johann.' The omnibus to Koenigstein passes here twice every day. We have early strawberries for breakfast, at two we dine, have supper at half-past eight in the evening, and by ten we are all asleep. The country is covered with pear-trees and apple-trees, so heavy with fruit that they are all propped up; then the blue hills, and the windings of the Main and the Rhine; the confectioner, from whom you can buy thread and shirt-buttons; the list of visitors, which comes out every Saturday, as Punch does with you; the walking-post, who, before going to Frankfort, calls as he passes to ask what we want, and next day brings me my linen back; the women who sell cherries, with whom my little four-year-old Paul makes a bargain, or sends them away, just as he pleases; above all, the pure Rhenish air,—this is familiar to all, and I call it Germany!"

Grove makes this sketch of the blissful circle:

"The pleasure in his simple home life, which crops out now and then in these Frankfort letters, is very genuine and delightful. Now, Marie is learning the scale of C; he has actually forgotten how to play it, and has taught her to pass her thumb under the wrong finger! Now, Paul tumbles the others about so as to crack their skulls as well as his own. Another time he is dragged off from his letter to see a great tower which the children have built, and on which they have ranged all their slices of bread and jam—'A good idea for an architect,' At ten Carl comes to him for reading and sums, and at five for spelling and geography—and so on. 'And,' to sum up, 'the best part of every pleasure is gone if Cecile is not there,' His wife is always somewhere in the picture."

Even when Mendelssohn went to England and was cordially received by the young Queen Victoria, and when she asked him what she could grant him for his pleasure, he asked to see the royal nursery. Stratton describes the strange reward of his art as follows:

"Delighted beyond everything, the Queen led the way, and the two were soon deep in the mysteries of children's clothing, dietary, ailments, and all that appertains to the duties of the heads of a family. Perchance he inspected the juvenile wardrobe of the future Empress of his own Germany."

On one of the home festivals, Cecile and her sister gave and acted a comic dialogue between two ladies' maids, in Frankfort dialect. Gradually, however, Mendelssohn's overbusy musical enthusiasm wore down his health, and at thirty-seven he was nearing the end of his marvellous vitality and vivacity. In May, 1847, his sister Fanny was conducting a rehearsal of her choir; she sat at the piano till suddenly her hands dropped from the keys, and she was dead. The news was told to Mendelssohn without any preparation; with a scream he dropped senseless; it was said that a blood-vessel had broken in his brain. From this time on he was a changed man, weary of everything. He sank gradually until, the evening of November 4, 1847, he died, painlessly, in the presence of his wife, his brother, and three friends.

His funeral was a fitting close to his splendid life; six years later Cecile died at Frankfort of consumption.

Of Mendelssohn's character there is no need to speak further here; it was strangely summed up in his own words, in a letter he wrote to a man who had told him that he was spoken of as a veritable saint. How few saints are canonised in their own time, and how few deserve it ever! But let us take Mendelssohn's own words for his own epitaph:

"So I am said to be a saint! If this is intended to convey what I conceive to be the meaning of the word, and what your expressions lead me to think you also understand by it, then I can only say that, alas! I am not so, though every day of my life I strive with greater earnestness, according to my ability, more and more to resemble this character. I know indeed that I can never hope to be altogether a saint, but if I ever approach to one, it will be well. If people, however, understand by the word 'saint' a Pietist, one of those who lay their hands on their laps and expect that Providence will do their work for them, and who, instead of striving in their vocation to press on towards perfection, talk of a heavenly calling being incompatible with an earthly one, and are incapable of loving with their whole hearts any human being, or anything on earth,—then God be praised! such a one I am not, and hope never to become, so long as I live; and though I am sincerely desirous to live piously, and really to be so, I hope this does not necessarily entail the other character. It is singular that people should select precisely this time to say such a thing, when I am in the enjoyment of so much happiness, both through my inner and outer life, and my new domestic ties, as well as my busy work, that I really know not how sufficiently to show my thankfulness. And, as you wish me to follow the path which leads to rest and peace, believe me, I never expected to live in the rest and peace which have now fallen to my lot."



