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.. The harmonic schemes of the simplest of Chopin's works are marvels of originality and musical loveliness, and I make bold to say that his treatment of the passing note did much toward showing later writers how to produce the restless and endless complexity of the harmony in contemporaneous orchestral music." Heinrich Pudor in his strictures on German music is hardly complimentary to Chopin: "Wagner is a thorough-going decadent, an off-shoot, an epigonus, not a progonus. His cheeks are hollow and pale--but the Germans have the full red cheeks. Equally decadent is Liszt. Liszt is a Hungarian and the Hungarians are confessedly a completely disorganized, self-outlived, dying people. No less decadent is Chopin, whose figure comes before one as flesh without bones, this morbid, womanly, womanish, slip-slop, powerless, sickly, bleached, sweet-caramel Pole!" This has a ring of Nietzsche--Nietzsche who boasted of his Polish origin. Now listen to the fatidical Pole Przybyszewski: "In the beginning there was sex, out of sex there was nothing and in it everything was. And sex made itself brain whence was the birth of the soul." And then, as Mr. Vance Thompson, who first Englished this "Mass of the Dead"--wrote: "He pictures largely in great cosmic symbols, decorated with passionate and mystic fervors, the singular combat between the growing soul and the sex from which it fain would be free." Arno Holz thus parodies Przybyszewski: "In our soul there is surging and singing a song of the victorious bacteria. Our blood lacks the white corpuscles. On the sounding board of our consciousness there echoes along the frightful symphony of the flesh. It becomes objective in Chopin; he alone, the modern primeval man, puts our brains on the green meadows, he alone thinks in hyper-European dimensions. He alone rebuilds the shattered Jerusalem of our souls." All of which shows to what comically delirious lengths this sort of deleterious soul-probing may go. It would be well to consider this word "decadent" and its morbid implications. There is a fashion just now in criticism to over-accentuate the physical and moral weaknesses of the artist. Lombroso started the fashion, Nordau carried it to its logical absurdity, yet it is nothing new. In Hazlitt's day he complains, that genius is called mad by foolish folk. Mr. Newman writes in his Wagner, that "art in general, and music in particular, ought not to be condemned merely in terms of the
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