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.
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