CHAPTER XVII.

THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN

He wrote to his parents:

"I have made the acquaintance of an important celebrity, Mme. Dudevant, well known as George Sand; but I do not like her face; there is something in it that repels me."

And then, of course, he fell in love with her, for she leaned on his piano and improvised flatteries across the strings to him and turned full on him the luminous midnight of her ox-eyed beauty. A punster would say that he was oxidised, at once. The two lovers were strangely unlike—of course. She was masculine, self-poised, and self-satisfied; she had taken excellent care of herself at a time when the independent woman had less encouragement than now. So more than masculinely coarse she was in some ways, indeed, that Henry James once insinuated that, while she may have been to all intents and purposes a man, she was certainly no gentleman. Heine raved over her beauty, but, judging from her portrait, she later had a face as homely as that of George Eliot, who, as Carlyle said, looked like a horse. The poet De Musset, one of Sand's later lovers, said her dark complexion gave reflections like bronze; therefore De Musset found her very beautiful. Chopin was—well, some say he was not effeminate; and he could break chairs when he was angry at a pupil. But they also speak of his frail, fairylike, ethereal manner, and those qualities I, for one, have never known in any non-effeminate man—outside of books.

The first meeting of Chopin and Sand was a curious proof of the value of presentiments, and should interest those who have such things and believe them. Chopin, according to Karasovski, went to the salon of the Countess de Custine. As he climbed the stairs he fancied that he was followed by a shadow odorous of violets; he wanted to turn back, but resisted the superstitious thrill. Those violets were the perfumery of George Sand. She snared him first with violet-water, and thereafter surrounded him with her multitudinous wreaths of tobacco—though he neither made nor liked smoke. She, however, puffed voluminously at cigarettes, and even, according to Von Lenz, at long black cigars—as did Liszt's princess.

Other accounts are given of the first meeting, and Liszt claims the credit for arranging it all at her request, in spite of Chopin's desire not to meet her. But, be that as it may, he came, he saw, and she conquered. The two were alike chiefly in their versatility as lovers.

Chopin's first loves were his family, on whom he doted with Polish fervour. George Sand once exclaimed that his mother was his only love. She was a Polish woman whose name was Krzyzanovska—a good name to change for the shorter tinkle of "Chopin." It was from her that Chopin took that deep-burning patriotism which characterised him and gave his music a national tinge. And at that time Polish patriotism was bound to be all one elegy. But Chopin's father was a Frenchman, and when finally the composer reached Paris, he found himself instantly at home, and the darling of the salons. How different this feeling was from the loneliness and disgust that Paris filled Mozart's soul withal!

As we found Mozart's first serious wound in the heart coming from a public singer, so Chopin (unless we except his pupil, the Princess Elisa Radziwill) seems to have been caught very young by Constantia Gladkovska. She made a great success at Warsaw in the year which was Chopin's twentieth. He had previously indulged in a mild flirtation with a pretty little pianist and composer, Leopoldine Blahetka, but in her case he seems less to have loved than to have graciously permitted himself to be loved. When he fell under the witchery of Gladkovska, however, he was genuinely pierced to the heart, and his letters are as full of vague morose yearning as his Preludes. He left Warsaw for Vienna, but the memory of her pursued him. She had sung at his farewell concert in Warsaw, and made a ravishing success as a picture and as a singer. In Vienna he longed for her so deeply that he went about wearing the black velvet mantle of gloom which was so effective on the musicians and poets of that day.

To-day we will hardly permit an artist an extra half-inch of hair, and he must be very well groomed, very prosperous, businesslike, and, in appearance at least, athletic—even if he must ask his tailor to furnish the look of brawn. Personally, I prefer the mode of to-day, but with to-day's fashion we should not have had Chopin, such music as he drew from his familiar and daemon, the piano, and such letters as he wrote about the Gladkovska to his friend Matuszynski:

"God forbid that she should suffer in any way on my account. Set her mind at rest, and tell her that as long as my heart beats I shall not cease to adore her. Tell her that even after my death my ashes shall be strewn under her feet."

