ith a minute and desperate perseverance. He
spent six weeks over a single page to write it at last as he
had noted it down at the very first.

I had for a long time been able to make him consent to trust
to this first inspiration. But when he was no longer disposed
to believe me, he reproached me gently with having spoiled him
and with not being severe enough for him. I tried to amuse
him, to take him out for walks. Sometimes, taking away all my
brood in a country char a bancs, I dragged him away in spite
of himself from this agony. I took him to the banks of the
Creuse, and after being for two or three days lost amid
sunshine and rain in frightful roads, we arrived, cheerful and
famished, at some magnificently-situated place where he seemed
to revive. These fatigues knocked him up the first day, but he
slept. The last day he was quite revived, quite rejuvenated in
returning to Nohant, and he found the solution of his work
without too much effort; but it was not always possible to
prevail upon him to leave that piano which was much oftener
his torment than his joy, and by degrees he showed temper when
I disturbed him. I dared not insist. Chopin when angry was
alarming, and as, with me, he always restrained himself, he
seemed almost to choke and die.

A critic remarks in reference to this account that Chopin's mode of
creation does not show genius, but only passion. From which we may
conclude that he would not, like Carlyle, have defined genius as the
power of taking infinite pains. To be sure, the great Scotchman's
definition is inadequate, but nothing is more false than the popular
notion that the great authors throw off their works with the
pleasantest ease, that creation is an act of pure enjoyment. Beethoven's
sketch-books tell a different story; so do also Balzac's proof-sheets
and the manuscripts of Pope's version of the Iliad and Odyssey in the
British Museum. Dr. Johnson speaking of Milton's MSS. observed truly:
"Such reliques show how excellence is acquired." Goethe in writing to
Schiller asks him to return certain books of "Wilhelm Meister" that he
may go over them A FEW TIMES before sending them to the press. And on
re-reading one of these books he cut out one third of its contents.
Moreover, if an author writes with ease, this is not necessarily a proof
that he labours little, for he may finish the work before bringing it to
paper. Mozart is a striking instance. H