“He makes several further salutations—he endeavours to animate his countenance with a smile of acknowledgment, which is instantly succeeded by a look of icy coldness.... He makes a halt, and, with still greater eccentricity of manner, it may be, than in his reverences and his walk, he seizes his fiddle, hugs it betwixt chin and chest, and fixes on it a look at once of pride, penetration and gentleness. Thus resteth he several seconds, leaving the public at leisure to examine and make him out in his strange originality—to note with curiosity his gaunt body, his lengthy arms and fingers, his dark hair descending to his shoulders, the sickness and suffering denoted in his whole frame, his sunken mouth, his long eagle nose, his wan and hollow cheeks, his large, fine, manifest forehead, such as Gall would have delighted to contemplate,—and, beneath the shelter and shadow of that front, eyes that dilate, sparkle and flash at every instant!
“Such doth Paganini show himself, formed, at every point of his person, to catch the greatest possible quantum of applause from a public whom it is his office to amuse. Behold him, a compound of chill irony and electric enthusiasm,—of haughtiness, with seeming humility,—of sickly languor, and fitful, nervous, fatal exultings,—of wild oddity, chastened by some hidden and unconscious grace—of frank abandonment, of charming attractiveness, of a superiority of talent that might fix the most indifferent,—but, above all this, a very man-fiddle—a being of extraordinary nature, created as if expressly for the gratification of a public delighting, before all things, in the extraordinary!
“‘Sufficient for the eyes!’ seems he now to say within himself, as he notes in their operation the incoherent reveries and speculations of his beholders. Promptly his looks descend from his violin to the orchestra—he gives the signal—he raises his right hand briskly into the air, and dashes his bow down upon the instrument!
“You anticipate the rupture of all its strings! On the contrary, the lightest, the finest, the most delicate of sounds comes forth to win your surprise. He continues for some moments to sport with your pre-conceptions, to look askance at you, to irritate you; and every whim that occurs to him, is employed to draw you out from your supposed indifference. He teases you, he pleases you: he springs, he runs, he wanders from tone to tone, from octave to octave; achieves, with incredible lightness and precision, the widest intervals; ascends and descends the chromatic and diatonic scales; touches harmonic accompaniments in his way; extracts unknown sounds; searches, with easy success, for difficulties and tricks of skill; exhausts, within the space of a few bars, the whole range of chords and sounds possible upon the instrument—discourses, sings, bewails, ejaculates, describes! ’Tis suddenly a murmur of waves, a whistling in the air, a warbling of birds; a something undefinably musical, in the most acute as well as the lowest tones—an unrestricted impulse of caprices, and contrasts, without guide or measure! ’Tis, in a word, a perfect union of incoherence and nameless clatter, beyond which, the world-worn and vitiated beings around, the worshippers of singularity, can see nothing, imagine nothing, desire nothing!
“The great Artist has, nevertheless, resources other than those of phantasy, by which to captivate the public—and presently there succeeds to this musical phantasmagoria a broad, stately, harmonious (albeit somewhat too bare) simplicity. The fatigue of the public and of the Artist now gives place to a species of joy, that visibly blooms on every countenance. Chords that are pure sweet, melodious, brilliant, stream from beneath the bow; and then come accents of nature that seem to flow from the heart itself, and affect you with a perspiring thrill of delight; and then (prodigy of harmony!) the vague moans and unfinished plainings of a melancholy abandonment! You sympathize, in gentle pain, with the touching and melodious artist; you dispose yourself to follow, at his direction, the course of (as it should seem) some mournful, fleeting, intangible vision—when instantly a fit of violent distress, a sort of shuddering fury, seizes him, and we are startled, chilled, tormented, by cries which pierce the inmost recesses of our frame, and make us tremble for the hapless being whom we behold and hear! We dare not breathe—we are half suffocated;—fearfully the head burns, and the heart aches.