While Chopin was thus mooning over her memory, she seems to have been finding consolation elsewhere than in her music, even as Mozart's Aloysia had done. This letter was sent on New Year's Day, 1831. After a few more references to her, her name vanishes from his letters, and the incident is closed. It may best be summed up in the words of James Huneker, who is one of the few writers who has kept his sanity on the subject of Chopin:

"He never saw his Gladkovska again, for he did not return to Warsaw. The lady was married in 1832—preferring a solid merchant to nebulous genius—to Joseph Grabovski, a merchant at Warsaw. Her husband, so saith a romantic biographer, Count Wodzinski, became blind; perhaps even a blind country gentleman was preferable to a lachrymose pianist. Chopin must have heard of the attachment in 1831. Her name almost disappears from his correspondence. Time as well as other nails drove from his memory her image. If she was fickle, he was inconstant, and so let us waste no pity on this episode, over which lakes of tears have been shed and rivers of ink have been spilt."

This same year, 1831, brought Chopin to Paris, thenceforward his residence and home. His great elegance of manner, as well as of music, brought him into the most aristocratic dove-cotes, or salons, as they called them, and it is small wonder that he found himself unable to avoid accepting and buttonholing for a while some of the countless hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. Even George Sand was amazed at his dexterity in juggling with hearts, and, in this matter, praise or blame from George Sand was praise from Lady Hubert. It seems that he could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as gracefully as from one key to its remotest neighbour. She says he could manage three flirtations of an evening, and begin a new series the very next day. Apparently even distance was no barrier, for George Sand declares that he was at the same moment trying to marry a girl in Poland and another in Paris. The Parisienne he cancelled from his list because, says Sand, when he called on her with another man, she offered the other man a chair before she asked Chopin to be seated. Chopin conducted himself in Paris very much en prince, according to Von Lenz, and such a sacrilege to the laws of precedence naturally was unpardonable.

The Polish woman whom Sand refers to may have been the one woman with whom Chopin is definitely known to have planned marriage. This was Maria Wodzinska. Her two brothers had boarded years before at the pension which Chopin's father kept at Warsaw. The acquaintance with the brothers was renewed in Paris, and when, in 1835, Chopin visited Dresden after a long journey to see his parents, he met the sister, Maria, then nineteen years old, and fell deeply and seriously in love with her. According to her brother, who wrote a biographical romance on "Chopin's Three Love Affairs," Maria, while not classically a beauty, had an indefinable charm.

"Her black eyes were full of sweetness, reverie, and restrained fire; a smile of ineffable voluptuousness played around her lips, and her magnificent hair was as dark as ebony and long enough to serve her as a mantle."

They flirted at the piano and behind a fan, and he dedicated her a little waltz, and she drew his portrait. As usual, the different biographers tell different stories, but from them the chief biographer of all, Frederick Neicks, decides that Chopin proposed and Maria deposed. And here endeth the second of Chopin's three romances. So this brings us back to Paris and George Sand, and the year 1837, when Chopin was twenty-eight and George Sand thirty-three.

Thus far we have followed the standard authorities, but the year 1903 has done much in the way of unveiling Chopin's life. His letters to his family, and their letters to him, were believed to have perished. They were in the possession of his sister Isabella Barcinska, and she was living in the palace of Count Zamoyski at Warsaw, in 1863, when a bomb was thrown from a window as the Russian lieutenant-general was passing. In revenge the soldiers sacked the palace, and burned what they did not carry off. Chopin's portrait by Ary Scheffer, his piano, and his Paris furniture perished, and his papers were believed to be among the lost.

But all the while the family was keeping their very existence secret until, after forty years, it was thought proper to give them to the public.

