still greater canon-eer than the redoubtable Jadassohn of Leipzig.  Chopin and Klengel liked each other.  Three days later the party proceeded to Teplitz and Chopin played in aristocratic company.  He reached Dresden August 26, heard Spohr’s “Faust” and met capellmeister Morlacchi—­that same Morlacchi whom Wagner succeeded as a conductor January 10, 1843—­vide Finck’s “Wagner.”  By September 12, after a brief sojourn in Breslau, Chopin was again safe at home in Warsaw.

About this time he fell in love with Constantia Gladowska, a singer and pupil of the Warsaw Conservatory.  Niecks dwells gingerly upon his fervor in love and friendship—­“a passion with him” and thinks that it gives the key to his life.  Of his romantic friendship for Titus Woyciechowski and John Matuszynski--his “Johnnie”—­there are abundant evidences in the letters.  They are like the letters of a love-sick maiden.  But Chopin’s purity of character was marked; he shrank from coarseness of all sorts, and the Fates only know what he must have suffered at times from George Sand and her gallant band of retainers.  To this impressionable man, Parisian badinage—­not to call it anything stronger—­was positively antipathetical.  Of him we might indeed say in Lafcadio Hearn’s words, “Every mortal man has been many million times a woman.”  And was it the Goncourts who dared to assert that, “there are no women of genius:  women of genius are men”?  Chopin needed an outlet for his sentimentalism.  His piano was but a sieve for some, and we are rather amused than otherwise on reading the romantic nonsense of his boyish letters.

After the Vienna trip his spirits and his health flagged.  He was overwrought and Warsaw became hateful to him, for he loved but had not the courage to tell it to the beloved one.  He put it on paper, he played it, but speak it he could not.  Here is a point that reveals Chopin’s native indecision, his inability to make up his mind.  He recalls to me the Frederic Moreau of Flaubert’s “L’Education Sentimentale.”  There is an atrophy of the will, for Chopin can neither propose nor fly from Warsaw.  He writes letters that are full of self-reproaches, letters that must have both bored and irritated his friends.  Like many other men of genius he suffered all his life from folie de doute, indeed his was what specialists call “a beautiful case.”  This halting and irresolution was a stumbling block in his career and is faithfully mirrored in his art.

Chopin went to Posen in October, 1829, and at the Radziwills was attracted by the beauty and talent of the Princess Elisa, who died young.  George Sand has noted Chopin’s emotional versatility in the matter of falling in and out of love.  He could accomplish both of an evening and a crumpled roseleaf was sufficient cause to induce frowns and capricious flights—­decidedly a young man tres difficile.  He played at the “Ressource” in November, 1829, the Variations, opus 2.  On March 17, 1830, he gave his first concert in Warsaw,