The piece is Chopin's Iliad; in it
are the ghosts that lurk near the hidden alleys of the soul, but
here come out to leer and exult.
Horla! the Horla of Guy de Maupassant, the sinister Doppelganger
of mankind, which races with him to the goal of eternity, perhaps
to outstrip and master him in the next evolutionary cycle, master
as does man, the brute creation. This Horla, according to
Przybyszewski, conquered Chopin and became vocal in his music--
this Horla has mastered Nietzsche, who, quite mad, gave the world
that Bible of the Ubermensch, that dancing lyric prose-poem,
"Also Sprach Zarathustra."
Nietzsche's disciple is half right. Chopin's moods are often
morbid, his music often pathological; Beethoven too is morbid,
but in his kingdom, so vast, so varied, the mood is lost or
lightly felt, while in Chopin's province, it looms a maleficent
upas-tree, with flowers of evil and its leaves glistering with
sensuousness. But so keen for symmetry, for all the term formal
beauty implies, is Chopin, that seldom does his morbidity madden,
his voluptuousness poison.
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