eye was attuned to hues the most fragile and attenuated;
he can weave harmonies that are as ghostly as a lunar rainbow. And
lunar-like in their libration are some of his melodies--glimpses,
mysterious and vast, as of a strange world.

His utterances are always dynamic, and he emerges betimes, as if from
Goya's tomb, and etches with sardonic finger Nada in dust. But this
spirit of denial is not an abiding mood; Chopin throws a net of tone
over souls wearied with rancors and revolts, bridges "salty, estranged
seas" of misery and presently we are viewing a mirrored, a fabulous
universe wherein Death is dead, and Love reigns Lord of all.

II

Heine said that "every epoch is a sphinx which plunges into the abyss
as soon as its problem is solved." Born in the very upheaval of the
Romantic revolution--a revolution evoked by the intensity of its
emotion, rather than by the power of its ideas--Chopin was not
altogether one of the insurgents of art. Just when his individual soul
germinated, who may tell? In his early music are discovered the roots
and fibres of Hummel and Field. His growth, involuntary, inevitable,
put forth strange sprouts, and he saw in the piano, an instrument of
two dimensions, a third, and so his music deepened and took on stranger
colors. The keyboard had never sung so before; he forged its formula. A
new apocalyptic seal of melody and harmony was let fall upon it.
Sounding scrolls, delicious arabesques gorgeous in tint, martial,
lyric, "a resonance of emerald," a sobbing of fountains--as that Chopin
of the Gutter, Paul Verlaine, has it--the tear crystallized midway, an
arrested pearl, were overheard in his music, and Europe felt a new
shudder of sheer delight.

The literary quality is absent and so is the ethical--Chopin may
prophesy but he never flames into the divers tongues of the upper
heaven. Compared with his passionate abandonment to the dance, Brahms
is the Lao-tsze of music, the great infant born with gray hair and with
the slow smile of childhood. Chopin seldom smiles, and while some of
his music is young, he does not raise in the mind pictures of the
fatuous romance of youth. His passion is mature, self-sustained and
never at a loss for the mot propre. And with what marvellous vibration
he gamuts the passions, festooning them with carnations and great white
tube roses, but the dark dramatic motive is never lost in the
decorative wiles of this magician. As the man grew he laid aside his
p