retty garlands and his line became sterner, its traceries more gothic;
he made Bach his chief god and within the woven walls of his strange
harmonies he sings the history of a soul, a soul convulsed by antique
madness, by the memory of awful things, a soul lured by Beauty to
secret glades wherein sacrificial rites are performed to the solemn
sounds of unearthly music. Like Maurice de Guerin, Chopin perpetually
strove to decipher Beauty's enigma and passionately demanded of the
sphinx that defies:

"Upon the shores of what oceans have they rolled the stone that hides
them, O Macareus?"

His name was as the stroke of a bell to the Romancists; he remained
aloof from them though in a sympathetic attitude. The classic is but
the Romantic dead, said an acute critic. Chopin was a classic without
knowing it; he compassed for the dances of his land what Bach did for
the older forms. With Heine he led the spirit of revolt, but enclosed
his note of agitation in a frame beautiful. The color, the "lithe
perpetual escape" from the formal deceived his critics, Schumann among
the rest. Chopin, like Flaubert, was the last of the idealists, the
first of the realists. The newness of his form, his linear
counterpoint, misled the critics, who accused him of the lack of it.
Schumann's formal deficiency detracts from much of his music, and
because of their formal genius Wagner and Chopin will live.

To Chopin might be addressed Sar Merodack Peladan's words:

"When your hand writes a perfect line the Cherubim descend to find
pleasure therein as in a mirror." Chopin wrote many perfect lines; he
is, above all, the faultless lyrist, the Swinburne, the master of
fiery, many rhythms, the chanter of songs before sunrise, of the burden
of the flesh, the sting of desire and large-moulded lays of passionate
freedom. His music is, to quote Thoreau, "a proud sweet satire on the
meanness of our life." He had no feeling for the epic, his genius was
too concentrated, and though he could be furiously dramatic the
sustained majesty of blank verse was denied him. With musical ideas he
was ever gravid but their intensity is parent to their brevity. And it
must not be forgotten that with Chopin the form was conditioned by the
idea. He took up the dancing patterns of Poland because they suited his
vivid inner life; he transformed them, idealized them, attaining to
more prolonged phraseology and denser architecture in his Ballades and
Scherzi--but these period