re in
Chopin's development; but it cannot be said that they left a striking
mark on his music, with regard to which, however, it has to be
remembered that the degree of external resemblance does not always
accurately indicate the degree of internal indebtedness. Bach's
influence on Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, and others of their
contemporaries, and its various effects on their styles, is one of the
curiosities of nineteenth century musical history; a curiosity, however,
which is fully disclosed only by subtle analysis. Field and especially
Hummel are those musicians who--more, however, as pianists than as
composers (i.e., more by their pianoforte language than by their musical
thoughts)--set the most distinct impress on Chopin's early virtuosic
style, of which we see almost the last in the concertos, where it
appears in a chastened and spiritualised form very different from the
materialism of the Fantasia (Op. 13) and the Krakowiak (Op. 14). Indeed,
we may say of this style that the germ, and much more than the germ, of
almost every one of its peculiarities is to be found in the pianoforte
works of Hummel and Field; and this statement the concertos of these
masters, more especially those of the former, and their shorter pieces,
more especially the nocturnes of the latter, bear out in its entirety.
The wide-spread broken chords, great skips, wreaths of rhythmically
unmeasured ornamental notes, simultaneous combinations of unequal
numbers of notes (five or seven against four, for instance), &c.,
are all to be found in the compositions of the two above-named
pianist-composers. Chopin's style, then, was not original? Most
decidedly it was. But it is not so much new elements as the development
and the different commixture, in degree and kind, of known elements
which make an individual style--the absolutely new being, generally
speaking, insignificant compared with the acquired and evolved. The
opinion that individuality is a spontaneous generation is an error of
the same kind as that imagination has nothing to do with memory. Ex
nihilo nihil fit. Individuality should rather be regarded as a feminine
organisation which conceives and brings forth; or, better still, as
a growing thing which feeds on what is germane to it, a thing with
self-acting suctorial organs that operate whenever they come in contact
with suitable food. A nucleus is of course necessary for the development
of an individuality, and this nucleus is the phys