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 combated.  He would never compound with human nature.  He accepted nothing of reality.  This was his vice and his virtue, his grandeur and his misery.  Implacable to the least blemish, he had an immense enthusiasm for the least light, his excited imagination doing its utmost to see in it a sun.

He was the same in friendship [as in love], becoming enthusiastic at first sight, getting disgusted, and correcting himself [se reprenant] incessantly, living on infatuations full of charms for those who were the object of them, and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest affections.

  Chopin accorded to me, I may say honoured me with, a kind of
  friendship which was an exception in his life.  He was always
  the same to me.