Heine said that “every epoch is a sphinx which plunges into the abyss as soon as its problem is solved.”  Born in the very upheaval of the Romantic revolution—­a revolution evoked by the intensity of its emotion, rather than by the power of its ideas—­ Chopin was not altogether one of the insurgents of art.  Just when his individual soul germinated, who may tell?  In his early music are discovered the roots and fibres of Hummel and Field.  His growth, involuntary, inevitable, put forth strange sprouts, and he saw in the piano, an instrument of two dimensions, a third, and so his music deepened and took on stranger colors.  The keyboard had never sung so before; he forged its formula.  A new apocalyptic seal of melody and harmony was let fall upon it.  Sounding scrolls, delicious arabesques gorgeous in tint, martial, lyric, “a resonance of emerald,” a sobbing of fountains—­as that Chopin of the Gutter, Paul Verlaine, has it—­the tear crystallized midway, an arrested pearl, were overheard in his music, and Europe felt a new shudder of sheer delight.

The literary quality is absent and so is the ethical—­Chopin may prophesy but he never flames into the divers tongues of the upper heaven.  Compared with his passionate abandonment to the dance, Brahms is the Lao-tsze of music, the great infant born with gray hair and with the slow smile of childhood.  Chopin seldom smiles, and while some of his music is young, he does not raise in the mind pictures of the fatuous romance of youth.  His passion is mature, self-sustained and never at a loss for the mot propre.  And with what marvellous vibration he gamuts the passions, festooning them with carnations and great white tube roses, but the dark dramatic motive is never lost in the decorative wiles of this magician.  As the man grew he laid aside his pretty garlands and his line became sterner, its traceries more gothic; he made Bach his chief god and within the woven walls of his strange harmonies he sings the history of a soul, a soul convulsed by antique madness, by the memory of awful things, a soul lured by Beauty to secret glades wherein sacrificial rites are performed to the solemn sounds of unearthly music.  Like Maurice de Guerin, Chopin perpetually strove to decipher Beauty’s enigma and passionately demanded of the sphinx that defies: 

“Upon the shores of what oceans have they rolled the stone that hides them, O Macareus?”

His name was as the stroke of a bell to the Romancists; he remained aloof from them though in a sympathetic attitude.  The classic is but the Romantic dead, said an acute critic.  Chopin was a classic without knowing it; he compassed for the dances of his land what Bach did for the older forms.  With Heine he led the spirit of revolt, but enclosed his note of agitation in a frame beautiful.  The color, the “lithe perpetual escape” from the formal deceived his critics, Schumann among the rest.  Chopin, like Flaubert, was the last of the idealists, the first of the realists.  The newness of his form, his linear counterpoint, misled the critics, who accused him of the lack of it.  Schumann’s formal deficiency detracts from much of his music, and because of their formal genius Wagner and Chopin will live.