As a child he had become familiar with the folk-songs and dances
heard in the harvest-fields and at market and village festivals. They
were his earliest models; on them were builded his first themes. As Bach
glorified the melodies of the German people, so Chopin glorified those
of the Poles. The national tonality became to him a vehicle to be
freighted with his own individual conceptions.
"I should like to be to my people what Uhland was to the Germans," he
once said to a friend. He addressed himself to the heart of this people
and immortalized its joys, sorrows and caprices by the force of his
splendid art. Those who have attempted to interpret him as the
sentimental hero of minor moods, the tone-poet in whom the weakness of
despair predominates, have missed the leaping flames, the vivid
intensity and the heroic manliness permeated with genuine love of beauty
that animated him. True art softens the harshest accents of suffering by
placing superior to it some elevating idea. So in the most melancholy
strains of his music one who heeds well may detect the presence of a
lofty ideal that uplifts and strengthens the travailing soul.
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