A neurotic man, his
tissues trembling, his sensibilities aflame, the offspring of a
nation doomed to pain and partition, it was quite natural for him
to go to France--Poland had ever been her historical client--the
France that overheated all Europe. Chopin, born after two
revolutions, the true child of insurrection, chose Paris for his
second home. Revolt sat easily upon his inherited aristocratic
instincts--no proletarian is quite so thorough a revolutionist as
the born aristocrat, witness Nietzsche--and Chopin, in the
bloodless battle of the Romantics, in the silent warring of Slav
against Teuton, Gaul and Anglo-Saxon, will ever stand as the
protagonist of the artistic drama.
All that followed, the breaking up of the old hard-and-fast
boundaries on the musical map is due to Chopin. A pioneer, he has
been rewarded as such by a polite ignorement or bland
condescension. He smashed the portals of the convention that
forbade a man baring his soul to the multitude. The psychology of
music is the gainer thereby. Chopin, like Velasquez, could paint
single figures perfectly, but to great massed effects he was a
stranger.
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