The first time I had seen Paderewski was in 1915 in San Francisco. But before that I had already made what seemed a personal contact with him through my friendship with Madame Modjeska. More than once she had mentioned him in her letters to me, and in her memoirs she had given a charming picture of him in the days of her Zakopane villa, when he was still only a young music teacher, his concert career ahead of him. "We had many chats," she wrote, "and I advised him to appear in public. I knew he would make a name and a fortune." 

As an artist he had made both name and fortune that time I first saw him, thirty years after Modjeska's first meeting with him. But likewise, by 1915, he was already launched on a new career, one very different indeed from that of musician, a career in which he was to win strange laurels and to lose his entire fortune. He was even then, thus early in the World War, one of the acknowledged leaders of the Polish people in their final struggle for freedom. 

When next I saw Paderewski that new career of his in statecraft was become a brilliant reality, was in act at its pitch of achievement. That was scarcely five years later. But the history of a nation had been crowded into those five years. The famous mane of golden hair was now turned coppery gray;  the tall figure that had gone out of Modjeska's villa to bow before the plaudits of hundreds of thousands seemed taller still as he greeted me in the Zamek Palace at Warsaw in 1919. And the strong hand that took mine, with its steel-like grip, the hand that had swayed the hearts of multitudes through music, was now firmly set to the helm of a nation whose thirty millions looked to him for their political salvation, for the restoration of their country to its rightful place in the ranks of the international world.

The story of Paderewski is two stories, or, as it were, the story of two men. The story of his artistic career belongs to the history of music; the verdict of that history places him among the masters of all time. I know that story from its beginning in many of its intimate details.  I gathered much of it in Poland from among his friends. “You have evidently come across somebody who knows a great deal about my early youth," he once said to me, to which he added good-humoredly, "perhaps knows even too much!" But there is another story to tell of Paderewski, a story the living out of which, in great part, it was my good fortune to witness first-hand in the Poland of post-Armistice days. It is the story of his phenomenal success as a national leader and an international politician, a story that is not sufficiently known and yet one which illustrates the power of Paderewski's character fully as well as does the record of his triumphal artistic achievements. As a matter of fact, the one story is in its essentials no different from the other; the genius and character of the man comes out in both. Tireless, relentless, indefatigable patience, iron determination, merciless self-discipline, make the theme of both these stories. The youth who could practice at the piano seventeen hours at a time to perfect a pair of hands that had been laughed at by his fellows, and who could in the end develop in those hands a power of artistic magic that for nearly half a century has moved the soul of the whole music-loving world, such a youth could hardly escape the destiny of fame that Modjeska predicted for him, though she could not have dreamed how that destiny would work out in the end or what obstacles he would have to overcome. Include poverty and hardship among those obstacles, and we have, in the winning of a large fortune, another evidence of power, the power of level-headed practical common sense. Interrupt this story of fame and fortune with a cataclysmic war which not only turns the man face about from his artistic career to the wholly alien field of international politics, but at the same time strips him of his fortune; see him win as statesman a success as brilliant as that won by him in art, and watch him finally, over sixty years of age, his lifetime savings gone, return to his art, win a new fortune and make a new career: to follow Paderewski through such a story as this is to have beyond denial an extraordinary man to consider.

To the world at large, devoted for so many years to Paderewski as an artist, the most extraordinary thing that he did was to enter the field of international politics and become one of the great political leaders of history. But that extraordinary achievement of his is usually and very wrongly marveled at as a mere freak of war-time change. While his musical genius is accepted as a patent fact, his eminence in statecraft is regarded as one of the accidents of history. Paderewski's career as statesman was not an accident. When one knows what Paderewski had to cope with as a political leader, and considers how the powers he had developed as an artist were applied to the problems of world politics, one realizes that the two apparently disparate careers were in reality one and the same, part and parcel of each other. 

Paderewski's arrival in Poland in January 1919 had been preceded by some five years of political and philanthropic activity in America and Europe, raising funds with which to feed his starving people, inducing Woodrow Wilson to make the freedom of Poland one of the Fourteen Points; organizing Polish-American troops to fight for the Allies; securing a place for Poland at the Versailles Peace Conference. When I arrived in Poland in 1919 Paderewski was in the thick of his struggle to restore the nation to political unity. Poland had been liberated then for nearly a year, but in that time she had suffered such vicissitudes and such agonies of rebirth, after a juridical death of over a century, as would warrant any ordinary nation to drop back into chaos and ruin. The task of reconstruction and rehabilitation which Paderewski faced when he returned to his native land in 1919 was a task to stagger a giant. 

