tted--so the editorial note
urns--leads one to suspect that out of a fragment Janotha has evolved,
Cuvier-like, an entire composition. Chopin as fugue-maker does not
appear in a brilliant light. Is the Polish composer to become a musical
Hugh Conway? Why all these disjecta membra of a sketch-book?

In these youthful works may be found the beginnings of the greater
Chopin, but not his vast subjugation of the purely technical to the
poetic and spiritual. That came later. To the devout Chopinist the
first compositions are so many proofs of the joyful, victorious spirit
of the man whose spleen and pessimism have been wrongfully compared to
Leopardi's and Baudelaire's. Chopin was gay, fairly healthy and
bubbling over with a pretty malice. His first period shows this; it
also shows how thorough and painful the processes by which he evolved
his final style.

XII. THE POLONAISES:--HEROIC HYMNS OF BATTLE.

How is one to reconcile "the want of manliness, moral and
intellectual," which Hadow asserts is "the one great limitation of
Chopin's province," with the power, splendor and courage of the
Polonaises? Here are the cannon buried in flowers of Robert Schumann,
here overwhelming evidences of versatility, virility and passion.
Chopin blinded his critics and admirers alike; a delicate, puny fellow,
he could play the piano on occasion like a devil incarnate. He, too,
had his demon as well as Liszt, and only, as Ehlert puts it,
"theoretical fear" of this spirit driving him over the cliffs of reason
made him curb its antics. After all the couleur de rose portraits and
lollipop miniatures made of him by pensive, poetic persons it is not
possible to conceive Chopin as being irascible and almost brutal. Yet
he was at times even this. "Beethoven was scarce more vehement and
irritable," writes Ehlert. And we remember the stories of friends and
pupils who have seen this slender, refined Pole wrestling with his
wrath as one under the obsession of a fiend. It is no desire to
exaggerate this side of his nature that impels this plain writing.
Chopin left compositions that bear witness to his masculine side.
Diminutive in person, bad-temper became him ill; besides, his whole
education and tastes were opposed to scenes of violence. So this
energy, spleen and raging at fortune found escape in some of his music,
became psychical in its manifestations.

But, you may say, this is feminine hysteria, the impotent cries of an
unmanly, weak