, as so often, has also in connection with this aspect of the
composer Chopin some excellent remarks to offer.

He neither applied himself nor exerted himself to write Polish
music; it is possible that he would have been astonished to
hear himself called a Polish musician.

[FOOTNOTE: Liszt decidedly overshoots here the mark, and does
so in a less degree in the rest of these observations. Did not
Chopin himself say to Hiller that he wished to be to his
countrymen what Uhland was to the Germans? And did he not
write in one of his letters (see p. 168): "You know how I wish
to understand, and how I have in part succeeded in
understanding, our national music"?]

Nevertheless, he was a national musician par excellence...He
summed up in his imagination, he represented in his talent, a
poetic feeling inherent in his nation and diffused there among
all his contemporaries. Like the true national poets, Chopin
sang, without a fixed design, without a preconceived choice,
what inspiration spontaneously dictated to him; it is thus
that there arose in his music, without solicitation, without
effort, the most idealised form of the emotions which had
animated his childhood, chequered his adolescence, and
embellished his youth...Without making any pretence to it, he
collected into a luminous sheaf sentiments confusedly felt by
all in his country, fragmentarily disseminated in their
hearts, vaguely perceived by some.

George Sand tells us that Chopin's works were the mysterious and vague
expression of his inner life. That they were the expression of his inner
life is indeed a fact which no attentive hearer can fail to discover
without the aid of external evidence. For the composer has hardly
written a bar in which, so to speak, the beating of his heart may not be
felt. Chopin revealed himself only in his music, but there he revealed
himself fully. And was this expression of his inner life really
"mysterious and vague"? I think not! At least, no effusion of words
could have made clearer and more distinct what he expressed. For the
communications of dreams and visions such as he dreamt and saw, of
the fluctuating emotional actualities such as his sensitive heart
experienced, musical forms are, no doubt, less clumsy than verbal and
pictorial ones. And if we know something of his history and that of his
nation, we cannot be at a loss to give names and local habitations to
the impalpable, bu