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.
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