artening dictum in "By the Way." "The entrancing
phantasmagoria of picture and incident which we think we see rising
from the billowing sea of music is in reality nothing more than an
enchanting fata morgana, visible at no other angle than that of our own
eye. The true gist of music it never can be; it can never truly
translate what is most essential and characteristic in its expression.
It is but something that we have half unconsciously imputed to music;
nothing that really exists in music."

The shadowy miming of Chopin's soul has nevertheless a significance for
this generation. It is now the reign of the brutal, the realistic, the
impossible in music. Formal excellence is neglected and programme-music
has reduced art to the level of an anecdote. Chopin neither preaches
nor paints, yet his art is decorative and dramatic--though in the
climate of the ideal. He touches earth and its emotional issues in
Poland only; otherwise his music is a pure aesthetic delight, an
artistic enchantment, freighted with no ethical or theatric messages.
It is poetry made audible, the "soul written in sound." All that I can
faintly indicate is the way it affects me, this music with the petals
of a glowing rose and the heart of gray ashes. Its analogies to Poe,
Verlaine, Shelley, Keats, Heine and Mickiewicz are but critical
sign-posts, for Chopin is incomparable, Chopin is unique. "Our
interval," writes Walter Pater, "is brief." Few pass it recollectedly
and with full understanding of its larger rhythms and more urgent
colors. Many endure it in frivol and violence, the majority in bored,
sullen submission. Chopin, the New Chopin, is a foe to ennui and the
spirit that denies; in his exquisite soul-sorrow, sweet world-pain, we
may find rich impersonal relief.

V. POET AND PSYCHOLOGIST

Music is an order of mystic, sensuous mathematics. A sounding mirror,
an aural mode of motion, it addresses itself on the formal side to the
intellect, in its content of expression it appeals to the emotions.
Ribot, admirable psychologist, does not hesitate to proclaim music as
the most emotional of the arts. "It acts like a burn, like heat, cold
or a caressing contact, and is the most dependent on physiological
conditions."

Music then, the most vague of the arts in the matter of representing
the concrete, is the swiftest, surest agent for attacking the
sensibilities. The CRY made manifest, as Wagner asserts, it is a cry
that takes on fanciful s