of the national dance, developed it, enlarged it and hung upon it his choicest melodies, his most piquant harmonies.  He breaks and varies the conventionalized rhythm in a half hundred ways, lifting to the plane of a poem the heavy hoofed peasant dance.  But in this idealization he never robs it altogether of the flavor of the soil.  It is, in all its wayward disguises, the Polish Mazurka, and is with the Polonaise, according to Rubinstein, the only Polish-reflective music he has made, although “in all of his compositions we hear him relate rejoicingly of Poland’s vanished greatness, singing, mourning, weeping over Poland’s downfall and all that, in the most beautiful, the most musical, way.”  Besides the “hard, inartistic modulations, the startling progressions and abrupt changes of mood” that jarred on the old-fashioned Moscheles, and dipped in vitriol the pen of Rellstab, there is in the Mazurkas the greatest stumbling block of all, the much exploited rubato.  Berlioz swore that Chopin could not play in time—­which was not true—­and later we shall see that Meyerbeer thought the same.  What to the sensitive critic is a charming wavering and swaying in the measure—­“Chopin leans about freely within his bars,” wrote an English critic—­for the classicists was a rank departure from the time beat.  According to Liszt’s description of the rubato “a wind plays in the leaves, Life unfolds and develops beneath them, but the tree remains the same—­that is the Chopin rubato.”  Elsewhere, “a tempo agitated, broken, interrupted, a movement flexible, yet at the same time abrupt and languishing, and vacillating as the fluctuating breath by which it is agitated.”  Chopin was more commonplace in his definition:  “Supposing,” he explained, “that a piece lasts a given number of minutes; it may take just so long to perform the whole, but in detail deviations may differ.”

The tempo rubato is probably as old as music itself.  It is in Bach, it was practised by the old Italian singers.  Mikuli says that no matter how free Chopin was in his treatment of the right hand in melody or arabesque, the left kept strict time.  Mozart and not Chopin it was who first said:  “Let your left hand be your conductor and always keep time.”  Halle, the pianist, once asserted that he proved Chopin to be playing four-four instead of three-four measure in a mazurka.  Chopin laughingly admitted that it was a national trait.  Halle was bewildered when he first heard Chopin play, for he did not believe such music could be represented by musical signs.  Still he holds that this style has been woefully exaggerated by pupils and imitators.  If a Beethoven symphony or a Bach fugue be played with metronomical rigidity it loses its quintessential flavor.  Is it not time the ridiculous falsehoods about the Chopin rubato be exposed?  Naturally abhorring anything that would do violence to the structural part of his compositions, Chopin was a very martinet with his pupils if too much license of tempo was taken.  His music needs