(b)
Figure XXI.
A second technical result of the gradual deepening of Chopin's ideal of expression was a wonderful development of his harmonic sense. In the works of his prime he is one of the greatest of all masters of expressive harmony. His originality in modulation and enharmonic transition, his employment of chromatic progressions cheek by jowl with passages based on the old diatonic modes of the Polish folk-music, his daring use of consecutive fifths and other such bugbears of the scholastic, entitle him to a high place among the pioneers of modern methods. He constantly surprises us with premonitions of Liszt, Wagner, the French and Russian composers of to-day, and even Richard Strauss. Thus, for instance, the opening of the great Polonaise-Fantaisie, with its constantly shifting tonality, its groping bass, its murky, mysterious minor-ninth and diminished-seventh chords, seems like a page from "Tristan"; the series of kaleidoscopic modulations, marked "stretto," near the end of the fourth ballade, recall Tschaïkowsky in one of his most reckless moods; and we must go to César Franck to find a parallel for the lapsing chromatic dominant-seventh chords of the twenty-first mazurka.
Figure XXII.
Nor does Chopin make the mistake, so fatal to some modern writers, of surfeiting our ears on these complexities until they become apathetic. His taste is too sensitive for that. Scarcely are we launched on an admiring study of his harmonic intricacies (which it must be confessed became in his latest pieces, as Mr. Niecks suggests, almost too fine-spun) before we are arrested by some fascinating bit of utter simplicity and bell-like clarity. How grateful, after the ominous harmonics at the beginning of the Polonaise, opus 26, no. 2, in the lower register, the restless seventh chords of the principal tune, and the clanging dissonances above the pedal-point on F at the middle of the first section—how grateful, after all this clamor and stridency, are the triads and dominant sevenths of the Meno mosso (see Figure XXII). It is as if some bright band of pilgrims marched, to the clear peal of trumpets, out of the dust and blood of a battlefield. Exquisitely beautiful, again, is the celestial purity of those chords, transparent and colorless as crystal, which are introduced near the beginning of the second impromptu:—
