ays shrank
from the display of his powers as a mere executant. To exhibit his
talents to the public was an offense to him, and he only cared for his
remarkable technical skill as a means of placing his fanciful original
poems in tone rightly before the public. It was with the greatest
difficulty that his intimate friends, Liszt, Meyerbeer, Nourrit,
Delacroix, Heine, Mme. George Sand, Countess D'Agoult, and others, could
persuade him to appear before large mixed audiences. His genius only
shone unconstrained as a player in the society of a few chosen intimate
friends, with whom he felt a perfect sympathy, artistic, social, and
intellectual. Exquisite, fastidious, and refined, Chopin was loss an
aristocrat from political causes, or even by virtue of social caste,
than from the fact that his art nature, which was delicate, feminine,
and sensitive, shrank from all companions except those molded of the
finest clay. We find this sense of exclusiveness and isolation in all
of the Chopin music, as in some quaint, fantastic, ideal world, whose
master would draw us up to his sphere, but never descend to ours.

In the treatment of the technical means of the piano-forte, he entirely
wanders from the old methods. Moscheles, a great pianist in an age of
great players, gave it up in despair, and confessed that he could not
play Chopin's music. The latter teaches the fingers to serve his own
artistic uses, without regard to the notions of the schools. It is said
that M. Kalkbrenner advised Chopin to attend his classes at the Paris
Conservatoire, that the latter might learn the proper fingering. Chopin
answered his officious adviser by placing one of his own "Etudes" before
him, and asking him to play it. The failure of the pompous professor
was ludicrous, for the old-established technique utterly failed to do it
justice. Chopin's end as a player was to faithfully interpret the poetry
of his own composition. His genius as a composer taught him to make
innovations in piano-forte effects. He was thus not only a great
inventor as a composer, but as regards the technique of the piano-forte.
He not only told new things well worth hearing which the world would not
forget, but devised new ways of saying them, and it mattered but little
to him whether his more forcible and passionate dialectic offended what
Schumann calls musical Philistinism or no. Chopin formed a school of his
own which was purely the outcome of his genius, though as Schumann,