Other countries, it is true, had, like Poland, been freed by Wilson's peace terms and had set to work to reorganize themselves under their new found liberty. But none of them had come to that liberty as Poland had come, none had been so stripped, so torn apart, so stamped into political oblivion. Here was a nation that for over one hundred years had not only suffered the alien yoke of despotism and tyranny, but one that had been dismembered and as a political entity obliterated, not by one but by three despotisms. No longer was there a Poland to be restored; there were three Polands − Russian, German, and Austrian. Different tongues, different codes of law, different systems of education, different cultures, all these had been imposed upon that unhappy land, so that it had become literally true that Poland as a state, as a nation, had ceased to exist. "Poland is not yet dead!" had been the old rally-cry of the Dąbrowski legions under Napoleon, as it now is the refrain of Poland's national anthem. But the Poland to which Paderewski came in 1919 was as dead as a cruelly dismembered body can be dead. Only her soul lived on, a disenthralled spirit, a wraith, separated from its body, living only in the hearts, the memories and the hopes of the people. 

The practical result of the Polish dismemberment was this: The Polish people were no longer a united people. United they were, it is true, in their ideal of liberty as they had always been united in their hope of freedom. But they were sadly divided when it came to the question of how that freedom, now restored to them, was to be maintained and preserved. Not only was there no longer a Poland. There was no longer in actuality the Pole: there was the "Russian" Pole, the "German" Pole, the "Austrian" Pole. Not that the Muscovite had succeeded in Russianizing the Pole or the Prussian in Teutonizing him, or the Austrian in Hapsburging him. It was not that. But they had succeeded in sectionalizing the country and in making each section, when national issues were at stake, suspicious of the other. Who was to unify these separate parts? Could a Russian" Pole do it, with the "German" Pole eying him askance? Or vice versa? That was not in human nature. And yet a man must be found, a leader of all, a champion in whom all would believe fully and heartily. 

That man was found. He was Paderewski. He was a Pole of the Poles. He was neither "Russian" nor "German" nor "Austrian." He was just a Pole. By the providential circumstances of his life he had escaped the mark of sectionalism, and by reason of that fact he was assured a hearing at home as well as before the world. 

More than that, Paderewski was "American". For some thirty years more or less he had lived in America, in a land that was a magic land to the Pole, a land to which the heart of Poland had turned in admiration and devotion ever since the days when Kosciuszko and Pułaski had crossed the seas to help us win our independence. Through all the generations of their own suffering in the cause of liberty, the Polish people had looked upon America as the one land where liberty really triumphed, where freedom was not a dream but a reality. And now, out of that land, returning to his mother land, rose up this son of Poland, Paderewski, the man who had been for half his lifetime the spokesman of Polish genius to the world at large, the unportfolioed ambassador of a lost nation to the courts and congresses of civilization. Such a man, one without a single tie of factionalism or sectionalism binding him, a man of international repute and with the prestige of America backing him, was the one man needed by Poland at that critical hour to seal the guarantee of her restoration and begin the building of her superstructure as a State on the foundations laid by his brother patriots. 

Paderewski did it He did it simply, nobly, practically. And yet, after all his long struggle in America gathering funds for the starving people of his country and raising troops for the Allies, after his still more difficult struggle to secure open avowal of the claims of his people in the peace terms of President Wilson, and an acknowledged place for a Polish spokesman at the Versailles Conference: after all this, his task was as yet only begun. He still had Poland itself to save, to save for itself and even from itself. 

These were stirring days in Poland. The air was electrical with urgency. There was, as I have said, factionalism, sectionalism, division, dissension, on every side, for the harvest of division is dissension. Paderewski had to face all this, oppose it, fight it, reason with it, struggle night and day against it, laboring as perhaps no leader of a nation ever before has had to labor to save his country. And he had to carry on this struggle not alone against large divisions of partisan opposition but even against the sting of small personal attack, attack that stooped even to the intimacies of religious bigotry. Poland is distinctively a Catholic country, but it has not escaped the virus of Continental anticlericalism fostered by imported atheistic socialism. Paderewski's Catholic faith was seized upon by radical opponents as a means of rousing antagonism. I remember a postcard that was circulated against him, a picture representing him led by the traditional fox-faced monk of the anticlericals. Another, in kind, went further still, a mean cartoon that lampooned the noble and generous woman who is Paderewski's wife, a woman who was at that moment spending her utmost energies if indeed she was not permanently wrecking her health in service of the poor of her stricken country. There were many such attacks by cartoon and word of print in the "red" press, a press that gave plain evidence of enjoying Bolshevik subsidy from across the Russian border. Much of this sort of thing Paderewski had to suffer as he labored to draw his people out of the darkness of disunion rather out of the blinding glare of new unaccustomed liberty up to the plane of sober action, clear vision. But he had the vision, and he had the gift of ordered action and the power to lead others to see that vision and to act. 

