Which of the following cannot be inferred from the passage?
I. Chopin was head and shoulders above his contemporaries in the field of music.
II. Despite his showing of extraordinary originality, Chopin's genius was not recognised.
III. Chopin's personality was not strong enough to have warranted attention.
IV. Liszt regrets that Chopin does not have enough operas, oratories and symphonies to his credit.
Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question based on the passage.
There is hardly a composer concerning whom so many erroneous notions are current as concerning Chopin, and of all the histories of music I have seen that very few critics devote to Chopin an amount of space approximately proportionate to his importance. One of the most absurd of the misconceptions is that Chopin's genius was born in full armor, and that it did not pass through several stages of development, like that of other composers. Chopin did display remarkable originality at the very beginning, but the apparent maturity of his first published works is due to the fact that he destroyed his earliest efforts and disowned those works which are known as posthumous, and which may have created confusion in some minds by having received a higher opus number than his last works.
Another misconception regarding Chopin is that his latest works are morbid and unintelligible. The same charge was brought by philistines against the best works of Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner. The fact is that these last works are of an almost matchless harmonic depth and originality, as superior to his earlier works as Wagner's last music dramas are to his first operas. Schumann was the first to recognize the revolutionary significance of Chopin's style. Chopin's works, he says, are cannons buried in flowers; and in another place he declares that he can see in Chopin's G minor Nocturne a terrible declaration of war against a whole musical past.
Chopin was quiet and retiring in his personal disposition so much so that his small voice was lost in the din of musical warfare. He warmly defended the principles of the romantic school, if necessary, and had decided opinions of other musicians, especially of the popular pianists of his day who vitiated the public taste with their show pieces; but he generally kept them to himself or confided them only to his friends.
The world is yet to acknowledge that Chopin is one of the very greatest explorers and pioneers in the domain of art. This can be explained by, for want of a better term, aesthetic Jumboism. When the late lamented Jumbo was in New York he attracted so much attention that his colleagues, although but little inferior in size, had no show whatever. Everybody crowded around Jumbo, stuffing him with bushels of oranges and apples, while the other elephants were entirely ignored. As elephants are intelligent animals, is it not probable that Pilot, the next in size to Jumbo, went mad and had to be shot because he was jealous of the exclusive attentions bestowed on his rival? In aesthetics, this Jumboism, this exaggerated desire for mammoth dimensions, seems to be a trait of the human mind which it is difficult to eradicate. It cannot be said that the critics of art or literature follow the popular disposition to measure genius with a yard-stick; but in music there seems to be a general tendency to do this. Liszt remarks, apropos, in his work on Chopin: The value of the sketches made by Chopin's extremely delicate pencil has not yet been acknowledged and emphasized sufficiently. It has become customary in our days to regard as great composers only those who have written at least half a dozen operas, as many oratorios, and several symphonies.