"This sorrow is
the very soil of Chopin's nature. He so confessed when questioned
by Comtesse d'Agoult. Liszt further explains that the strange
word includes in its meanings--for it seems packed with them--
"all the tenderness, all the humility of a regret borne with
resignation and without a murmur;" it also signifies "excitement,
agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditated
vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should
ever become possible, feeding itself meanwhile with a bitter if
sterile hatred."
Sterile indeed must be such a consuming passion. Even where his
patriotism became a lyric cry, this Zal tainted the source of
Chopin's joy. It made him irascible, and with his powers of
repression, this smouldering, smothered rage must have well nigh
suffocated him, and in the end proved harmful alike to his person
and to his art. As in certain phases of disease it heightened the
beauty of his later work, unhealthy, feverish, yet beauty without
doubt. The pearl is said to be a morbid secretion, so the
spiritual ferment called Zal gave to Chopin's music its morbid
beauty.
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