country people; and everyone acquainted with the national music
of Poland as well as with the composer's works knows that he is
indebted to it for some of the most piquant rhythmic, melodic,
and even harmonic peculiarities of his style. These longer stays
in the country would offer him better opportunities for the
enjoyment and study of this land of music than the short
excursions which he occasionally made with his father into the
neighbourhood of Warsaw. His wonder always was who could have
composed the quaint and beautiful strains of those mazurkas,
polonaises, and krakowiaks, and who had taught these simple men
and women to play and sing so truly in tune. The conditions then
existing in Poland were very favourable to the study of folk-lore
of any kind. Art-music had not yet corrupted folk-music; indeed,
it could hardly be said that civilisation had affected the lower
strata of society at all. Notwithstanding the emancipation of the
peasants in 1807, and the confirmation of this law in 1815--a law
which seems to have remained for a long time and in a great
measure a dead letter--the writer of an anonymous book, published
at Boston in 1834, found that the freedom of the wretched serfs
in Russian Poland was much the same as that of their cattle, they
being brought up with as little of human cultivation; nay, that
the Polish peasant, poor in every part of the country, was of all
the living creatures he had met with in this world or seen
described in books, the most wretched. From another publication
we learn that the improvements in public instruction, however
much it may have benefited the upper classes, did not affect the
lowest ones: the parish schools were insufficient, and the
village schools not numerous enough. But the peasants, although
steeped in superstition and ignorance, and too much addicted to
brandy-drinking with its consequences--quarrelsomeness and