His passion is
mature, self-sustained and never at a loss for the mot propre.
And with what marvellous vibration he gamuts the passions,
festooning them with carnations and great white tube roses, but
the dark dramatic motive is never lost in the decorative wiles of
this magician. As the man grew he laid aside his pretty 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.
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