CHAPTER IV.

Chopin’s Mode of Playing—­Concerts—­The Elite—­Fading Bouquets and Immortal Crowns—­Hospitality—­Heine—­Meyerbeer—­Adolphe Nourrit—­Eugene Delacroix—­Niemcevicz—­Mickiewicz—­George Sand.

After having described the compositions palpitating with emotion in which genius struggles with grief, (grief, that terrible reality which Art must strive to reconcile with Heaven), confronting it sometimes as conqueror, sometimes as conquered; compositions in which all the memories of his youth, the affections of his heart, the mysteries of his desires, the secrets of his untold passions, are collected like tears in a lachrymatory; compositions in which, passing the limits of human sensations—­too dull for his eager fancy, too obtuse for his keen perceptions—­he makes incursions into the realms of Dryads, Oreads, and Oceanides;—­we would naturally be expected to speak of his talent for execution.  But this task we cannot assume.  We cannot command the melancholy courage to exhume emotions linked with our fondest memories, our dearest personal recollections; we cannot force ourselves to make the mournful effort to color the gloomy shrouds, veiling the skill we once loved, with the brilliant hues they would exact at our hands.  We feel our loss too bitterly to attempt such an analysis.  And what result would it be possible to attain with all our efforts!  We could not hope to convey to those who have never heard him, any just conception of that fascination so ineffably poetic, that charm subtle and penetrating as the delicate perfume of the vervain or the Ethiopian calla, which, shrinking and exclusive, refuses to diffuse its exquisite aroma in the noisome breath of crowds, whose heavy air can only retain the stronger odor of the tuberose, the incense of burning resin.

By the purity of its handling, by its relation with la fee aux MIETTES and Les LUTINS D’ARGAIL, by its rencounters with the SERAPHINS and DIANES, who murmur in his ear their most confidential complaints, their most secret dreams, the style and the manner of conception of Chopin remind us of Nodier.  He knew that he did not act upon the masses, that he could not warm the multitude, which is like a sea of lead, and as heavy to set in motion, and which, though its waves may be melted and rendered malleable by heat, requires the powerful arm of an athletic Cyclops to manipulate, fuse, and pour into moulds, where the dull metal, glowing and seething under the electric fire, becomes thought and feeling under the new form into which it has been forced.  He knew he was only perfectly appreciated in those meetings, unfortunately too few, in which all his hearers were prepared to follow him into those spheres which the ancients imagined to be entered only through a gate of ivory, to be surrounded by pilasters of diamond, and surmounted by a dome arched with fawn-colored crystal, upon which played the various dyes of the