Further, he adopted only some of the striking peculiarities of the national music, and added to them others which were individual.  These individual characteristics—­those audacities of rhythm, melody, and harmony (in progressions and modulations, as well as in single chords)—­may, however, be said to have been fathered by the national ones.  As to the predominating chromaticism of his style, it is not to be found in Polish folk-music; although slight rudiments are discoverable (see Nos. 6-12 of the musical illustrations).  Of course, no one would seek there his indescribably-exquisite and highly-elaborate workmanship, which alone enabled him to give expression to the finest shades and most sudden changes of gentle feelings and turbulent passions.  Indeed, as I have already said, it is rather the national spirit than the form which manifests itself in Chopin’s music.  The writer of the article on Polish music in Mendel’s Conversations-Lexikon remarks:—­

What Chopin has written remains for all times the highest ideal of Polish music.  Although it would be impossible to point out in a single bar a vulgar utilisation of a national theme, or a Slavonic aping of it, there yet hovers over the whole the spirit of Polish melody, with its chivalrous, proud, and dreamy accents; yea, even the spirit of the Polish language is so pregnantly reproduced in the musical diction as perhaps in no composition of any of his countrymen; unless it be that Prince Oginski with his polonaises and Dobrzynski in his happiest moments have approached him.

Liszt, 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,