As a player he aimed first and always for beauty of tone and fineness of shading. He was not often successful before a large public. This was due in part to the weakness of his body, but probably more to the nature of his temperament. On account of the first he was unable to ‘thunder,’ and therefore, in his own words, to overwhelm his audience if he could not win them. But on account of his extremely sensitive nature a large audience, full of strange faces, was frightful to him. He shrank from displaying his art before a crowd. This was no doubt bitter to him. The triumphant general fame of a Liszt or a Thalberg was denied him. Yet in many respects he was the most remarkable pianist the world has been privileged to enjoy. Among friends in his rooms his playing had more than an earthly charm. It seems to have been distinguished not only by rare delicacy of touch, but by a skill with the pedal, with both the sustaining pedal and the soft pedal. He was master of blending his harmonies in a way that raised those who heard him at his best into a veritable ecstasy. Under his fingers the piano seemed to breathe out a music that floated in air. Though he was not, as we have implied, a powerful player, he was capable of flashes of extraordinary vigor; but it was less by sharp contrasts and extremes that he got his effects, than by infinite nuances. And he was above all else a poet of sound, a man of swift fancies, of infinite moods and changes. Chopin spent the years of his boyhood and youth in Warsaw. In the summer of 1829 he spent some weeks in Vienna, and played there twice in public. In the list of those who were present at these concerts--which, by the way, were wholly successful--one reads the names of men and women who had known Beethoven and Schubert, even friends of Mozart. He went again to Vienna in the fall of 1830 and remained there, more or less idling, until uncertain political conditions and an outbreak of cholera drove him in July, 1831, to seek Paris. Here he arrived about the end of September, and here with few exceptions he lived the rest of his life. He found himself at once in the midst of a society made up of people who were enthusiasts, and were in favor of, or actually apostles of, some radical reform in society or in the arts. Thus at their gatherings there was a great deal of animated and even polemical conversation. It was largely self-conscious. Each talker felt himself the oracle of a new doctrine. But Chopin was silent at most of these reunions. He talked little or not at all about himself and his work. His conduct seems an advocacy of conservatism; but as a matter of fact his music proves him to have been one of the great innovators in the art. II