M. Karlovicz was entrusted with this honour, and La Revue Musicale of Paris chosen as the medium. The letters are said to make a large bulk, but I have been able to see only the first three instalments, of which two are family letters to him. They are exuberant with tenderness, admiration, and of hope for his great fame; the father constantly pleading with the son to lay up his sous against a rainy day,—advice which met the usual fate of good advice.

Karlovicz says, with some exaggeration: "In his letters to his family, Chopin, as if he wished to avoid pronouncing the name of George Sand, always calls her 'My hostess,' sometimes even employing, strange to say, the plural, for instance, 'Elles si cheres, elles rirent pour tous,' or, 'Here the vigil is sad, because les malades do not wish a doctor.'"

The first letter, signed "Fritz," is a most cordial welcome to a man about to marry his sister. The third is a double letter from George Sand and Chopin to Louise, who had just visited the two lovers at Nohant in 1844. Sand tells her that her visit has been the best tonic he has ever had, and writes to the whole family: "Tell them all that I love them, too, and would give my life to unite them with him one day under my roof." Chopin refers to Sand as "My hostess," and signs himself "Ton vieux." In his next he details with much amusement a scandalous escapade of Victor Hugo's, a husband's discovery, and Madame Hugo's forgiving manner. He announces (July 20, 1845) that "le telegraphe electro-magnetique entre Baltimore et Washington, donne des resultats extraordinaires." He revels in puns and gossip.

Karlovicz mentions the existence of a despairing letter in which Chopin called his sister Louise to Paris where he was dying; she came in 1849, with her husband and daughter, and remained till the end, giving him the last tendernesses in her power.

This is all I have gleaned from Karlovicz. More immediate help has come from a new biography published in Warsaw in 1903 by Ferdinand Hoesick, and, according to Alfred Nossig, destined to upset the supremacy of Nieck's biography. This latest work is really the carrying out of the plans of Chopin's friend and fellow student, Julian Fontana, who shared joy and sorrow with him in Paris, and collected letters and data for a biography. On Chopin's death Liszt sprang into print with a rhapsody which led Fontana to defer his work. At his death in 1869 he left it unfinished, bequeathing his documents to his son, who permitted Hoesick the use of them.

Hoesick blames Chopin's notable melancholy to early experiences of love requited, indeed, but not united in marriage. His love was as rathe as his music.

Alfred Nossig, reviewing the biography, says of Chopin: "As his talent, so did his heart mature early." It was at Warsaw, in his early youth, that he found his first ideal. Although his father, a Frenchman who had married a Polish woman, did not occupy a foremost position in society, Frederic moved in the highest circles. In addition to his genius he had always the princely way with him.

One of his admirers was the Duchess Ludvika Czetvertynska, whose majestic figure and aureole of hair reminded one of the pictures of Giorgione. Her friend, the Governor of Poland, the Grand Duke Konstantin, through her introduction accepted Chopin as one of his most welcome guests; he was musical, and greatly admired Chopin's music. Whenever his violent temper carried him away, the grand duchess would send secretly for Chopin, who would seat himself at the piano, and at the first notes the grand duke would appear in the drawing-room with his temper cured. Thus was Chopin another David to a latter-day Saul. Chopin was an intimate friend of the grand duke's son, Paul, whose instructor was a Count Moriolles. It was his daughter, the Comtesse Alexandra, in whose eyes Chopin found inspiration; he improvised never so beautifully as when she sat next to him at the piano. His adoration was no secret. He was often teased on account of the beautiful "Mariolka," as he called her. In his letters to his friends, we find many allusions that prove that the young comtesse loved him in turn. But both knew that this love was hopeless, and therefore Chopin's musical expressions of his dreams for her are melancholy. One remembrance of this attachment is the Rondo a la Mazur, Op. 5, which he dedicated to the Comtesse de Moriolles.

