Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/112

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Polish soul found its deepest utterance in one of the most astonishing artists of all time,—in Frédéric Chopin.

The word is really a relic of the earliest articulate expression of the soul's vitality. The word is, as it were, a well-worn current metaphor, whose original sense we have lost. Who stops to reflect upon the huge spiritual sound-value of the word "mother," of all the long-drawn-out combinations of sound and melody, from which a purely verbal unit has arisen, which possibly admits of wide gradations of feeling, but has lost its original sound-value? I imagine that, originally, words were sung and thus in sound and melody could reproduce their whole emotional contents. With the loss of its sound value, the word has by no means lost its emotional value, but this has become deposited, has, so to speak, separated itself from the word, and has created in music its own form of being, independent from the word.

And thus it comes about, that the innermost spiritual development of a nation can be investi-