before he put a composition to paper, but when it was once in writing did not keep it long in his portfolio.  The latter part of this statement is contradicted by a remark of the better-informed Fontana, who, in the preface to Chopin’s posthumous works, says that the composer, whether from caprice or nonchalance, had the habit of keeping his manuscripts sometimes a very long time in his portfolio before giving them to the public.  As George Sand observed the composer with an artist’s eye and interest, and had, of course, better opportunities than anybody else to observe him, her remarks are particularly valuable.  She writes:—­

His creation was spontaneous and miraculous.  He found it without seeking it, without foreseeing it.  It came on his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was impatient to play it to himself.  But then began the most heart-rending labour I ever saw.  It was a series of efforts, of irresolutions, and of frettings to seize again certain details of the theme he had heard; what he had conceived as a whole he analysed too much when wishing to write it, and his regret at not finding it again, in his opinion, clearly defined, threw him into a kind of despair.  He shut himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeating and altering a bar a hundred times, writing and effacing it as many times, and recommencing the next day with 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,