exists not. Henselt was only a German who fell
asleep and dreamed of Chopin. To a Thalberg-ian euphony he has added a
technical figuration not unlike Chopin's, and a spirit quite Teutonic
in its sentimentality. Rubinstein calls Chopin the exhalation of the
third epoch in art. He certainly closed one. With a less strong
rhythmic impulse and formal sense Chopin's music would have degenerated
into mere overperfumed impressionism. The French piano school of his
day, indeed of today, is entirely drowned by its devotion to cold
decoration, to unemotional ornamentation. Mannerisms he had--what great
artist has not?--but the Greek in him, as in Heine, kept him from
formlessness. He is seldom a landscapist, but he can handle his brush
deftly before nature if he must. He paints atmosphere, the open air at
eventide, with consummate skill, and for playing fantastic tricks on
your nerves in the depiction of the superhuman he has a peculiar
faculty. Remember that in Chopin's early days the Byronic pose, the
grandiose and the horrible prevailed--witness the pictures of Ingres
and Delacroix--and Richter wrote with his heart-strings saturated in
moonshine and tears. Chopin did not altogether escape the artistic
vices of his generation. As a man he was a bit of poseur--the little
whisker grown on one side of his face, the side which he turned to his
audience, is a note of foppery--but was ever a detester of the
sham-artistic. He was sincere, and his survival, when nearly all of
Mendelssohn, much of Schumann and half of Berlioz have suffered an
eclipse, is proof positive of his vitality. The fruit of his
experimentings in tonality we see in the whole latter-day school of
piano, dramatic and orchestral composers. That Chopin may lead to the
development and adoption of the new enharmonic scales, the "Homotonic
scales," I do not know. For these M. A. de Bertha claimed the future of
music. He wrote:

"Now vaporously illumined by the crepuscular light of a magical sky on
the boundaries of the major and minor modes, now seeming to spring from
the bowels of the earth with sepulchral inflexions, melody moves with
ease on the serried degrees of the enharmonic scales. Lively or slow
she always assumed in them the accents of a fatalist impossibility, for
the laws of arithmetic have preceded her, and there still remains, as
it were, an atmosphere of proud rigidity. Melancholy or passionate she
preserves the reflected lines of a primitive rusticity, w