lived with it my years of hope, of wedded happiness, of loneliness. It heard my cries of joy, it saw my tears, my disenchantments, my honours. It shared with me my toils and the sweat of my brow. In it dwells my genius, every section of my path. It saw your father, your brother, all of us; we all have tortured it; it was a true comrade to us all, and may it always be a comrade to your daughter as a dowry of a thousand sad and happy thoughts.” There seems so much that is contemptible in this technical school that it would almost appear, at least from the artistic point of view, to have lived in vain. And yet it was at this time that a form sprang into existence which, born from technical necessities, became a custom, and from a custom a style, and so emphatically a style that it was able to enter into effective rivalry with the older styles--the contrapuntal, the thematic, the _leit-motif_. We are still under its dominion. This form is the _Étude_. The Étude was not the invention of the technists. It existed in germ in Bach; it half grew out of thematic; only the visual angle altered with time. In an invention or symphony of Bach a motive is treated according to the free laws of imitation; it is used up in all the voices, for all fingers. In a Prelude on some thematic ground-subject, in a fugue with its stern code of canonic succession, the same is the case: the motive is expended on itself. But between the broken chords of Bach’s C sharp Prelude and those of Chopin’s C sharp Étude there is a vast difference in the treatment. What in the one is used with a view to the motive is here expended with a view to the technique. Bach sets before him the artistic possibilities of the theme: Chopin the mechanical. Bach wrote many of his preludes with educational purposes; but he did not compose them with a sole view to their full practical value. As in theory the musical and the mechanical cannot be sharply severed, so the pieces are half for the purpose of supplying music, half means of instruction. The mechanical part was obliged first to emancipate itself before the conception of the Étude could be fully grasped. On the straight line leading from the old thematic to the Étude style, the conception of the motive altered itself. Motives were now found which could be arranged according to their technical productiveness. We see perhaps even the same motive, considered first contrapuntally or as a fixed idea, but afterwards according to its mechanical value.