Chopin was fond of listening to the singing and fiddling of the country people; and everyone acquainted with the national music of Poland as well as with the composer’s works knows that he is indebted to it for some of the most piquant rhythmic, melodic, and even harmonic peculiarities of his style.  These longer stays in the country would offer him better opportunities for the enjoyment and study of this land of music than the short excursions which he occasionally made with his father into the neighbourhood of Warsaw.  His wonder always was who could have composed the quaint and beautiful strains of those mazurkas, polonaises, and krakowiaks, and who had taught these simple men and women to play and sing so truly in tune.  The conditions then existing in Poland were very favourable to the study of folk-lore of any kind.  Art-music had not yet corrupted folk-music; indeed, it could hardly be said that civilisation had affected the lower strata of society at all.  Notwithstanding the emancipation of the peasants in 1807, and the confirmation of this law in 1815—­a law which seems to have remained for a long time and in a great measure a dead letter—­the writer of an anonymous book, published at Boston in 1834, found that the freedom of the wretched serfs in Russian Poland was much the same as that of their cattle, they being brought up with as little of human cultivation; nay, that the Polish peasant, poor in every part of the country, was of all the living creatures he had met with in this world or seen described in books, the most wretched.  From another publication we learn that the improvements in public instruction, however much it may have benefited the upper classes, did not affect the lowest ones:  the parish schools were insufficient, and the village schools not numerous enough.  But the peasants, although steeped in superstition and ignorance, and too much addicted to brandy-drinking with its consequences—­quarrelsomeness and revengefulness—­had not altogether lost the happier features of their original character—­hospitality, patriotism, good-naturedness, and, above all, cheerfulness and love of song and dance.  It has been said that a simple Slavonic peasant can be enticed by his national songs from one end of the world to the other.  The delight which the Slavonic nations take in dancing seems to be equally great.  No other nation, it has been asserted, can compare with them in ardent devotion to this amusement.  Moreover, it is noteworthy that song and dance were in Poland—­as they were of course originally everywhere—­intimately united.  Heine gives a pretty description of the character of the Polish peasant:—­

It cannot be denied [he writes] that the Polish peasant has often more head and heart than the German peasant in some districts.  Not infrequently did I find in the meanest Pole that original wit (not Gemuthswitz, humour) which on every occasion bubbles forth with wonderful iridescence, and that dreamy sentimental trait, that brilliant flashing of an Ossianic feeling for nature whose sudden outbreaks on passionate occasions are as involuntary as the rising of the blood into the face.

The student of human nature and its reflex in art will not call these remarks a digression; at least, not one deserving of censure.