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, but emotionally and intellectually-perceptible contents of his music.  We have to distinguish in Chopin the personal and the national tone-poet, the singer of his own joys and sorrows and that of his country’s.  But, while distinguishing these two aspects, we must take care not to regard them as two separate things.  They were a duality the constitutive forces of which alternately assumed supremacy.  The national poet at no time absorbed the personal, the personal poet at no time disowned the national.  His imagination was always ready to conjure up his native atmosphere, nay, we may even say that, wherever he might be, he lived in it.  The scene of his dreams and visions lay oftenest in the land of his birth.  And what did the national poet dream and see in these dreams and visions?  A past, present, and future which never existed and never will exist, a Poland and a Polish people glorified.  Reality passed through the refining fires of his love and genius and reappeared in his music sublimated as beauty and poetry.  No other poet has like Chopin embodied in art the romance of the land and people of Poland.  And, also, no other poet has like him embodied in art the romance of his own existence.  But whereas as a national poet he was a flattering idealist, he was as a personal poet an uncompromising realist.

The masterpieces of Chopin consist of mazurkas, polonaises, waltzes, etudes, preludes, nocturnes (with which we will class the berceuse and barcarole), scherzos and impromptus, and ballades.  They do not, however, comprise all his notable compositions.  And about these notable compositions which do not rank with his masterpieces, either because they are of less significance or otherwise fail to reach the standard of requisite perfectness, I shall first say a few words.