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Erskine, who was with Miss Stirling in Paris, her aunt instead of her sister; and thought that Miss Stirling was about eighteen years old when he taught her. To her the composer dedicated his Deux Nocturnes, Op. 55, which he published in August, 1844. It was thought that she was in love with Chopin, and there were rumours of their going to be married.
"See," he whispered; "oh, listen!" He spread Kirk's fingers above the keyboard brought them down on a fine chord of the Chopin prelude, and for one instant Kirk felt coursing through him a feeling inexplicable as it was exciting as painful as it was glad. The next moment the chord died; the old man was again the gentle friend of the fireside. "I am stupid," he said, "and ill-advised.
Chopin revealed himself only in his music, but there he revealed himself fully. And was this expression of his inner life really "mysterious and vague"? I think not! At least, no effusion of words could have made clearer and more distinct what he expressed.
Set against Field's naive and idyllic specimens, Chopin's efforts are often too bejewelled for true simplicity, too lugubrious, too tropical Asiatic is a better word and they have the exotic savor of the heated conservatory, and not the fresh scent of the flowers reared in the open by the less poetic Irishman. And, then, Chopin is so desperately sentimental in some of these compositions.
Perhaps the importance of the rubato in Chopin cannot be more readily realized than by his concession that he could never play a Viennese waltz properly, and by the fact that sometimes, when he was in a jocular mood, he would play one of his mazurkas in strict, metronomic time, to the great amusement of those who had heard him play them properly.
And instantly he broke into that sweet air, with its fateful hushed accompaniment the trifle which Chopin threw off in a moment of his highest inspiration. 'It is the thirteenth Prelude, I reflected. I was disturbed, profoundly troubled. The next piece was the last, and it was the Fantasia, the masterpiece of Chopin.
George Sand, although one of the cleverest of the literary portrayers who have tried their hand at Chopin, cannot be regarded as one of the most impartial; but it must be admitted that in describing her deserted lover as un homme du monde par excellence, non pas du monde trop officiel, trop nombreux, she says what is confirmed by all who have known him, by his friends, foes, and those that are neither.
And the almost incredible sensitiveness of Chopin has been illustrated in the memoirs of George Sand. An unusually emotional nature being thus the general characteristic of musical composers, we have in it just the agency required for the development of recitative and song.
Chopin was perhaps an equal feature of interest with Alboni, as he was preceded by a high musical reputation. This vanishes when he seats himself at the instrument, in which he seems for the time perfectly absorbed.
But as the term taught nothing to him who knew, said nothing to him who did not know, understand, and feel, Chopin afterwards ceased to add this explanation to his music, being persuaded that if one understood it, it was impossible not to divine this rule of irregularity.
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