olly explained away by saying that they are in part fun and in part
indirect flattery of his correspondent. It would rather seem that
Chopin's undoubtedly real love for Matuszynski was not unmixed with a
certain kind of contempt. And here I must tell the reader that while
Poles have so high an opinion of their nation in comparison with other
nations, and of their countrymen with other countrymen, they have
generally a very mean opinion of each other. Indeed, I never met with a
Pole who did not look down with a self-satisfied smile of pity on any
of his fellow-countrymen, even on his best friend. It seems that their
feeling of individual superiority is as great as that of their national
superiority. Liszt's observations (see Vol. I., p. 259) and those of
other writers (Polish as well as non-Polish) confirm mine, which else
might rightly be supposed to be based on too limited an experience. To
return to Matuszynski, he may have been too ready to advise and censure
his friend, and not practical enough to be actively helpful. After
reading the letters addressed to them one comes to the conclusion that
Fontana's and Franchomme's serviceableness and readiness to serve went
for something in his appreciation of them as friends. At any rate, he
did not hesitate to exploiter them most unconscionably. Taking a general
view of the letters written by him during the last twelve years of his
life, one is struck by the absence of generous judgments and the extreme
rareness of sympathetic sentiments concerning third persons. As this
was not the case in his earlier letters, ill-health and disappointments
suggest themselves naturally as causes of these faults of character
and temper. To these principal causes have, however, to be added his
nationality, his originally delicate constitution, and his cultivation
of salon manners and tastes. His extreme sensitiveness, fastidiousness,
and irritability may be easily understood to derive from one or the
other of these conditions.

George Sand's Ma Vie throws a good deal of light on Chopin's character;
let us collect a few rays from it:--

He [Chopin] was modest on principle and gentle [doux] by
habit, but he was imperious by instinct, and full of a
legitimate pride that did not know itself.

He was certainly not made to live long in this world, this
extreme type of an artist. He was devoured by the dream of an
ideal which no practical philosophic or compassionate
tolerance comba