.. 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