But a genuine school exists not.  Henselt was only a German who fell asleep and dreamed of Chopin.  To a Thalberg-ian euphony he has added a technical figuration not unlike Chopin’s, and a spirit quite Teutonic in its sentimentality.  Rubinstein calls Chopin the exhalation of the third epoch in art.  He certainly closed one.  With a less strong rhythmic impulse and formal sense Chopin’s music would have degenerated into mere overperfumed impressionism.  The French piano school of his day, indeed of today, is entirely drowned by its devotion to cold decoration, to unemotional ornamentation.  Mannerisms he had—­what great artist has not?—­but the Greek in him, as in Heine, kept him from formlessness.  He is seldom a landscapist, but he can handle his brush deftly before nature if he must.  He paints atmosphere, the open air at eventide, with consummate skill, and for playing fantastic tricks on your nerves in the depiction of the superhuman he has a peculiar faculty.  Remember that in Chopin’s early days the Byronic pose, the grandiose and the horrible prevailed—­witness the pictures of Ingres and Delacroix—­and Richter wrote with his heart-strings saturated in moonshine and tears.  Chopin did not altogether escape the artistic vices of his generation.  As a man he was a bit of poseur—­the little whisker grown on one side of his face, the side which he turned to his audience, is a note of foppery—­but was ever a detester of the sham-artistic.  He was sincere, and his survival, when nearly all of Mendelssohn, much of Schumann and half of Berlioz have suffered an eclipse, is proof positive of his vitality.  The fruit of his experimentings in tonality we see in the whole latter-day school of piano, dramatic and orchestral composers.  That Chopin may lead to the development and adoption of the new enharmonic scales, the “Homotonic scales,” I do not know.  For these M. A. de Bertha claimed the future of music.  He wrote: 

“Now vaporously illumined by the crepuscular light of a magical sky on the boundaries of the major and minor modes, now seeming to spring from the bowels of the earth with sepulchral inflexions, melody moves with ease on the serried degrees of the enharmonic scales.  Lively or slow she always assumed in them the accents of a fatalist impossibility, for the laws of arithmetic have preceded her, and there still remains, as it were, an atmosphere of proud rigidity.  Melancholy or passionate she preserves the reflected lines of a primitive rusticity, which clings to the homotones in despite of their artificial origin.”  But all this will be in the days to come when the flat keyboard will be superseded by a Janko many-banked clavier contrivance, when Mr. Krehbiel’s oriental srootis are in use and Mr. Apthorp’s nullitonic order, no key at all, is invented.  Then too a new Chopin may be born, but I doubt it.