were his chords, that at first, many of them were deemed unplayable;
but he showed that if his own system of fingering was adopted, they
were not only playable, but eminently suited to the character of the
instrument. The superior beauty of scattered intervals can be
strikingly demonstrated in this way. If you strike four or five
adjacent notes on the piano at once, you produce an intolerable
cacophony. But these same notes can be so arranged by scattering them
that they make an exquisite chord in suspension. Everything depends on
the arrangement and the wideness of the intervals. Chopin's fancy was
inexhaustible in the discovery of new kinds of scattered chords,
combined into harmony by his novel use of the pedal; and in this way
he enriched music with so many new harmonies and modulations that he
must be placed, as a harmonic innovator, on a level with Bach and
Wagner.

These remarks apply especially to Chopin's later compositions; but his
peculiarities are already distinctly traceable in many of his earlier
works; and Elsner, his teacher, was sufficiently clear-sighted and
frank to write the following words: "The achievements of Mozart and
Beethoven as pianists have long been forgotten; and their pianoforte
compositions, although undoubtedly classical works, must give way to
the diversified artistic treatment of that instrument by the modern
school." Mr. Joseph Bennett quotes this sentence in his Biography of
Chopin, and adds an exclamation point in brackets after it, to
express his surprise. Mr. Bennett is considered one of the leading
London critics; yet I must say that I have never seen so much
ignorance in a single exclamation point in brackets. Note the
difference between Elsner and Bennett. Elsner adds to the sentence
just quoted, that the _other_ works of Mozart and Beethoven--their
symphonies, operas, quartets, etc., "will not only continue to live,
but will, perhaps, remain unequalled by anything of the present day."
This is genuine discriminative criticism, which renders unto Caesar
what is Caesar's due: whereas, Mr. Bennett is guided by the vicious old
habit of fancying that because Mozart and Beethoven are great masters,
therefore they must be superior to everybody in everything. Is it not
about time to put an end to this absurd Jumboism in music?

The fact is, we are living in an age of division of labor and
specialism; and those who, like Robert Franz and Richard Wagner,
devote themselves to a single