Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/119

Rh suffice. So he fashioned for himself an instrument which, in reality, has no name.

For Chopin's piano is something quite different from that of a Bach, a Mozart or a Beethoven. His piano is really not a tool prepared for the transmission of sounds; it is the profound, the impalpable, the spontaneous projection, astonishing in its infinite range, of Chopin's soul, of that mysterious synthesis in sound of the whole nation's most actual entity. In his piano Chopin was able to give this entire soul palpable shape, to span its subtlest fibres as strings, and to bestow upon them such power and scope of utterance that they could replace a whole orchestra and in their compass express the most secret emotions of the soul which the brain itself cannot grasp.

Chopin did not need to create orchestral works—his piano is an orchestra in itself; is violin and cello together, is organ and flute and bagpipes, a hunting-horn and the trumpet of the insurgent.

And then, upon this instrument so peculiarly his own, which he himself had fashioned, he created in sounds the great secret of his nation's soul, and thus he became its profoundest interpreter and its clairvoyant herald.

But he did not forget what he owed to the original, naive folk-tunes; for the deepest impressions of his own soul he clad in the form