be permissible to ignore them.  While thus controverting the so-called vox Dei (are not popular opinions generally popular prejudices?) and the pseudo-critics who create or follow it, I have no intention either to deny or conceal the Polish master’s excess of languor and melancholy.  I only wish to avoid vulgar exaggeration, to keep within the bounds of the factual.  In art as in life, in biography as in history, there are not many questions that can be answered by a plain “yea” or “nay.  It was, indeed, with Chopin as has been said of him, “his heart was sad, his mind was gay.  “One day when Chopin, Liszt, and the Comtesse d’Agoult spent the after-dinner hours together, the lady, deeply moved by the Polish composer’s playing, ventured to ask him “by what name he called the extraordinary feeling which he enclosed in his compositions, like unknown ashes in superb urns of most exquisitely-chiselled alabaster?  “He answered her that—­

her heart had not deceived her in its melancholy saddening, for whatever his moments of cheerfulness might be, he never for all that got rid of a feeling which formed, as it were, the soil of his heart, and for which he found a name only in his mother-tongue, no other possessing an equivalent to the Polish word zal [sadness, pain, sorrow, grief, trouble, repentance, &c.].  Indeed, he uttered the word repeatedly, as if his ear had been eager for this sound, which for him comprised the whole scale of the feelings which is produced by an intense plaint, from repentance to hatred, blessed or poisoned fruits of this acrid root.

After a long dissertation on the meaning of the word zal, Liszt, from whose book this quotation is taken, proceeds thus:—­

Yes, truly, the zal colours with a reflection now argent, now ardent, the whole of Chopin’s works.  It is not even absent from his sweetest reveries.  These impressions had so much the more importance in the life of Chopin that they manifested themselves distinctly in his last works.  They little by little attained a kind of sickly irascibility, reaching the point of feverish tremulousness.  This latter reveals itself in some of his last writings by a distortion of his thought which one is sometimes rather pained than surprised to meet.  Suffocating almost under the oppression of his repressed transports of passion, making no longer use of the art except to rehearse to himself his own tragedy, he began, after having sung his feeling, to tear it to pieces.

Read together with my matter-of-fact statements, Liszt’s hyperbolical and circumlocutional poetic prose will not be misunderstood by the reader.  The case may be briefly summed up thus.  Zal is not to be found in every one of Chopin’s compositions, but in the greater part of them:  sometimes it appears clearly on the surface, now as a smooth or lightly-rippled flow, now as a wildly-coursing, fiercely-gushing torrent; sometimes it is dimly felt only as an undercurrent whose presence not unfrequently becomes temporarily lost to ear and eye.  We must, however, take care not to overlook that this zal is not exclusively individual, although its width and intensity are so.