In 1830 Chopin toured the continent. As in his later relation to George Sand, the passion of a poet, Alfred Musset, rivalled his, so at this time he found a rival in the Polish poet, Julius Slovaki. The pretty, vivacious, and perhaps somewhat flirtatious girl, Comtesse Maria Wodzinska, was the bone of contention, or, rather, the "rag and the bone and the hank of hair" of contention.

It chanced that Chopin and Slovaki, whose works showed most startling similarity, were also much alike in looks, in slenderness, dreaminess of feature, and even in expression of countenance. Their very fates were like: both left their country never to return. In their wandering through Europe, they stopped in the same capitals; both at last took up their residence in Paris, where both died of consumption. It was these twins of fate whom fate put in love with the same teasing girl.

The "black-eyed demoiselle," as she was called by the poet and the musician, managed so well, that her two admirers never met at the same time. She travelled through Europe with her mother and brothers, and found an opportunity to meet Chopin in one, and Slovaki in another town, and to pass several weeks with each.

It was Slovaki's turn to meet her in Geneva. Here she inspired him to much verse, especially his "In der Schweiz." But all this while the little vixen corresponded with Chopin. He improvised in Paris on themes she composed, and then she repeated his inspirations to keep Slovaki hovering at her piano.

When Chopin met the Wodzinskis in Dresden, he composed for Maria his F-minor Etude which he called "the soul-portrait" of the comtesse. A year later he passed a month with the family at Marienbad, where he proposed for her hand and was accepted. In his bridegroom mood he composed the graceful F-minor Waltz, and later the C-sharp minor Nocturne.

In the meantime, Slovaki travelled on in blissful ignorance, glorifying Chopin's fiancee in poetic songs full of passionate admiration. The distant Slovaki finally learned that Chopin had won his muse, and he wrote to his mother:

"They say that Chopin and 'my Maria' are to be a pair. How sentimental to marry a person who is the image of one's first love. Swedenborg says that in a case of this kind, after death, not out of two of the souls but out of all three only one angel can be created."

But this tripartite angel died unborn, for in 1837 Chopin found himself deserted by her. So much we learn from Hoesick. And now we may return to Chopin's immortal, if immoral, affair with George Sand.

George Sand will be remembered for the famous love affairs she has contributed to history long after her books have lost their last reader. It has been my habit in these papers to take the woman's side, and even for George Sand there is much to be said in praise and in palliation. For her peculiar views of life her peculiar husband may be largely blamed, along with the peculiar ideals of the literary circle into which her unhappy married life drove her. That she showed good taste in either the management or the publication of her amorous entanglements one could hardly maintain, and yet the men in the case seem to have been at least as caddish as she was unwomanly. But it would take volumes to recount what volumes have already recounted, and bewilderment and contradiction would still be the chief result. Since so much of the story is familiar, I can be brief with it here.

George Sand's relations with Chopin have been accepted in almost every conceivable manner. There have even been writers of such intelligence as Hadow who have maintained that she was entirely and solely a mother to him. Before a trust in humanity as bland as this, before a credulity that can deny itself to certain records and stretch itself to certain others, there is nothing to say except to express gratitude that in some hearts, at least, the belief in fairy stories is not left behind in the nursery.

On the other hand, it is not necessary to fly to the opposite extreme, and condemn the years that Chopin and Sand spent together as years devoid of very earnest sympathy, intellectual and artistic communion, and of mutual advantage. The relations were irregular, and were harrowed by the temperaments of each. Sand was masculine, energetic, restless, and by nature—for which she was surely not thoroughly to blame—a voluptuary. Chopin, while not the whining mooncalf some have painted him, was never of truly virile character. He was a man whose genius was as limited in scope as a diamond's lustre, even while it had the brilliance, the firmness, and the solitariness of that jewel. And, most of all, he was that most pathetic of wretches, a sick man. He was drifting down the current of that stream which had carried off his gifted and adored sister when she was half his present age.