He did it. But he could never have done it if he had not already imposed upon himself the discipline that had perfected him in his art, if he had not developed in himself the smooth running machinery of controlled genius, of indefatigable, relentless, tireless patience, determination and self-criticism. 

But that is not all of Paderewski's story as statesman. He did the great thing. And then he did a greater thing. He did one of the greatest things that any man can do. He sacrificed himself. His task of international recognition completed, his work of national reunification launched, the machine assembled, the huge and complicated engine of government set moving, he voluntarily stepped down from the engineer's seat, moved aside, made way for others. Not too late and not too soon although, in the light of later events, it remains difficult for the American observer not to believe that it would have been better for Poland had Paderewski's distracted countrymen been possessed of just a little more of his broad vision, enough of it to force him to remain. But the Polish democracy was no exception to the universal human rule: there was one spirit, one aim, but there were divergent interests, opinions, convictions, pulling in opposite directions. Paderewski held and steered these through the first crisis, through the "creative hour"; it was the part of his genius to sense what that hour, that crucial moment, was. Then, the crisis passed, he withdrew. He gave over the wheel to others.

He might have staid on. He might have remained, keeping to himself the glory of leadership, the honor of supreme office. But it was not premiership or presidency that Paderewski was working for. It was a free Poland he was working for, a strong, self-controlled, self-functioning democracy, a Poland that would be in plan, framework, and eventual operation as much a harmony of accord as one of his own musical compositions. That was his dream. Only the great make their dreams come true. He had made his dream of music come true. Now, to make his dream of a free Poland come true, a Poland harmonious and accordant, he sacrificed himself. He had composed the score, harmonized the furious fortissimo of its discords. That done, he gave the composition to his people to play. 

And yet no act of Paderewski's was less understood or less appreciated than the act of his withdrawal from politics. "So Paderewski failed?" If that question was asked me once, it was asked a hundred times, when I came home from Poland. So few in America had any grasp of the real situation in Poland, of the real greatness of Paderewski, True, Americans never disgraced themselves as some of the Prussian politicians did by ridiculing him as the "piano playing premier." Our people respected him too much and recognized his genius for statesmanship too readily for that. The unexpected does not surprise us, we are used to it, in a land where rail splitters become presidents. But nearly everyone here seemed to labor nevertheless under the impression that Paderewski's withdrawal from politics meant that he had failed. 

He had not failed. As a matter of fact, no man in the war and the post-war history of Europe triumphed quite as Paderewski triumphed. He won back for his country its rightful "place in the sun" among the great nations. He did the one thing that had to be done to complete the restoration of Poland, the one thing that, as it happened, he alone at the moment could do. And if there be any today who still believe that Paderewski failed, all they need do is look across the sea to the new Poland of our time, that new Poland which, amidst all the ruin and confusion of post-war years has balanced her budget, established a soundly backed currency, exported more than she has imported, paid her bills and reduced her national debt to one of the smallest per capita public debts in Europe. That new Poland is built on foundations laid by Paderewski's hands. Whatever has happened since, whatever fame or glory others have won in the rehabilitation of Poland they are many and they have won it justly and greatly in the end as it was in the beginning the new Poland as a recognized entity in the world of nations, is Paderewski's Poland. The Poland that is, today, could not have been, certainly not within the time of living men, had not Paderewski come when he did, done what he did, and, in the wisdom of his unselfish foresight, quit when he did. Henryk Opienski in his biography quotes thus an eminent official of the Versailles Peace Conference: "Without his [Paderewski's] work in America none of the Allies would have dared to present the Polish question before the congress at Versailles as it was presented." Without Paderewski's work the Polish question would not have been solved in our day; it would have remained Europe's most despairing riddle.

So he quit the field of politics. But he did not quit his art. The strains of music that Paderewski makes are still heard as the pages of this book are written, as indeed they will be heard, in his compositions, for all time, as long as music exists on this earth. The "million dollar hands" that not only gave away their hard-earned millions to feed starving Poland, but that grasped and held the wheel of the nation and saved that nation from foundering, still strike music around the world. I know little about music, but Paderewski's playing has the power to draw me to the edge of my chair experiencing unimaginable things as I sit listening to him. As long as I live, I shall not forget his music. But whenever I hear it, whether actually as played by him, or in his compositions as played by others, or only in memory and imagination as I heard it that midsummer eve in 1920 as if by some preternatural conjuring floating into the dusk out of the silence of Modjeska's empty house where often he played to the stars coming out over the snowy Tatras, however and wherever I hear Paderewski's music, I shall not feel the artist only, I shall feel the impact of a strong and great man, a man endowed with genius, who played his part in the saving of a nation not in spite of his being an artist, but exactly because he was an artist, and by reason of no other fact. As Saint-Saens once remarked, “Paderewski is a genius who happens to play the piano.”