of his own composition.  His genius as a composer taught him to make innovations in piano-forte effects.  He was thus not only a great inventor as a composer, but as regards the technique of the piano-forte.  He not only told new things well worth hearing which the world would not forget, but devised new ways of saying them, and it mattered but little to him whether his more forcible and passionate dialectic offended what Schumann calls musical Philistinism or no.  Chopin formed a school of his own which was purely the outcome of his genius, though as Schumann, in the extract previously quoted, justly says:  “He was molded by the deep poetic spirit of Beethoven, with whom form only had value as it expressed truthfully and beautifully symmetry of conception.”

The forms of Chopin’s compositions grew out of the keyboard of the piano, and their genre is so peculiar that it is nearly impracticable to transpose them for any other instrument.  Some of the noted contemporary violinists have attempted to transpose a few of the Nocturnes and Etudes, but without success.  Both Schumann and Liszt succeeded in adapting Paganini’s most complex and difficult violin works for the piano-forte, but the compositions of Chopin are so essentially born to and of the one instrument that they can not be well suited to any other.  The cast of the melody, the matchless beauty and swing of the rhythm, his ingenious treatment of harmony, and the chromatic changes and climaxes through which the motives are developed, make up a new chapter in the history of the piano-forte.

Liszt, in his life of Chopin, says of him:  “His character was indeed not easily understood.  A thousand subtile shades, mingling, crossing, contradicting, and disguising each other, rendered it almost undecipherable at first view; kind, courteous, affable, and almost of joyous manners, he would not suffer the secret convulsions which agitated him to be ever suspected.  His works, concertos, waltzes, sonatas, ballades, polonaises, mazurkas, nocturnes, scherzi, all reflect a similar enigma in a most poetical and romantic form.”

Chopin’s moral nature was not cast in an heroic mold, and he lacked the robust intellectual marrow which is essential to the highest forms of genius in art as well as in literature and affairs, though it is not safe to believe that he was, as painted by George Sand and Liszt, a feeble youth, continually living at death’s door in an atmosphere of moonshine and sentimentality.  But there can be no question that the whole bent of Chopin’s temperament and genius was melancholy, romantic, and poetic, and that frequently he gives us mere musical moods and reveries, instead of well-defined and well-developed ideas.  His music perhaps loses nothing, for, if it misses something of the clear, inspiring, vigorous quality of other great composers, it has a subtile, dreamy, suggestive beauty all its own.