to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts.”  Then he proceeds to show in literature that Sir Thomas Browne, Emerson, Pater, Carlyle, Poe, Hawthorne and Whitman are decadents—­not in any invidious sense—­but simply in “the breaking up of the whole for the benefit of its parts.”  Nietzsche is quoted to the effect that “in the period of corruption in the evolution of societies we are apt to overlook the fact that the energy which in more primitive times marked the operations of a community as a whole has now simply been transferred to the individuals themselves, and this aggrandizement of the individual really produces an even greater amount of energy.”  And further, Ellis:  “All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes.  Decadence suggests to us going down, falling, decay.  If we walk down a real hill we do not feel that we commit a more wicked act than when we walked up it....Roman architecture is classic to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and St. Mark’s is the perfected type of decadence in art. ...  We have to recognize that decadence is an aesthetic and not a moral conception.  The power of words is great but they need not befool us. ...  We are not called upon to air our moral indignation over the bass end of the musical clef.”  I recommend the entire chapter to such men as Lombroso Levi, Max Nordau and Heinrich Pudor, who have yet to learn that “all confusion of intellectual substances is foolish.”

Oscar Bie states the Chopin case most excellently:—­

Chopin is a poet.  It has become a very bad habit to place this poet in the hands of our youth.  The concertos and polonaises being put aside, no one lends himself worse to youthful instruction than Chopin.  Because his delicate touches inevitably seem perverse to the youthful mind, he has gained the name of a morbid genius.  The grown man who understands how to play Chopin, whose music begins where that of another leaves off, whose tones show the supremest mastery in the tongue of music—­such a man will discover nothing morbid in him.  Chopin, a Pole, strikes sorrowful chords, which do not occur frequently to healthy normal persons.  But why is a Pole to receive less justice than a German?  We know that the extreme of culture is closely allied to decay; for perfect ripeness is but the foreboding of corruption.  Children, of course, do not know this.  And Chopin himself would have been much too noble ever to lay bare his mental sickness to the world.  And his greatness lies precisely in this:  that he preserves the mean between immaturity and decay.  His greatness is his aristocracy.  He stands among musicians in his faultless vesture, a noble from head to foot.  The sublimest emotions toward whose refinement whole genrations had tended, the last things in our soul, whose foreboding is interwoven with the mystery of Judgment Day, have in his music found their form.