Excepting always the music of Bach, there is almost no keyboard music save Chopin’s in which every note is thus fraught with meaning and delight. Therein lies the secret of his style, its clearness, flexibility and charm. As a work of art it is flawless, and in that may well rest its best assurance of an immortal life. IV There is little to be said of the quality of Chopin’s music in general, and that little has often been fervidly spoken, now in praise, now in blame. His music may be variously classified. There are works of his young manhood, works of more mature stamp, finally works written in the last years of his relatively short life which are very noticeably more profound and more involved than earlier ones. To study his music in the order of its creation is to trace the deepening and the sobering of his emotional life. An intensity is common to it all, a fervor which a long and painful illness had not the power to assuage. Neither the Ballade in F minor nor the _Polonaise-Fantaisie_ is less impassioned than the study in C minor, opus 10, No. 12. Outwardly they all show the same restlessness and tumultuousness. But the passion of the later works is deeper if not more calm than that of the earlier, and the expression of it is more varied and full of contrasts. Works like the fourth Scherzo, the fourth Ballade, and the Barcarolle have an under meaning so hard to grasp that perhaps the majority of those who study them or hear them find fault with the structure and say they are rambling. There is in all his music a reserve which puts it beyond the touch of most who would play it. In these last great pieces one discerns vaguely something of the holiness of that inner life of his which no one ever heard him speak of, of the intense, yearning idealism that tortured him. His was a spirit that underwent the chastening brought upon us by suffering in body and mind in silence, this fastidious, dainty, malicious, little man, for ever suffering, for ever unconquerable in pride. But the compositions may be more definitely classified than by the signs they show of Chopin’s general development. There are, for example, three distinct groups: salon pieces, such as the Waltzes and Nocturnes; pieces in which he speaks as it were his native Polish language, such as the Mazurkas and the Polonaises, and finally works which seem the unrestricted expression of his emotions: the Ballades, Scherzos, Sonatas, Preludes, and Études.