XII. THE POLONAISES:--HEROIC HYMNS OF BATTLE.
How is one to reconcile "the want of manliness, moral and
intellectual," which Hadow asserts is "the one great limitation
of Chopin's province," with the power, splendor and courage of
the Polonaises? Here are the cannon buried in flowers of Robert
Schumann, here overwhelming evidences of versatility, virility
and passion. Chopin blinded his critics and admirers alike; a
delicate, puny fellow, he could play the piano on occasion like a
devil incarnate. He, too, had his demon as well as Liszt, and
only, as Ehlert puts it, "theoretical fear" of this spirit
driving him over the cliffs of reason made him curb its antics.
After all the couleur de rose portraits and lollipop miniatures
made of him by pensive, poetic persons it is not possible to
conceive Chopin as being irascible and almost brutal. Yet he was
at times even this. "Beethoven was scarce more vehement and
irritable," writes Ehlert. And we remember the stories of friends
and pupils who have seen this slender, refined Pole wrestling
with his wrath as one under the obsession of a fiend.
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