First a Slav, by adoption a Parisian, he is the open door
because he admitted into the West, Eastern musical ideas, Eastern
tonalities, rhythms, in fine the Slavic, all that is objectionable,
decadent and dangerous. He inducted Europe into the mysteries and
seductions of the Orient. His music lies wavering between the East and
the West. A neurotic man, his tissues trembling, his sensibilities
aflame, the offspring of a nation doomed to pain and partition, it was
quite natural for him to go to France--Poland had ever been her
historical client--the France that overheated all Europe. Chopin, born
after two revolutions, the true child of insurrection, chose Paris for
his second home. Revolt sat easily upon his inherited aristocratic
instincts--no proletarian is quite so thorough a revolutionist as the
born aristocrat, witness Nietzsche--and Chopin, in the bloodless battle
of the Romantics, in the silent warring of Slav against Teuton, Gaul
and Anglo-Saxon, will ever stand as the protagonist of the artistic
drama.

All that followed, the breaking up of the old hard-and-fast boundaries
on the musical map is due to Chopin. A pioneer, he has been rewarded as
such by a polite ignorement or bland condescension. He smashed the
portals of the convention that forbade a man baring his soul to the
multitude. The psychology of music is the gainer thereby. Chopin, like
Velasquez, could paint single figures perfectly, but to great massed
effects he was a stranger. Wagner did not fail to profit by his
marvellously drawn soul-portraits. Chopin taught his century the pathos
of patriotism, and showed Grieg the value of national ore. He
practically re-created the harmonic charts, he gave voice to the
individual, himself a product of a nation dissolved by overwrought
individualism. As Schumann assures us, his is "the proudest and most
poetic spirit of his time." Chopin, subdued by his familiar demon, was
a true specimen of Nietzsche's Ubermensch,--which is but Emerson's
Oversoul shorn of her wings. Chopin's transcendental scheme of technics
is the image of a supernormal lift in composition. He sometimes robs
music of its corporeal vesture and his transcendentalism lies not alone
in his striving after strange tonalities and rhythms, but in seeking
the emotionally recondite. Self-tormented, ever "a dweller on the
threshold" he saw visions that outshone the glories of Hasheesh and his
nerve-swept soul ground in its mills exceeding fine music. Hi