Between his youth in Poland--which was soon closed to him on political grounds--and his last journey through England and Scotland, his stay in France stretches like a peaceful background of exclusively artistic activity. A thousand anecdotes cluster round him, but only a few of them have stood the test of criticism and comparison. In his “Life of Chopin”--and there are few musical biographies equally good--Niecks has collected everything that is told, and all the arguments against the authenticity of the various tales. Even upon that famous scene, in which the Countess Potocka sings the dying Chopin to his eternal slumber, the traditions are contradictory. There are few letters to help us. Chopin was too reserved to write them. It was said that he would rather go right through Paris to decline an invitation by word of mouth than write his excuse. And of the few letters he actually did write, the best appear to have been burnt in the sack of Warsaw. Nevertheless there is a certain charm in being thus obliged, as it were, to see him in shadow. [Illustration: George Sand, in man’s dress. Lithograph by Cecilia Brandt.] A sweet tie bound him to his native country. The fundamental characteristic of the Poles, who united the merits of the Gaul and of the Slav, that character of modesty and resignation, of sadness and of reminiscence, flowed all the purer into the works of the artist. It was easy to see that almost every one of Chopin’s compositions, even if it was _not_ a Mazurka, sprang from the rhythm and sentiment of the Mazur (Magyar) music; but it had been all steeped in the spirit of the Parisian life. A _milieu_ of his own was here, of a charming and cultivated kind, of which there are but few; the _milieu_ of fair Polish ladies, who in Paris lived for their aspirations and their temperaments. As Liszt said, the French alone saw in the daughters of Poland a yet unknown ideal: the other nations had not the slightest suspicion that there was anything worthy of admiration in these elusive sylphs of the dance, who smiled so happily of an evening, and in the morning lay sobbing at the foot of the altar; in these apparently distracted travellers, who, if they journeyed through Switzerland, drew the curtains of their carriages lest the sight of the mountain-landscape should erase the memory of the limitless horizon of their own native plains. Is not this a paraphrase of Chopin’s music?