The “Polonaise-Fantaisie” is to be classed among the works which belong to the latest period of Chopin’s compositions, which are all more or less marked by a feverish and restless anxiety.  No bold and brilliant pictures are to be found in it; the loud tramp of a cavalry accustomed to victory is no longer heard; no more resound the heroic chants muffled by no visions of defeat—­the bold tones suited to the audacity of those who were always victorious.  A deep melancholy—­ever broken by startled movements, by sudden alarms, by disturbed rest, by stifled sighs—­reigns throughout.  We are surrounded by such scenes and feelings as might arise among those who had been surprised and encompassed on all sides by an ambuscade, the vast sweep of whose horizon reveals not a single ground for hope, and whose despair had giddied the brain, like a draught of that wine of Cyprus which gives a more instinctive rapidity to all our gestures, a keener point to all our words, a more subtle flame to all our emotions, and excites the mind to a pitch of irritability approaching insanity.

Such pictures possess but little real value for art.  Like all descriptions of moments of extremity, of agonies, of death rattles, of contractions of the muscles where all elasticity is lost, where the nerves, ceasing to be the organs of the human will, reduce man to a passive victim of despair; they only serve to torture the soul.  Deplorable visions, which the artist should admit with extreme circumspection within the graceful circle of his charmed realm!

CHAPTER III.

Chopin’s Mazourkas—­Polish Ladies—­Mazourka in Poland—­Tortured Motives—­Early life of Chopin—­Zal.

In all that regards expression, the mazourkas of Chopin differ greatly from his Polonaises.  Indeed they are entirely unlike in character.  The bold and vigorous coloring of the Polonaises gives place to the most delicate, tender, and evanescent shades in the Mazourkas.  A nation, considered as a whole, in its united, characteristic, and single impetus, is no longer placed before us; the character and impressions now become purely personal, always individualized and divided.  No longer is the feminine and effeminate element driven back into shadowy recesses.  On the contrary, it is brought out in the boldest relief, nay, it is brought into such prominent importance that all else disappears, or, at most, serves only as its accompaniment.  The days are now past when to say that a woman was charming, they called her grateful (WDZIECZNA); the very word charm being derived from WDZIEKI:  Gratitude.  Woman no longer appears as a protegee, but as a queen; she no longer forms only the better part of life, she now entirely fills it.  Man is still ardent, proud, and presumptuous, but he yields himself up to a delirium of pleasure.  This very pleasure is, however, always stamped with melancholy.  Both the music