nticism which they opposed to the classic and
formal pedantry of the time.

Buried in a fauteuil, with her arms resting upon a table, sits Mme.
George Sand (that name so tragically mixed with Chopin's life),
"curiously attentive, gracefully subdued." With the second sight of
genius, which pierces through the mask, she saw the sweetness, the
passion, the delicate emotional sensibility of Chopin; and her insatiate
nature must unravel and assimilate this new study in human enjoyment and
suffering. She had then just finished "Lelia," that strange and
powerful creation, in which she embodied all her hatred of the forms and
tyrannies of society, her craving for an impossible social ideal, her
tempestuous hopes and desires, in such startling types. Exhausted by the
struggle, she panted for the rest and luxury of a companionship in
which both brain and heart could find sympathy. She met Chopin, and she
recognized in the poetry of his temperament and the fire of his genius
what she desired. Her personality, electric, energetic, and imperious,
exercised the power of a magnet on the frail organization of Chopin, and
he loved once and forever, with a passion that consumed him; for in Mme.
Sand he found the blessing and curse of his life. This many-sided woman,
at this point of her development, found in the fragile Chopin one phase
of her nature which had never been expressed, and he was sacrificed
to the demands of an insatiable originality, which tried all things in
turn, to be contented with nothing but an ideal which could never be
attained.

About the time of Chopin's arrival in Paris the political effervescence
of the recent revolution had passed into art and letters. It was the
oft-repeated battle of Romanticism against Classicism. There could be no
truce between those who believed that everything must be fashioned after
old models, that Procrustes must settle the height and depth, the length
and breadth of art-forms, and those who, inspired with the new wine of
liberty and free creative thought, held that the rule of form should
always be the mere expression of the vital, flexible thought. The one
side argued that supreme perfection already reached left the artist hope
only in imitation; the other, that the immaterial beautiful could have
no fixed absolute form. Victor Hugo among the poets, Delacroix among the
painters, and Berlioz among the musicians, led the ranks of the romantic
school.

Chopin found himself strongly e