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 t