Sand was the former of the two to fall in love, and the earlier to fall out. After the first meeting, there was little delay in beginning that form of unchurched marriage so fashionable in the art world of that day. In 1838 they went to Majorca with Sand's two children, a son and daughter, who had been born to her husband. The weather was atrocious, the accommodations primitive, and Chopin's health wretched. He was beset by presentiments and fierce anxieties, and tormented by a hatred of the place and the clime. In June of the next year they went back to Nohant, her chateau. We owe to Sand herself the account of Chopin's manner of life, his petulance, his self-inflicted torments, and the agonies of his art and his disease. We owe to her, also, the picture of her devotion both to his health and to his music.

The tendency, of course, is to take her praises of herself with a liberal sprinkling of salt, and to feel that Chopin was not the "detestable invalid" she painted him. But need we withdraw charity from one, to give to the other? Need we rob Pauline to pay Peter? There should be easily a plenty of sympathy for both, for the woman infatuated with a strange, exotic genius, gathering him into her heart and home, only to find that she had taken upon herself the role of nurse as well as mistress; and to find her time and her vitality devoted to an invalid, while her own life-work as a famous writer was making demands on her as wild as those of a sick musician her junior in years as in fame.

After granting her this justice, there should still be no stint of sympathy for the poor Chopin, wrought to a frenzy with the revolutions he was so gorgeously effecting, not only in the music of the piano, but in all harmony; racked with pain and unmanned with the weakening effects of his disease; struggling vainly against the chill and clammy Wrestler who was to drag him to his grave before his life was half complete.

Our feeling, again, should not be wrath at George Sand because she did not eternally resist the centrifugal forces of such a life, but rather a deep sense of gratitude that she gave Chopin some sort of home and mental support for ten long years.

George Sand's books are full of allusions to Chopin, and from the many that are quoteworthy, the following may be cited from her "Histoire de ma Vie," as throwing a few flecks of light on the woman's attitude in the affair:

"He was the same in friendship (as in love), becoming enthusiastic at first sight, getting disgusted and correcting himself (se reprenant) incessantly, living on infatuations full of charm for those who were the object of them and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest affections."

"Chopin accorded to me, I may say, honoured me with, a kind of friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always the same to me."

"The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness. He had enough of his own ills to bear."

"We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once, which, alas, was the first and the final time."

"But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace, obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured the asperities of character towards those who were about me. With them the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice versa."

"Chopin when angry was alarming, and, as, with me, he always restrained himself, he seemed almost to choke and die."

It is generally believed that in the character of Prince Karol in her novel, "Lucrezia Floriani," published in 1847, Sand used that lethal weapon of revenge novelists possess, and portrayed or caricatured Chopin. It is only fair to give her disclaimer, though Liszt repeated the charge in his "Life of Chopin," and though Karasovski says that Sand's own children told Chopin that he was pictured as Prince Karol. None the less, hearken to the novelist's own defence:

"It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his (Chopin's) character with a great exactness of analysis. People were mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and, proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in a life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in good faith. I have traced in Prince Karol the character of a man determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his exigencies. Chopin was not such. Nature does not design like art, however realistic it may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is too limited to reproduce them.

"Chopin was a resume of these magnificent inconsequences which God alone can allow himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full of unlegitimate pride, which was unconscious of itself. Hence sufferings which he did not reason out and which did not fix themselves on a determined object.

"However, Prince Karol is not an artist. He is a dreamer and nothing more; having no genius, he has not the right of genius. He is therefore a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the manuscript every day on my desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself,—he who, nevertheless, was so suspicious.

"And yet, afterwards, by reaction, he imagined, I am told, than this was the case. Enemies (he had such about him who call themselves his friends; as if embittering a suffering heart was not murder), enemies made him believe that this romance was a revelation of his character. At that time his memory was no doubt enfeebled; he had forgotten the book, why did he not re-read it?

