spectacle of a thoroughly romantic and emphatically
unclassical composer who has no sympathy either with Berlioz and Liszt,
or with Schumann and other leaders of romanticism, and the object of
whose constant and ardent love and admiration was Mozart, the purest
type of classicism. But the romantic, which Jean Paul Richter defined
as "the beautiful without limitation, or the beautiful infinite" [das
Schone ohne Begrenzung, oder das schone Unendliche], affords more
scope for wide divergence, and allows greater freedom in the display of
individual and national differences, than the classical.

Chopin's and Berlioz's relative positions may be compared to those of
V. Hugo and Alfred de Musset, both of whom were undeniably romanticists,
and yet as unlike as two authors can be. For a time Chopin was carried
away by Liszt's and Killer's enthusiasm for Berlioz, but he soon retired
from his championship, as Musset from the Cenacle. Franchomme thought
this took place in 1833, but perhaps he antedated this change of
opinion. At any rate, Chopin told him that he had expected better things
from Berlioz, and declared that the latter's music justified any man
in breaking off all friendship with him. Some years afterwards, when
conversing with his pupil Gutmann about Berlioz, Chopin took up a pen,
bent back the point of it, and then let it rebound, saying: "This is the
way Berlioz composes--he sputters the ink over the pages of ruled paper,
and the result is as chance wills it." Chopin did not like the works of
Victor Hugo, because he felt them to be too coarse and violent. And this
may also have been his opinion of Berlioz's works. No doubt he spurned
Voltaire's maxim, "Le gout n'est autre chose pour la poesie que ce
qu'il est pour les ajustements des femmes," and embraced V. Hugo's
countermaxim, "Le gout c'est la raison du genie"; but his delicate,
beauty-loving nature could feel nothing but disgust at what has been
called the rehabilitation of the ugly, at such creations, for instance,
as Le Roi s'amuse and Lucrece Borgia, of which, according to their
author's own declaration, this is the essence:--

Take the most hideous, repulsive, and complete physical
deformity; place it where it stands out most prominently, in
the lowest, most subterraneous and despised story of the
social edifice; illuminate this miserable creature on all
sides by the sinister light of contrasts; and then give it a
soul, and place in that so