No doubt, much of your fustian and rhodomontade, your diabolic attitudes, your grandiose battles between the hosts of evil and the light of the Tree, your interminable fanfares, was due the age in which you grew. The externality, the pompousness of intention, the theatrical postures, was part of the romantic constitution. The desire to achieve sensational effects, the tendency to externalize, to assume theatrical postures and intend pompously, was inborn in every single one of the men among whom you passed your youth. For they had suddenly, painfully become aware that nature was supremely indifferent to their individual fates and sorrows. So wounded were they in their _amour-propre_ that they sought to restore their diminished sense of self-worth by exaggerating the importance and intensity of their sufferings and seeking to convince themselves of their satanic sins and dreadful dooms. Manfred, posing darkly on an Alpine crag and summoning
"Nature to her feud With bile & buskin attitude,"
was the type of you all. You had to ward off consciousness of your own insignificance by conceiving yourselves amid stupendous surroundings, lurid natural effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coliseums, subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit dens, and as laboring under frightful curses, dire punishments, ancestral sins, etc., etc.
But while we find the frenetic romanticism of a Delacroix, for instance, attractive, even, because of the virtue of his painting, and forgive that of a Berlioz and a Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, the veritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite learn to love yours. For in you the disease was aggravated by the presence of another powerful incentive to strut and posture and externalize and inflate your art. For you were the virtuoso. You were the man whose entire being was pointed to achieve an effect. You were the man whose life is lived on the concert-platform, whose values are those of the concert-room, who finds his highest good in the instantaneous effect achieved by his performance. From childhood you were the idolized piano-virtuoso. All your days you were smothered in the adulation showered upon you in very tangible form by the great ladies of every capital of Europe. And a virtuoso you remained all your existence. You never developed out of that early situation into something more salutary to the artist. On the contrary, you came to require the atmosphere of the performance, the exhibition, about you continually, to find the rose leaves and the clouds of perfume absolutely necessary. Most of your composition seems but the effort to perpetuate about you the admiration and the adulation, the glowing eyes and half-parted lips and heaving bosoms. Everything in your piano-music is keyed for that effect. The shameless sentimentalities, the voluptuous lingerings over sweet chords and incisive notes, the ostentatious recitatives, the moist, sensual climaxes, the titillating figuration, the over-draperies, were called into existence for the immediate, the overwhelming effect at first hearing. Everything is broadened and peppered and directed to obtaining you the Pasha-power you craved. Besides being windy and theatrical, your music is what Nietzsche so bitterly called it, "Die Schule der Geläufichkeit--nach Frauen."