The traditional ‘sick’ Chopin is to be found _ipsissimus_ in the Nocturnes, the most popular, with the waltzes, of his works. In such ones as those in E flat or G the sentiment is that of a lad suffering from puppy-love and gazing at the moon. From beginning to end there is scarcely a bar which could correspond to the feelings of a physically healthy man. Yet we must remember that this sort of sentiment was quite in the fashion of the time. Byron had created of himself a myth of introspective sorrow. Only a few decades before, the Werther of Goethe’s novel, committing suicide in his suit of buff and blue, was being imitated by love-sick swains among all the fashionable circles which sought to do the correct thing. Chateaubriand and Jean Paul had cast their morbid spell over fashionable society, and this spell was not likely to pass away from the hectic Paris of the thirties while there were such men as Byron and Heine to bind it afresh each year with some fascinating book of verse. From such an influence a highly sensitive man like Chopin could not be altogether free. There is something in every artistic nature which can respond sympathetically to the claims of the morbid, for the reason that the artist is a man to feel a wide variety of the sensations that pertain to humanity. No one of the great creative musicians of the time was quite free from this morbid strain; in the sensitive, retiring Chopin it came out in its most effeminate guise. But the point is, it did not represent the whole of the man, nor necessarily any essential part of him. It was the response of his nervous organism to certain of the influences to which he was subject. Chopin may have been physiologically decadent or psychologically morbid; it is hardly a question for musicians. But his music, taken as a whole, does not prove a nature that was positively unhealthy. Its persistent emphasis of sensuousness and emotion makes it doubtless a somewhat unhealthy influence on the nerves of children; but the same could be said of many of the phases of perfectly healthy adult life. And, whatever may be the verdict concerning Chopin, we must admire the manner in which he held his powerful emotional utterance within the firm restraint of his aristocratic sense of fitness. If he has sores, he never makes a vulgar display of them in public.