Chopin knew every one of note in Paris.  The best salons were open to him.  Some of his confreres have not hesitated to describe him as a bit snobbish, for during the last ten years of his life he was generally inaccessible.  But consider his retiring nature, his suspicious Slavic temperament, above all his delicate health!  Where one accuses him of indifference and selfishness there are ten who praise his unfaltering kindness, generosity and forbearance.  He was as a rule a kind and patient teacher, and where talent was displayed his interest trebled.  Can you fancy this Ariel of the piano giving lessons to hum-drum pupils!  Playing in a charmed and bewitching circle of countesses, surrounded by the luxury and the praise that kills, Chopin is a much more natural figure, yet he gave lessons regularly and appeared to relish them.  He had not much taste for literature.  He liked Voltaire though he read but little that was not Polish—­did he really enjoy Sand’s novels?—­and when asked why he did not compose symphonies or operas, answered that his metier was the piano, and to it he would stick.  He spoke French though with a Polish accent, and also German, but did not care much for German music except Bach and Mozart.  Beethoven—­save in the C sharp minor and several other sonatas—­was not sympathetic.  Schubert he found rough, Weber, in his piano music, too operatic and Schumann he dismissed without a word.  He told Heller that the “Carneval” was really not music at all.  This remark is one of the curiosities of musical anecdotage.

But he had his gay moments when he would gossip, chatter, imitate every one, cut up all manner of tricks and, like Wagner, stand on his head.  Perhaps it was feverish, agitated gayety, yet somehow it seemed more human than that eternal Thaddeus of Warsaw melancholy and regret for the vanished greatness and happiness of Poland—­a greatness and happiness that never had existed.  Chopin disliked letter writing and would go miles to answer one in person.  He did not hate any one in particular, being rather indifferent to every one and to political events—­except where Poland was concerned.  Theoretically he hated Jews and Russians, yet associated with both.  He was, like his music, a bundle of unreconciled affirmations and evasions and never could have been contented anywhere or with any one.  Of himself he said that “he was in this world like the E string of a violin on a contrabass.”  This “divine dissatisfaction” led him to extremes:  to the flouting of friends for fancied affronts, to the snubbing of artists who sometimes visited him.  He grew suspicious of Liszt and for ten years was not on terms of intimacy with him although they never openly quarrelled.