Several points in Chopin’s character are more than usually interesting in connection with his music. To begin with he was half Polish in blood and wholly Polish in sympathies. It was his ambition to be for Poland in music what the poet Uhland had been for Germany in literature.[36] This does not by any means signify that many of the startling originalities in his music are due to racial influences. Only in the Polonaises and in the Mazurkas, both national dances of Poland, does Chopin make use of Polish forms. Even in the Polonaises there is more of universal than of national spirit, though in the Mazurkas, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies have for the most part a distinctly Polish stamp. Elsewhere in his music there are but rarely suggestions of a tonality not common to the music of Western Europe, or of melodies more Slavic than Latin or Teutonic. It is in spirit that his music hints of another race, by its passionate intensity, by its glowing color, and perhaps most of all by its restraint. This may seem strange when we think of the almost barbaric abandon of other Slavic composers. But Liszt in his book on Chopin speaks at length of the peculiar reserve, not to say secretiveness, of the Polish people in general and of Chopin in particular. He is emphatic in his statement that only Poles came near the inner nature of this musician; that others felt themselves delicately but surely held at a distance. So in no small measure the meaning of his music, its true beauty, eludes the player. There is a secret in it which perhaps no player has the skill fully to reveal. It is not often explicit; it is nearly always suggestive. We need not think that only a Pole can penetrate the mystery. Perhaps only Poles can play the Polonaises and the Mazurkas with full sympathy; but the Preludes, the Ballades and Études and Scherzos, to speak of but a few of his works, are music for the whole world. That they elude the efforts of most players is due to no peculiar tricks of rhythm or of melody; but to the quality of secretiveness which has somehow been transfused from the composer into his music. Even in the most splendid of his compositions, as in the most intimate, there is a touch of personal aristocracy, of reserve.