s vision
is of beauty; he persistently groped at the hem of her robe, but never
sought to transpose or to tone the commonplace of life. For this he
reproved Schubert. Such intensity cannot be purchased but at the cost
of breadth, of sanity, and his picture of life is not so high, wide,
sublime, or awful as Beethoven's. Yet is it just as inevitable, sincere
and as tragically poignant.

Stanislaw Przybyszewski in his "Zur Psychologie des Individuums"
approaches the morbid Chopin--the Chopin who threw open to the world
the East, who waved his chromatic wand to Liszt, Tschaikowsky,
Saint-Saens, Goldmark, Rubinstein, Richard Strauss, Dvorak and all
Russia with its consonantal composers. This Polish psychologist--a
fulgurant expounder of Nietzsche--finds in Chopin faith and mania, the
true stigma of the mad individualist, the individual "who in the first
instance is naught but an oxidation apparatus." Nietzsche and Chopin
are the most outspoken individualities of the age--he forgets
Wagner--Chopin himself the finest flowering of a morbid and rare
culture. His music is a series of psychoses--he has the sehnsucht of a
marvellously constituted nature--and the shrill dissonance of his
nerves, as seen in the physiological outbursts of the B minor Scherzo,
is the agony of a tortured soul. The piece is Chopin's Iliad; in it are
the ghosts that lurk near the hidden alleys of the soul, but here come
out to leer and exult.

Horla! the Horla of Guy de Maupassant, the sinister Doppelganger of
mankind, which races with him to the goal of eternity, perhaps to
outstrip and master him in the next evolutionary cycle, master as does
man, the brute creation. This Horla, according to Przybyszewski,
conquered Chopin and became vocal in his music--this Horla has mastered
Nietzsche, who, quite mad, gave the world that Bible of the Ubermensch,
that dancing lyric prose-poem, "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

Nietzsche's disciple is half right. Chopin's moods are often morbid,
his music often pathological; Beethoven too is morbid, but in his
kingdom, so vast, so varied, the mood is lost or lightly felt, while in
Chopin's province, it looms a maleficent upas-tree, with flowers of
evil and its leaves glistering with sensuousness. But so keen for
symmetry, for all the term formal beauty implies, is Chopin, that
seldom does his morbidity madden, his voluptuousness poison. His music
has its morass, but also its upland where the gale blows strong and
true. Pe