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eye was attuned to hues the most fragile and attenuated; he can weave harmonies that are as ghostly as a lunar rainbow. And lunar-like in their libration are some of his melodies--glimpses, mysterious and vast, as of a strange world. His utterances are always dynamic, and he emerges betimes, as if from Goya's tomb, and etches with sardonic finger Nada in dust. But this spirit of denial is not an abiding mood; Chopin throws a net of tone over souls wearied with rancors and revolts, bridges "salty, estranged seas" of misery and presently we are viewing a mirrored, a fabulous universe wherein Death is dead, and Love reigns Lord of all. II Heine said that "every epoch is a sphinx which plunges into the abyss as soon as its problem is solved." Born in the very upheaval of the Romantic revolution--a revolution evoked by the intensity of its emotion, rather than by the power of its ideas--Chopin was not altogether one of the insurgents of art. Just when his individual soul germinated, who may tell? In his early music are discovered the roots and fibres of Hummel and Field. His growth, involuntary, inevitable, put forth strange sprouts, and he saw in the piano, an instrument of two dimensions, a third, and so his music deepened and took on stranger colors. The keyboard had never sung so before; he forged its formula. A new apocalyptic seal of melody and harmony was let fall upon it. Sounding scrolls, delicious arabesques gorgeous in tint, martial, lyric, "a resonance of emerald," a sobbing of fountains--as that Chopin of the Gutter, Paul Verlaine, has it--the tear crystallized midway, an arrested pearl, were overheard in his music, and Europe felt a new shudder of sheer delight. The literary quality is absent and so is the ethical--Chopin may prophesy but he never flames into the divers tongues of the upper heaven. Compared with his passionate abandonment to the dance, Brahms is the Lao-tsze of music, the great infant born with gray hair and with the slow smile of childhood. Chopin seldom smiles, and while some of his music is young, he does not raise in the mind pictures of the fatuous romance of youth. His passion is mature, self-sustained and never at a loss for the mot propre. And with what marvellous vibration he gamuts the passions, festooning them with carnations and great white tube roses, but the dark dramatic motive is never lost in the decorative wiles of this magician. As the man grew he laid aside his p
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