To but one popular poet was it given to interpret in a hundred lyrics the heart of his peasant Scotland. To but one English dramatist to create for our sympathy Lear, Cordelia, Othello and Desdemona, and to evoke from his fecund brain the philosophical musings of Hamlet, the whimsical humor of Falstaff, the gossamer beauties of «Midsummer Night's Dream,» and the terrible realism of Macbeth and Richard. To but one epic poet was it given to breathe a quickening breath into the pale shades of those mighty dead, Hector, Agamemnon, Achilles, and many an otherwise forgotten hero. To but one musician was it given to perfect in «The Well-tempered Clavichord» the great organ Fugue, to but one master of his art to show the attainable in those purely classical forms, the Symphony and the Sonata.
But what in a summary are the features of Chopin warranting his present vogue, and assuring his future fame? They are many, and each is an unimpeachable witness to his worth.
Prior to his day, Bach and Beethoven had explored the known world of harmony. They knew the geography of its vast continents, the choreography of its countries, the topography of its mountains and valleys and plains. They had measured its waterways, had sounded its seas, had sailed by its limiting shores; and then Ludwig Spohr, suspecting other lands beyond the uncharted west, had ventured as from Gibraltar even to the Azores, or the Canaries, the Fortunate Islands of old. Schumann had gone even farther, but not to the utmost of daring for this was the deed of Chopin. He, the Columbus of composers, gave to Harmony a new world. He, and he alone, first dreamed and then beheld its isles of Paradise, tropic and enticing, embowered and restful, fit for lone and pensive musing till suddenly the sun is darkened, the winds make wail, and a dread note of thunder foretells the bursting storm. Many times a voyager, many times an explorer, he brought continually, for the world's wonder and delight, the fantastic, the weird, the exquisite. Ah! his was no haphazard sailing on the ocean of sound; no rudderless drifting with wind and tide! Every appliance of the skilled navigator, the quadrant, the sextant, the compass, were his guides. In day or in night he knew the altitude of the sun or else of the polar star. He had calculated to a nicety the deflections of the needle. Though seemingly lost was he on the limitless waves, latitude and longitude, to the fraction of a degree, were clear to his never-beclouded mind. He it was who opened the way for all future discoverers and, inevitably, for rash and turbulent adventurers, even for Richard Strauss that Cortes, that Pizarro of them all.
