her.
On August 19 he left with friends for Bohemia, arriving at Prague two
days later. There he saw everything and met Klengel, of canon fame, a
still greater canon-eer than the redoubtable Jadassohn of Leipzig.
Chopin and Klengel liked each other. Three days later the party
proceeded to Teplitz and Chopin played in aristocratic company. He
reached Dresden August 26, heard Spohr's "Faust" and met capellmeister
Morlacchi--that same Morlacchi whom Wagner succeeded as a conductor
January 10, 1843--vide Finck's "Wagner." By September 12, after a brief
sojourn in Breslau, Chopin was again safe at home in Warsaw.

About this time he fell in love with Constantia Gladowska, a singer and
pupil of the Warsaw Conservatory. Niecks dwells gingerly upon his
fervor in love and friendship--"a passion with him" and thinks that it
gives the key to his life. Of his romantic friendship for Titus
Woyciechowski and John Matuszynski--his "Johnnie"--there are abundant
evidences in the letters. They are like the letters of a love-sick
maiden. But Chopin's purity of character was marked; he shrank from
coarseness of all sorts, and the Fates only know what he must have
suffered at times from George Sand and her gallant band of retainers.
To this impressionable man, Parisian badinage--not to call it anything
stronger--was positively antipathetical. Of him we might indeed say in
Lafcadio Hearn's words, "Every mortal man has been many million times a
woman." And was it the Goncourts who dared to assert that, "there are
no women of genius: women of genius are men"? Chopin needed an outlet
for his sentimentalism. His piano was but a sieve for some, and we are
rather amused than otherwise on reading the romantic nonsense of his
boyish letters.

After the Vienna trip his spirits and his health flagged. He was
overwrought and Warsaw became hateful to him, for he loved but had not
the courage to tell it to the beloved one. He put it on paper, he
played it, but speak it he could not. Here is a point that reveals
Chopin's native indecision, his inability to make up his mind. He
recalls to me the Frederic Moreau of Flaubert's "L'Education
Sentimentale." There is an atrophy of the will, for Chopin can neither
propose nor fly from Warsaw. He writes letters that are full of
self-reproaches, letters that must have both bored and irritated his
friends. Like many other men of genius he suffered all his life from
folie de doute, indeed his was what specialists ca