His music has its morass, but also its
upland where the gale blows strong and true. Perhaps all art is,
as the incorrigible Nordau declares, a slight deviation from the
normal, though Ribot scoffs at the existence of any standard of
normality. The butcher and the candle-stick-maker have their
Horla, their secret soul convulsions, which they set down to
taxation, the vapors, or weather.
Chopin has surprised the musical malady of the century. He is its
chief spokesman. After the vague, mad, noble dreams of Byron,
Shelley and Napoleon, the awakening found those disillusioned
souls, Wagner, Nietzsche and Chopin. Wagner sought in the epical
rehabilitation of a vanished Valhalla a surcease from the world-
pain. He consciously selected his anodyne and in "Die
Meistersinger" touched a consoling earth. Chopin and Nietzsche,
temperamentally finer and more sensitive than Wagner--the one
musically, the other intellectually--sang themselves in music and
philosophy, because they were so constituted. Their nerves rode
them to their death. Neither found the serenity and repose of
Wagner, for neither was as sane and both suffered mortally from
hyperaesthesia, the penalty of all sick genius.
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