To Chopin might be addressed Sar Merodack Peladan’s words: 

“When your hand writes a perfect line the Cherubim descend to find pleasure therein as in a mirror.”  Chopin wrote many perfect lines; he is, above all, the faultless lyrist, the Swinburne, the master of fiery, many rhythms, the chanter of songs before sunrise, of the burden of the flesh, the sting of desire and large-moulded lays of passionate freedom.  His music is, to quote Thoreau, “a proud sweet satire on the meanness of our life.”  He had no feeling for the epic, his genius was too concentrated, and though he could be furiously dramatic the sustained majesty of blank verse was denied him.  With musical ideas he was ever gravid but their intensity is parent to their brevity.  And it must not be forgotten that with Chopin the form was conditioned by the idea.  He took up the dancing patterns of Poland because they suited his vivid inner life; he transformed them, idealized them, attaining to more prolonged phraseology and denser architecture in his Ballades and Scherzi—­but these periods are passionate, never philosophical.

All artists are androgynous; in Chopin the feminine often prevails, but it must be noted that this quality is a distinguishing sign of masculine lyric genius, for when he unbends, coquets and makes graceful confessions or whimpers in lyric loveliness at fate, then his mother’s sex peeps out, a picture of the capricious, beautiful tyrannical Polish woman.  When he stiffens his soul, when Russia gets into his nostrils, then the smoke and flame of his Polonaises, the tantalizing despair of his Mazurkas are testimony to the strong man-soul in rebellion.  But it is often a psychical masquerade.  The sag of melancholy is soon felt, and the old Chopin, the subjective Chopin, wails afresh in melodic moodiness.

That he could attempt far flights one may see in his B flat minor Sonata, in his Scherzi, in several of the Ballades, above all in the F minor Fantasie.  In this great work the technical invention keeps pace with the inspiration.  It coheres, there is not a flaw in the reverberating marble, not a rift in the idea.  If Chopin, diseased to death’s door, could erect such a Palace of Dreams, what might not he have dared had he been healthy?  But forth from his misery came sweetness and strength, like honey from the lion.  He grew amazingly the last ten years of his existence, grew with a promise that recalls Keats, Shelley, Mozart, Schubert and the rest of the early slaughtered angelic crew.  His flame-like spirit waxed and waned in the gusty surprises of a disappointed life.  To the earth for consolation he bent his ear and caught echoes of the cosmic comedy, the far-off laughter of the hills, the lament of the sea and the mutterings of its depths.  These things with tales of sombre clouds and shining skies and whisperings of strange creatures dancing timidly in pavonine twilights, he traced upon the ivory keys of his instrument and the world was richer for a poet.