eat and many--I have laboured to the full extent
of my humble abilities to group and present my material perspicuously,
and to avoid diffuseness and rhapsody, those besetting sins of writers
on music.

The first work of some length having Chopin for its subject was Liszt's
"Frederic Chopin," which, after appearing in 1851 in the Paris journal
"La France musicale," came out in book-form, still in French, in 1852
(Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hartel.--Translated into English by M. W. Cook,
and published by William Reeves, London, 1877). George Sand describes
it as "un peu exuberant de style, mais rempli de bonnes choses et de
tres-belles pages." These words, however, do in no way justice to the
book: for, on the one hand, the style is excessively, and not merely
a little, exuberant; and, on the other hand, the "good things" and
"beautiful pages" amount to a psychological study of Chopin, and an
aesthetical study of his works, which it is impossible to over-estimate.
Still, the book is no biography. It records few dates and events, and
these few are for the most part incorrect. When, in 1878, the second
edition of F. Chopin was passing through the press, Liszt remarked to
me:--

"I have been told that there are wrong dates and other mistakes in my
book, and that the dates and facts are correctly given in Karasowski's
biography of Chopin [which had in the meantime been published]. But,
though I often thought of reading it, I have not yet done so. I got my
information from Paris friends on whom I believed I might depend. The
Princess Wittgenstein [who then lived in Rome, but in 1850 at Weimar,
and is said to have had a share in the production of the book] wished me
to make some alterations in the new edition. I tried to please her, but,
when she was still dissatisfied, I told her to add and alter whatever
she liked."

From this statement it is clear that Liszt had not the stuff of a
biographer in him. And, whatever value we may put on the Princess
Wittgenstein's additions and alterations, they did not touch the vital
faults of the work, which, as a French critic remarked, was a symphonie
funebre rather than a biography. The next book we have to notice, M. A.
Szulc's Polish Fryderyk Chopin i Utwory jego Muzyczne (Posen, 1873), is
little more than a chaotic, unsifted collection of notices, criticisms,
anecdotes, &c., from Polish, German, and French books and magazines. In
1877 Moritz Karasowski, a native of Warsaw, and since 1864