That Chopin was a Pole who went from Warsaw to Paris, there won fame, the love of George Sand, misery, and a sad death are facts that even schoolgirls lisp. The pianist-composer belongs to the stock figures of musical fiction. He was slender, had consumption, slim, long fingers, played vaporous moon-haunted music, and after his desertion by Sand coughed himself off the contemporary canvas in the most genteel and romantic manner. I like to recall George Moore’s description of Robert Louis Stevenson: “I think of Mr. Stevenson,” he wrote in his Confessions, “as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of sad flowers with pale weak hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass window and scratching thereon certain exquisite profiles with a diamond pencil.” The piano was Chopin’s window, and upon it he traced arabesques, tender and heroic, sorrowful and capricious. All this is Chopin romantically conventionalized by artist-biographers and associates. The real man, as nearly as we dare describe a real man—was of a gentle, slightly acid temper, and of a refined nature, who had a talent for playing the piano that was without parallel, and a positive genius in composition. His life was stupid, if compared with an actor’s or a sailor’s, and was devoid of public incident. We can see him giving a few piano lessons to prim, chaperoned misses of the Boulevard Saint-Germain before each noon; in the afternoons making calls or studying; in the evening at the opera for an hour, later in the enchanted circle of countesses who listened to his weaving music, and afterward a space for breathing at a fashionable café before retiring. Public appearances were rare; this aristocrat loved not the larger world and its democratic criticisms. His was a temperament prone to self-coddling. Only to the favored few did he reveal the richness of his inner life. That he suffered intensely from petty annoyances before which the ordinary man would hunch his shoulders was but the result of a hyperæsthetic delicacy. An æolian harp! you cry, and the simile is a happy one. But no wind harp has ever discoursed such music as Chopin’s piano.