It is, however, not only
in the closeness and complexity of texture that we notice Chopin's
style changing: a striving after greater breadth and fulness of form are
likewise apparent, and, alas! also an increase in sombreness, the result
of deteriorating health. All this the reader will have to keep in mind
when he passes in review the master's works, for I shall marshal them by
groups, not chronologically.

Another prejudice, wide-spread, almost universal, is that Chopin's music
is all languor and melancholy, and, consequently, wanting in variety.
Now, there can be no greater error than this belief. As to variety,
we should be obliged to wonder at its infiniteness if he had composed
nothing but the pieces to which are really applicable the epithets
dreamy, pensive, mournful, and despondent. But what vigour, what more
than manly vigour, manifests itself in many of his creations! Think only
of the Polonaises in A major (Op. 40, No. 1) and in A flat major (Op.
53), of many of his studies, the first three of his ballades, the
scherzos, and much besides! To be sure, a great deal of this vigour is
not natural, but the outcome of despair and maddening passion. Still, it
is vigour, and such vigour as is not often to be met with. And, then, it
is not the only kind to be found in his music. There is also a healthy
vigour, which, for instance, in the A major Polonaise assumes a
brilliantly-heroic form. Nor are serene and even joyous moods so rare
that it would be permissible to ignore them. While thus controverting
the so-called vox Dei (are not popular opinions generally popular
prejudices?) and the pseudo-critics who create or follow it, I have
no intention either to deny or conceal the Polish master's excess of
languor and melancholy. I only wish to avoid vulgar exaggeration, to
keep within the bounds of the factual. In art as in life, in biography
as in history, there are not many questions that can be answered by a
plain "yea" or "nay". It was, indeed, with Chopin as has been said of
him, "his heart was sad, his mind was gay. "One day when Chopin, Liszt,
and the Comtesse d'Agoult spent the after-dinner hours together, the
lady, deeply moved by the Polish composer's playing, ventured to ask him
"by what name he called the extraordinary feeling which he enclosed
in his compositions, like unknown ashes in superb urns of most
exquisitely-chiselled alabaster? "He answered her that--

her heart had not deceived her in its melan