ess artificial, is
easier filled than the vast empty frame of the theatre. Through their
intensity of conception and of life, both men touch issues, though
widely dissimilar in all else. Chopin had greater melodic and as great
harmonic genius as Wagner; he made more themes, he was, as Rubinstein
wrote, the last of the original composers, but his scope was not
scenic, he preferred the stage of his soul to the windy spaces of the
music-drama. His is the interior play, the eternal conflict between
body and soul. He viewed music through his temperament and it often
becomes so imponderable, so bodiless as to suggest a fourth dimension
in the art. Space is obliterated. With Chopin one does not get, as from
Beethoven, the sense of spiritual vastness, of the overarching sublime.
There is the pathos of spiritual distance, but it is pathos, not
sublimity. "His soul was a star and dwelt apart," though not in the
Miltonic or Wordsworthian sense. A Shelley-like tenuity at times wings
his thought, and he is the creator of a new thrill within the thrill.
The charm of the dying fall, the unspeakable cadence of regret for the
love that is dead, is in his music; like John Keats he sometimes sees:--

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Chopin, "subtle-souled psychologist," is more kin to Keats than
Shelley, he is a greater artist than a thinker. His philosophy is of
the beautiful, as was Keats', and while he lingers by the river's edge
to catch the song of the reeds, his gaze is oftener fixed on the
quiring planets. He is nature's most exquisite sounding-board and
vibrates to her with intensity, color and vivacity that have no
parallel. Stained with melancholy, his joy is never that of the strong
man rejoicing in his muscles. Yet his very tenderness is tonic and his
cry is ever restrained by an Attic sense of proportion. Like Alfred De
Vigny, he dwelt in a "tour d'ivoire" that faced the west and for him
the sunrise was not, but O! the miraculous moons he discovered, the
sunsets and cloud-shine! His notes cast great rich shadows, these
chains of blown-roses drenched in the dew of beauty. Pompeian colors
are too restricted and flat; he divulges a world of half-tones, some
"enfolding sunny spots of greenery," or singing in silvery shade the
song of chromatic ecstasy, others "huge fragments vaulted like
rebounding hail" and black upon black. Chopin is the color genius of
the piano, his