of almost all the works of art in which they were embodied.  Or rather, he adopted their negative teaching, and like them broke and threw off the trammels of dead formulas; but at the same time he rejected their positive teaching, and walked apart from them.  Chopin’s repugnance was not confined only to the frantic side and the delirious excesses of romanticism as Liszt thinks.  He presents to us the strange spectacle of a thoroughly romantic and emphatically unclassical composer who has no sympathy either with Berlioz and Liszt, or with Schumann and other leaders of romanticism, and the object of whose constant and ardent love and admiration was Mozart, the purest type of classicism.  But the romantic, which Jean Paul Richter defined as “the beautiful without limitation, or the beautiful infinite” [das Schone ohne Begrenzung, oder das schone Unendliche], affords more scope for wide divergence, and allows greater freedom in the display of individual and national differences, than the classical.

Chopin’s and Berlioz’s relative positions may be compared to those of V. Hugo and Alfred de Musset, both of whom were undeniably romanticists, and yet as unlike as two authors can be.  For a time Chopin was carried away by Liszt’s and Killer’s enthusiasm for Berlioz, but he soon retired from his championship, as Musset from the Cenacle.  Franchomme thought this took place in 1833, but perhaps he antedated this change of opinion.  At any rate, Chopin told him that he had expected better things from Berlioz, and declared that the latter’s music justified any man in breaking off all friendship with him.  Some years afterwards, when conversing with his pupil Gutmann about Berlioz, Chopin took up a pen, bent back the point of it, and then let it rebound, saying:  “This is the way Berlioz composes—­ he sputters the ink over the pages of ruled paper, and the result is as chance wills it.”  Chopin did not like the works of Victor Hugo, because he felt them to be too coarse and violent.  And this may also have been his opinion of Berlioz’s works.  No doubt he spurned Voltaire’s maxim, “Le gout n’est autre chose pour la poesie que ce qu’il est pour les ajustements des femmes,” and embraced V. Hugo’s countermaxim, “Le gout c’est la raison du genie”; but his delicate, beauty-loving nature could feel nothing but disgust at what has been called the rehabilitation of the ugly, at such creations, for instance, as Le Roi s’amuse and Lucrece Borgia, of which, according to their author’s own declaration, this is the essence:—­

Take the most hideous, repulsive, and complete physical deformity; place it where it stands out most prominently, in the lowest, most subterraneous and despised story of the social edifice; illuminate this miserable creature on all sides by the sinister light of contrasts; and then give it a soul, and place in that soul the purest feeling which is bestowed on man, the paternal feeling.  What will be the result?  This sublime feeling, intensified according to certain