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, 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
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