t emotionally and intellectually-perceptible contents
of his music. We have to distinguish in Chopin the personal and the
national tone-poet, the singer of his own joys and sorrows and that of
his country's. But, while distinguishing these two aspects, we must take
care not to regard them as two separate things. They were a duality the
constitutive forces of which alternately assumed supremacy. The national
poet at no time absorbed the personal, the personal poet at no time
disowned the national. His imagination was always ready to conjure up
his native atmosphere, nay, we may even say that, wherever he might be,
he lived in it. The scene of his dreams and visions lay oftenest in the
land of his birth. And what did the national poet dream and see in these
dreams and visions? A past, present, and future which never existed and
never will exist, a Poland and a Polish people glorified. Reality passed
through the refining fires of his love and genius and reappeared in his
music sublimated as beauty and poetry. No other poet has like Chopin
embodied in art the romance of the land and people of Poland. And,
also, no other poet has like him embodied in art the romance of his own
existence. But whereas as a national poet he was a flattering idealist,
he was as a personal poet an uncompromising realist.

The masterpieces of Chopin consist of mazurkas, polonaises, waltzes,
etudes, preludes, nocturnes (with which we will class the berceuse and
barcarole), scherzos and impromptus, and ballades. They do not,
however, comprise all his notable compositions. And about these notable
compositions which do not rank with his masterpieces, either because
they are of less significance or otherwise fail to reach the standard of
requisite perfectness, I shall first say a few words.

Chopin's Bolero, Op. 19, may be described as a Bolero a la polonaise.
It is livelier in movement and more coquettish in character than
the compositions which he entitles polonaises, but for all that its
physiognomy does not on the whole strike one as particularly Spanish,
certainly not beyond the first section of the Bolero proper and
the seductive strains of the Pililento, the second tempo of the
introduction. And in saying this I am not misled by the points of
resemblance in the rhythmical accompaniment of these dances. Chopin
published the Bolero in 1834, four years before he visited Spain, but
one may doubt whether it would have turned out less Polish if he had