eceding music and yet
distinct--separate inspirations. I refer, especially, to the endings
of his last two nocturnes and to the final bars of the mazurka, opus
59, No. 3.

George Sand has given us a vivid sketch of Chopin's conscientiousness
as a composer. "He shut himself up in his room for entire days," she
says, "weeping, walking about, breaking his pen, repeating and
changing a bar a hundred times, and beginning again next day with
minute and desperate perseverance. He spent six weeks over a single
page, only to go back and write that which he had traced at the first
essay." As regards his creativeness, George Sand says that "it
descended upon his piano suddenly, completely, sublimely, or it sang
itself in his head during his walks, and he made haste to hear it by
rushing to the instrument." I have already mentioned the fact that
when he wrote his last mazurka he was too weak to try it on the piano.
In one of his letters he speaks of a polonaise being ready in his
head. These facts indicate that he composed mentally, although, no
doubt, during the improvisations, many themes occurred to him which he
remembered and utilized. When he improvised he did not watch the
key-board, but generally looked at the ceiling. Already as a youth he
used to be so absorbed that he forgot his meals; and, in the street,
he was often so absent-minded that he very narrowly escaped being run
over by a wagon. Visions of female loveliness and patriotic
reminiscences inspired many of his best works. Sometimes the pictures
in his mind became so vivid as to form real hallucinations. Thus it
is related that one evening when he was alone in the dark, trying over
the A major polonaise which he had just completed, he saw the door
open and in marched a procession of Polish knights and ladies in
mediaeval costumes--the same, no doubt, that his imagination had
pictured while he was composing. He was so alarmed at this vision that
he fled through the opposite door and did not venture to return.
Another illustration of the relations between genius and insanity.

The foregoing remarks on Chopin's compositions suffice, I think, to
show how absurd is the prevalent notion that he is the composer for
the drawing-room, and that his pieces reflect the spirit of
fashionable Parisian society. They do, perhaps, in their elegant form,
but certainly not in their spirit. The frivolous aristocratic circles
that heard Chopin could never have comprehended the depth o