If Schumann sounds, as no other can, the whole gamut of feeling of a sensitive modern soul, Mendelssohn, quite dissimilar in temperament,--correct, reserved, dispassionate,--is nevertheless also romantic by virtue of his picturesqueness, his keen sense for the pageantry of life, his delicate skill as an illustrator of nature and of imaginative literature. His "Songs without Words" reveal a strain of mild lyricism, but he is never intimate or reckless, he never wholly reveals himself. His discreet objectivity is far removed from the frankly subjective enthusiasms of Schubert and Schumann. He was, in fact, by tradition, training, and native taste, a classicist; the exhibition of deep feeling was distasteful to his fastidious reticence; and he is thus emotionally less characteristic of his period than any of his contemporaries. But for all that he shows unmistakably in the felicity of his tone-painting the modern interest in picturesque detail, in the concrete circumstance, the significant particular. Illustration rather than abstract beauty--that is one of the special interests of the new school. No one has cultivated it more happily than the composer of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, the "Hebrides Overture," and the "Scotch" and "Italian" Symphonies.
Chopin presents an even more singular instance than Schumann affords of what introspection can make of a composer, of how resolute self-communion can individualize his work until its intense personal savor keeps little to remind us of other music. All Chopin's tastes were so aristocratic that the exclusiveness of his style seems a matter of course, and was probably to his mind a supreme merit. And if it debarred him from some musical experiences, if it made his music sound better in a drawing-room than in a concert hall, it certainly gave it a marvellous delicacy, finesse, originality, and fragile beauty. It is, so to speak, valetudinarian music, and preserves its pure white complexion only by never venturing into the full sunlight. Here, then, is another differentiation in musical style, a fresh departure from the classic norm, due to the exacting taste of the mental aristocrat, the carefully self-bounded dreamer and sybarite.
