“And yet—and yet, despite this too positive pain which the unfortunate artist has forced both upon us and himself, he bethinketh him mindfully that ’tis his vocation to serve for sport to the public that does him the honor to come and listen to him. He snatches away, therefore, your ladies with delicate nerves, and your men of effeminacy, from the suffocation and syncope that threaten them. Truce to the cries of agony! truce to despair! A fantastic chaunt, a wild laugh, springs up—and then succeeds a sort of buffoon dance, to complete the relief of these people, and restore them to life. Encore he sings, he laughs, he dances: each face is completely reassured, and its owner, to prove to the rest, and to his own satisfaction, that he has not so far forgotten himself as to quit the precincts of bon ton and eternal frigidity, smiles listlessly upon his neighbour, strokes his cravat adjustingly, and throws a careless glance from side to side! Amidst this returning indifference, let there come a new passage of arduous brilliancy, some more or less astonishing sleight of hand—and a reiterated clapping of palms convinces the unhappy purveyor of diversion that he has but too well served the public according to their taste!
“And now, should the rondo come, in its light and laughing gaiety—should the hymn of love and delight succeed, ’twill be the same case as with the cry of grief or despair. Each burst of simple gaiety must be followed by an air in the coquettish style, an impulse from the head, to give it stimulus. Amid the passionate harmonies of love, you shall hear interspersed the accents of coldness, of disdain, of raillery. After a voluptuous transport, you shall have mincings and caprices:—
for there is no gaiety, whether for him, or for the listening public, of a natural, fresh and youthful character; there is no frank and confiding attachment; there is no serene and grateful pleasure; there is no sadness that pours itself out for the sake of consolation; no joys but such as are like scentless flowers, that one picks to pieces in sport; no passion save what is akin to delirium, debauchery, or deadly poison! What the public must have, and the artist, are your pizzicati, your contrasts, your satanic schooleries, your touches of the extravagant;—’tis a dose of madness or despair,—’tis an agony—the sensation of a man suspended over a bottomless abyss;—’tis a violin, which is at once a flute, a bass, a guitar, and a whole orchestra, intermixed, confounded, and getting into harmony only by fits;—’tis a professional visage, revealing a wounded and withered heart; ’tis a human skeleton—death, in grotesque attire; ’tis the “talented exhibition” of a rebellious angel, who gnashes his teeth, and howls, and jeers! And so the public, seeing their artist hold forth to them, under convenient forms, all possible monstrosities, seem to applaud themselves inwardly, and to exclaim instinctively, ‘Here is our interpreter, our plaything, and our own handywork!‘
“Of such a public, and such an artist, how saddening the sight!... The public, made up of idlers—of beings isolated, selfish, cold, corrupt—must be amused, forsooth! and the artist exhausts his taste and his sentiment, and well nigh perspires blood and water, to comply with their exactions—to amuse them!—and if he attain this end, the public clap their hands, the manager of the theatre counts out to him a heap of gold, and he goes away, with his ears deafened at the noise which has surrounded him, and which, for a moment, (it may be), has made his heart beat high;—he goes away, with a loving grasp tightened over the coin he has so hardly won; and inwardly exclaims, with a smile of pity, ‘The blockheads—the barbarians! Who is there among them that can comprehend me—that can feel my intentions?’—and then the home-returning public, selfish to the very soul, indemnify themselves for their fingers’-end applause, by sottish contempt, by remarks that are empty, or worse—that are scornful, bitter, shocking, disgusting even—such as those which may have been buzzed into one’s ears in Italy or in Paris, but varied in a hundred ways, and aggravated at will, just as he varies and enlarges, twists and turns, beneath his magic bow, a subject of apparently the most simple and insignificant kind. And now the voices most distinguishable among the ebbing crowd murmur out the words, ‘Gambler! Libertine!’ or worse.... And the privileged public resort again to the theatre, to admire the talent of him whom they comprehend not; and the artist returns in like manner, to amuse those who provoke his pity, and whom he beholds so far below him! Thus, we have contempt on one side, compassion on the other—applause from hands chilled with the touch of gold, on the one part,—on the other, sounds that borrow their animation from no social sympathy! Such are the relations between the public and the professor—such the bonds that connect them!”
So much for the pungently descriptive, as regards this singular being. It is less difficult, however, to exhibit effects and appearances, than to analyze the causes or means which produce them—and it is in this latter endeavour, accordingly, that there has been least success attained by those who have made Paganini their theme, in Paris, as elsewhere. That which was already obscure in relation to him, has been forced into denser obscurity by the attempted demonstrations of certain pompous literary showmen, who have succeeded only in illustrating the proverb of “ignotum per ignotius.” Mystification and generalization, the resources of ambitious ignorance, have been copiously employed in these endeavours. Of a less unsatisfactory character, however, are the pretensions of M. Guhr, the able violinist, of Frankfort, who has attempted an analysis of the means employed, and the effects produced, by Paganini. Like most professors of a secret, the arch Italian was always studious of maintaining the mystery so provocative of curiosity and admiration. He assumed the air cabalistic, and, with a severe front and sullen eye, would stimulate and foster the impression of his being “profited in strange concealments.” M. Guhr, though he had the seeming advantage of personal and friendly access to him, found he could make nothing of him by the interrogatory system, and therefore adopted the alternative of becoming a silent student of his peculiarities, till he made certain discoveries of more or less importance, which he shaped into five heads, to show that Paganini’s chief points of difference from other violinists were—