The music of the latter is the most ravishing gesture
that art has yet made. Wagner and Chopin, the macrocosm and the
microcosm! "Wagner has made the largest impersonal synthesis
attainable of the personal influences that thrill our lives,"
cries Havelock Ellis. Chopin, a young man slight of frame,
furiously playing out upon the keyboard his soul, the soul of his
nation, the soul of his time, is the most individual composer
that has ever set humming the looms of our dreams. Wagner and
Chopin have a motor element in their music that is fiercer,
intenser and more fugacious than that of all other composers. For
them is not the Buddhistic void, in which shapes slowly form and
fade; their psychical tempo is devouring. They voiced their age,
they moulded their age and we listen eagerly to them, to these
vibrile prophetic voices, so sweetly corrosive, bardic and
appealing. Chopin being nearer the soil in the selection of
forms, his style and structure are more naive, more original than
Wagner's, while his medium, less artificial, is easier filled
than the vast empty frame of the theatre.
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