"This history is so little ours—It was the very reverse of it. There were between us neither the same raptures (envirements), nor the same sufferings. Our history had nothing of a romance; its foundation was too simple and too serious for us ever to have had occasion for a quarrel with each other a propos of each other."

As to the final separation, following my principle of letting the people tell their own stories so far as possible, I may turn again to George Sand's own version:

"After the last relapse of the invalid, his mind had become extremely gloomy, and Maurice [her son], who had hitherto tenderly loved him, was suddenly wounded by him in an unexpected manner about a trifling subject. They embraced each other the next moment, but the grain of sand had fallen into the tranquil lake, and little by little the pebbles fell there, one after another—all this was borne; but at last, one day, Maurice, tired of the pin-pricks, spoke of giving up the game. That could not be, and should not be. Chopin would not stand my legitimate and necessary intervention. He bowed his head and said that I no longer loved him.

"What blasphemy after these eight years of maternal devotion! But the poor bruised heart was not conscious of its delirium. I thought that some months passed at a distance and in silence would heal the wound, and make his friendship again calm and his memory equitable. But the revolution of February came, and Paris became momentarily hateful to this mind incapable of yielding to any commotion in the social form. Free to return to Poland, or certain to be tolerated there, he had preferred languishing ten (and some more) years far from his family, whom he adored, to the pain of seeing his country transformed and deformed (denature). He had fled from tyranny, as now he fled from liberty.

"I saw him again for an instant in March, 1848. I pressed his trembling and icy hand. I wished to speak to him, he slipped away. Now it was my turn to say that he no longer loved me. I spared him this infliction, and entrusted all to the hands of Providence and the future.

"I was not to see him again. There were bad hearts between us. There were good ones, too, who were at a loss what to do. There were frivolous ones who preferred not to meddle with such delicate matters.

"I have been told that he had asked for me, regretted me, and loved me filially up to the very end. It was thought fit to conceal from him that I was ready to hasten to him. It was thought fit to conceal this from me till then."

This, then, is George Sand's story, which has not been granted very much credence.

The cause of their—"divorce," one might call it—is blurred by the usual discrepancies of gossip. The most probable account seems to be that according to which Chopin mortally wounded Sand by receiving her daughter and her son-in-law when they were out of Sand's favour. All accounts agree that this was to her only a pretext for breaking shackles that had begun to be irksome. All are agreed that it was Sand and not Chopin who ended the relationship, and that she, as Niecks bluntly puts it, "had recourse to the heroic means of kicking him, metaphorically speaking, out-of-doors."

The woman seems easily to have forgotten the man who had proved, at best, of little joy to her, for, as she says, she could never go to him with her troubles, since he had always a plenty of his own. It was a relief, then, to her, being a far busier woman than he a man, to find herself free.

But Chopin was robbed of his last support. The strong woman he had leaned upon was gone, and he was alone with the consumption that was eating his life away. He started forth upon a concert tour, but the chill climates of England and Scotland were not refuges from his haunting disease. He died slowly and in poverty, though he was unconscious of want, thanks to the generosity of a Russian countess and a Scotch woman. Dependent upon women to the last! In his dying hours it is said that George Sand called at his house, but was not admitted to see him, though, as he wailed two days before his death, "She said I should die in no other arms than hers" (Que je ne mourrais que dans ses bras).

But even the story of her visit is denied. Turgeniev said that fifty countesses had claimed that he died in their arms. Among the number was the Countess Potocka, who is cherished traditionally as one of Chopin's loves, and who was much with him during his last days, and sang for him, at his request, as he lay dying. Poor genius! he must even have a woman sing his swan-song for him! Potocka is best known by a familiar portrait that you will find in a thousand homes. But how the higher criticism undermines the gospel of tradition! The truth is that Chopin denied ever having been in love with her or she with him, and Huneker even claims that the famous portrait of her is not of her at all.

But however attended, visited, caressed, Chopin died at the threshold of his prime, his life, lighted at most with a little feverish twinkling of stars, one nocturne.

END OF VOLUME I.