e, of
delicate health, and not destined, so they said in Warsaw, for a long
life. This must have been during one of his depressed periods, for his
stay in Berlin gives a record of unclouded spirits. However, his sister
Emilia died young of pulmonary trouble and doubtless Frederic was
predisposed to lung complaint. He was constantly admonished by his
relatives to keep his coat closed. Perhaps, as in Wagner's case, the
uncontrollable gayety and hectic humors were but so many signs of a
fatal disintegrating process. Wagner outlived them until the Scriptural
age, but Chopin succumbed when grief, disappointment and intense
feeling had undermined him. For the dissipations of the "average
sensual man" he had an abiding contempt. He never smoked, in fact
disliked it. His friend Sand differed greatly in this respect, and one
of the saddest anecdotes related by De Lenz accuses her of calling for
a match to light her cigar: "Frederic, un fidibus," she commanded, and
Frederic obeyed. Mr. Philip Hale mentions a letter from Balzac to his
Countess Hanska, dated March 15, 1841, which concludes: "George Sand
did not leave Paris last year. She lives at Rue Pigalle, No.
16...Chopin is always there. Elle ne fume que des cigarettes, et pas
autre chose" Mr. Hale states that the italics are in the letter. So
much for De Lenz and his fidibus!

I am impelled here to quote from Mr. Earnest Newman's "Study of Wagner"
because Chopin's exaltation of spirits, alternating with irritability
and intense depression, were duplicated in Wagner. Mr. Newman writes of
Wagner: "There have been few men in whom the torch of life has burned
so fiercely. In his early days he seems to have had that gayety of
temperament and that apparently boundless energy which men in his case,
as in that of Heine, Nietzsche, Amiel and others, have wrongly assumed
to be the outcome of harmonious physical and mental health. There is a
pathetic exception in the outward lives of so many men of genius, the
bloom being, to the instructed eye, only the indication of some subtle
nervous derangement, only the forerunner of decay." The overmastering
cerebral agitation that obsessed Wagner's life, was as with Chopin a
symptom, not a sickness; but in the latter it had not yet assumed a
sinister turn.

Chopin's fourteen days in Berlin,--he went there under the protection
of his father's friend, Professor Jarocki, to attend the great
scientific congress--were full of joy unrestrained. The p