Chopin, as we have said, played little in public. He said the public scared him. When he did play people were wont to complain that he could not be heard. They were used to the bombastic tone of Kalkbrenner. Chopin might have remedied this defect and made a successful concert performer out of himself, but his physical strength was always delicate and his artistic conscience, moreover, unwilling to permit forcing or grossness; so he continued to play too ‘softly.’ The explanation was his delicate finger touch, coming entirely from the knuckles except where detached chords were to be taken, when the wrists, of course, came into play. Those who were so fortunate as really to _hear_ Chopin’s playing had ecstasies of delight over this pearly touch, which made runs and florid decorations sound marvellously liquid and flute-like. No other performer before the public could do this. Chopin’s pupils were in this respect never more than pupils. People complained, on hearing Chopin’s music played by others, that it had no rhythm, that it was all _rubato_. The inaccuracy of this was evident when Chopin played his own compositions. For the melody, the ornament, of the right hand might be _rubato_ as it pleased, but beneath it was a steady, almost mechanical operation of the left hand. It was a part of Chopin’s conscious method, and it is said he used a metronome in practising. The point is worth emphasizing because of the way it illuminates Chopin’s fine sense of self-control and fitness. No technical method was ever more accurately suited to its task than Chopin’s. He grew up in the atmosphere of the piano, and ‘thought piano’ when composing music. He then drew on this and that piano resource until, by the time he had ended his short life, he had revealed the greater part of its potential musical possibilities--and always in what he had needed in the business of expressing his musical thoughts. With him the piano became utterly freed from the last traces of the tyranny of the polyphonic and chorale styles. But he supplied a polyphony of his own, the strangest, eeriest thing imaginable. It was the combination of two or three melodies, widely different and very beautiful, sometimes with the harmonic accompaniment added, sometimes with the harmony rising magically out of the counterpoint, but always in a new manner that was utterly pianistic. Chopin carried to its extreme the widely broken chord, as in the accompaniment to the major section of the ‘Funeral March.’ But it was in the art of delicate figuration (borrowed in the first place from Hummel) that Chopin was perhaps most himself. This, with Chopin, can be contained within no formula, can be described by no technical language. It was inexhaustible; it was eternally fluid, yet eternally appropriate. It somehow fused the utmost propriety of mood with the utmost grace of pattern. Even when it is most abundant, as in the F sharp major nocturne, it never seems exaggerated or in bad taste.