ul the purest feeling which is
bestowed on man, the paternal feeling. What will be the
result? This sublime feeling, intensified according to
certain conditions, will transform under your eyes the
degraded creature; the little being will become great; the
deformed being will become beautiful.--Take the most hideous,
repulsive, and complete moral deformity; place it where it
stands out most prominently, in the heart of a woman, with
all the conditions of physical beauty and royal grandeur
which give prominence to crime; and now mix with all this
moral deformity a pure feeling, the purest which woman can
feel, the maternal feeling; place a mother in your monster
and the monster will interest you, and the monster will make
you weep, and this creature which caused fear will cause
pity, and this deformed soul will become almost beautiful in
your eyes. Thus we have in Le Roi s'amuse paternity
sanctifying physical deformity; and in Lucrece Borgia
maternity purifying moral deformity. [FOOTNOTE: from Victor
Hugo's preface to "Lucrece Borgia."]

In fact, Chopin assimilated nothing or infinitely little of the ideas
that were surging around him. His ambition was, as he confided to his
friend Hiller, to become to his countrymen as a musician what Uhland was
to the Germans as a poet. Nevertheless, the intellectual activity of
the French capital and its tendencies had a considerable influence on
Chopin. They strengthened the spirit of independence in him, and were
potent impulses that helped to unfold his individuality in all its width
and depth. The intensification of thought and feeling, and the greater
fulness and compactness of his pianoforte style in his Parisian
compositions, cannot escape the attentive observer. The artist who
contributed the largest quotum of force to this impulse was probably
Liszt, whose fiery passions, indomitable energy, soaring enthusiasm,
universal tastes, and capacity of assimilation, mark him out as the very
opposite of Chopin. But, although the latter was undoubtedly stimulated
by Liszt's style of playing the piano and of writing for this
instrument, it is not so certain as Miss L. Ramann, Liszt's biographer,
thinks, that this master's influence can be discovered in many passages
of Chopin's music which are distinguished by a fiery and passionate
expression, and resemble rather a strong, swelling torrent than a
gently-gliding rivulet. She instanc