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"And in fine, my dear," said the commonwealth attorney, "you have not a single eye-witness. And from time immemorial an eye-witness has been looked upon as worth a hundred hearsays." "I have Cocoleu," said M. Galpin, who was rather impatient of all these objections. "Have the doctors decided that he is not an idiot?" "No: Dr. Seignebos alone maintains that doctrine."
The documents letters and newspaper advertisements and notices bearing on this period of Chopin's life are so plentiful that they tell the story without the help of many additions and explanatory notes. This is satisfactory, for one grain of fact is more precious than a bushel of guesses and hearsays. Chopin to Gutmann; London, 48, Dover Street, Piccadilly, Saturday, May 6, 1848:
No poet, perhaps, shows wider and truer sympathy with every form of the really beautiful in art, nature, and history: and yet he was a Puritan. Yes, Milton was a Puritan; one who, instead of trusting himself and his hopes of the universe to second-hand hearsays, systems, and traditions, had looked God's Word and his own soul in the face, and determined to act on that which he had found.
For, think, if we really believed that, what power it would give us to overcome the world, and all its chances and changes; all its seemingly iron laws; all its selfish struggling; all its hearsays and fashions. Those chances and changes of mortal life of which I spoke first. We should not be afraid of them, then, even if they came.
Direct from the Inner Fact of things; he lives, and has to live, in daily communion with that. Hearsays cannot hide it from him; he is blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays; it glares in upon him. Really his utterances, are they not a kind of "revelation;" what we must call such for want of some other name?
"Abraham Van Vechten is skilful counsel, and an honest man, and is riot likely to be employed in a cause that rests only on an old woman's hearsays and all to save her own farm!" Marble could keep silence no longer.
But if no world exist in the man; if nothing but continents of empty vapor, of greedy self-conceits, common-place hearsays, and indistinct loomings of a sordid chaos exist in him, what will be the use of "light" to show us that? Better a thousand times that such a man do not speak; but keep his empty vapor and his sordid chaos to himself, hidden to the utmost from all beholders.
And it takes a real live soul to do good or evil. That is the point of Mr. Kipling's Tomlinson a mere bundle of hearsays who could win neither hell nor heaven. It is also the teaching of Ibsen. You must not shrink from wrong because you are told it is wrong, but because you see it is wrong. But few people can expect to develop a personality of their own.
I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him. Truly Concord seems worthy of the name: no dissonance comes to me from that side. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world there were still but this one voice that responded intelligently to my own: as if the rest were all hearsays ... echoes: as if this alone were true and alive.
There you would find the love you sought in vain amid the swine of earth; there you would hear a concert of somewhat different melody from that of M. Rossini, voices more faultless than that of Malibran. But I am speaking as a blind man might, and repeating hearsays. If I had not visited Germany about the year 1791, I should know nothing of all this. Yes! man has a vocation for the infinite.
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