Such emotions have been of so much the more importance in the life of Chopin, because they have deeply influenced the character of his compositions.  Among the pages published under such influences, may be traced much analogous to the wire-drawn subtleties of Jean Paul, who found it necessary, in order to move hearts macerated by passion, blazes through suffering, to make use of the surprises caused by natural and physical phenomena; to evoke the sensations of luxurious terrors arising from occurrences not to be foreseen in the natural order of things; to awaken the morbid excitements of a dreamy brain.  Step by step the tortured mind of Chopin arrived at a state of sickly irritability; his emotions increased to a feverish tremor, producing that involution, that tortuosity of thought, which mark his latest works.  Almost suffocating under the oppression of repressed feelings, using art only to repeat and rehearse for himself his own internal tragedy, after having wearied emotion, he began to subtilize it.  His melodies are actually tormented; a nervous and restless sensibility leads to an obstinate persistence in the handling and rehandling and a reiterated pursuit of the tortured motifs, which impress us as painfully as the sight of those physical or mental agonies which we know can find relief only in death.  Chopin was a victim to a disease without hope, which growing more envenomed from year to year, took him, while yet young, from those who loved him, and laid him in his still grave.  As in the fair form of some beautiful victim, the marks of the grasping claws of the fierce bird of prey which has destroyed it, may be found; so, in the productions of which we have just spoken, the traces of the bitter sufferings which devoured his heart, are painfully visible.

CHAPTER II.

National Character of the Polonaise—­Oginski—­Meyseder—­Weber—­ Chopin—­His Polonaise in F Sharp, Minor—­Polonaise—­Fantaisie.

It must not be supposed that the tortured aberrations of feeling to which we have just alluded, ever injure the harmonic tissue in the works of Chopin on the contrary, they only render it a more curious subject for analysis.  Such eccentricities rarely occur in his more generally known and admired compositions.  His Polonaises, which are less studied than they merit, on account of the difficulties presented by their perfect execution, are to be classed among his highest inspirations.  They never remind us of the mincing and affected “Polonaises a la Pompadour,” which our orchestras have introduced into ball-rooms, our virtuosi in concerts, or of those to be found in our “Parlor Repertories,” filled, as they invariably are, with hackneyed collections of music, marked by insipidity and mannerism.