rhaps all art is, as the incorrigible Nordau declares, a slight
deviation from the normal, though Ribot scoffs at the existence of any
standard of normality. The butcher and the candle-stick-maker have
their Horla, their secret soul convulsions, which they set down to
taxation, the vapors, or weather.

Chopin has surprised the musical malady of the century. He is its chief
spokesman. After the vague, mad, noble dreams of Byron, Shelley and
Napoleon, the awakening found those disillusioned souls, Wagner,
Nietzsche and Chopin. Wagner sought in the epical rehabilitation of a
vanished Valhalla a surcease from the world-pain. He consciously
selected his anodyne and in "Die Meistersinger" touched a consoling
earth. Chopin and Nietzsche, temperamentally finer and more sensitive
than Wagner--the one musically, the other intellectually--sang
themselves in music and philosophy, because they were so constituted.
Their nerves rode them to their death. Neither found the serenity and
repose of Wagner, for neither was as sane and both suffered mortally
from hyperaesthesia, the penalty of all sick genius.

Chopin's music is the aesthetic symbol of a personality nurtured on
patriotism, pride and love; that it is better expressed by the piano is
because of that instrument's idiosyncrasies of evanescent tone,
sensitive touch and wide range in dynamics. It was Chopin's lyre, the
"orchestra of his heart," from it he extorted music the most intimate
since Sappho. Among lyric moderns Heine closely resembles the Pole.
Both sang because they suffered, sang ineffable and ironic melodies;
both will endure because of their brave sincerity, their surpassing
art. The musical, the psychical history of the nineteenth century would
be incomplete without the name of Frederic Francois Chopin. Wagner
externalized its dramatic soul; in Chopin the mad lyricism of the
Time-spirit is made eloquent. Into his music modulated the poesy of his
age; he is one of its heroes, a hero of whom Swinburne might have sung:

O strong-winged soul with prophetic
Lips hot with the blood-beats of song;
With tremor of heart-strings magnetic,
With thoughts as thunder in throng;
With consonant ardor of chords
That pierce men's souls as with swords
And hale them hearing along.

PART II:--HIS MUSIC

VI. THE STUDIES:--TITANIC EXPERIMENTS

October 20, 1829, Frederic Chopin, aged twenty, wrote to his friend
Titus Woyciechowski, from Warsaw: "I have