Ilium non rutilis veniens Aurora capillis Cessantem vidit, non Hesperus!
His fiddle must be his inseparable companion, cultivated before all other society, beloved before all other worldly objects—the means and the end, the cause and the reward, of his assiduous toils. Such are the conditions on which the mastery of this “so potent art” depends. Through this road must they travel, who aspire to real excellence. Alas! what sort of compliance with such discipline are we to expect from the miscellaneous, fitful gentleman whom we designate too roundly by the term Amateur! What full conquest can we anticipate for him, who is the volatile lover of a mistress so jealous that she was never yet entirely won, save by the most refined arts of study, and by attentions the most persevering and the most delicate? No—there is no sane hope of consummate swam upon easy terms; and accordingly we find that, although Amateurs are sufficiently abundant, good players among them are not very numerous—and accomplished ones, positively few.
The Duke of Buckingham, Charles the Second’s rattling favourite, so noted for the versatility of his acquirements, is characterized, in one of Pope’s summary lines, as
Chemist, Fiddler, Statesman, and Buffoon;
and the amount of his qualification in the two latter respects has been pretty nicely weighed and exhibited; but what kind of a fiddler was he? History is ashamed to say—but her silence is well understood by philosophy to signify contempt: it is a silence more expressive than words—than even those memorable words, “So much for Buckingham!”
Dr. Johnson, whose habit of sound judgment has marked itself on almost every subject that came within the grasp of his comprehensive mind, appears to have duly appreciated the exemplary labours which distinguish the Violinist by profession. We all know how little music there was in the great Doctor’s soul; but, even as regards the mechanical part of musical practice, few of us have given him credit for such a readiness to estimate fairly, as he has been really recorded to have shewn. The fact is, that he was a prodigiously hard-working man himself, and had an honest admiration for hard work, in whatever career manifested. “There is nothing, I think” (quoth he) “in which the power of art is shewn so much as in playing on the fiddle. In all other things, we can do something at first. Any man will forge a bar of iron, if you give him a hammer; not so well as a smith, but tolerably. A man will saw a piece of wood, and make a box, though a clumsy one; but—give him a fiddle and a fiddle-stick, and he can do nothing.”
If a learned man can thus calculate the value of professional application, a child can feel its results, and, feeling, can discern between the practised player and the deficient dilettante—as we have already seen in the little story which had for its hero the infant Earl of Mornington.
From the very marked disparity subsisting, of necessity, between the Professor and the Amateur—a disparity greater as respects the Violin, than is observable as to any other instrument—it should follow that modesty was a general characteristic of the non-professional class. Yet, as if to confirm the truth of the current axiom, that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” it occurs too often that the deference due to laborious attainment is withheld, and that the Amateur, content with a mode of playing as noisy as it is shallow, assumes a prominence which exposes him to ridicule, and gives pain to his friends, on his account, if not on their own. If he do not err after this fashion, he will perhaps affect to hold cheap the talent which he finds it were dear to imitate. It has been found, in the matter of hand-writing, that lordly personages have sometimes scrawled illegibly, rather than write in such fairer characters as might make them seem to possess a knowledge in common with clerks and schoolmasters. In like manner, certain dandy dilettanti, so far from regarding the interval of merit between themselves and the accomplished professor as a “hiatus valde deflendus,” or at least as a reason for becoming diffidence on their own part, have curled the lip of disdain, while hinting that their style of playing was not that of people who played to live;—as if, by a strange contrariety of ideas, it were depreciation to perform for a price! There is something to our purpose on this head in the first volume of Anecdotes, &c. by Miss Hawkins: and here is the passage:—
“Dr. Cooke, the composer, was giving lessons on the violin to a young man of a noble family. The young man was beginning to play; but, in the common impetuosity of a novice, he passed over all the rests. He therefore soon left his master far behind him. ‘Stop, stop, Sir!’ said the Doctor, ‘just take me with you!’ This was a very unpleasant check to one who fancied he was going on famously; and it required to be more than once enforced; till at length it was necessary to argue the point, which the Doctor did with his usual candour, representing the necessity of these observances. The pupil, instead of shewing any sign of conviction, replied rather coarsely, ‘Ay, ay, it may be necessary for you, who get your living by it, to mind these trifles; but I don’t want to be so exact!’”
The strong contrast afforded by the glare of pretension, against the opaqueness of incapacity, may often furnish forth a diverting picture. Michael Kelly, in his “Reminiscences,” has drawn such a one, from an original who flourished about sixty years since. “The Apollo, the Orpheus, of the age,” says he, “was the redoubted and renowned Baron Bach, who came to Vienna to be heard by the Emperor. He, in his own conceit, surpassed Tartini, Nardini, &c. This fanatico per la musica had just arrived from Petersburg, where he went to make his extraordinary talents known to the Royal Family and Court. Now, I have often heard this man play, and I positively declare that his performance was as bad as any blind fiddler’s at a wake in a country-town in Ireland: but he was a man of immense fortune, and kept open house. In every city which he passed through, he gave grand dinners, to which all the musical professors were invited: at Vienna, myself among the rest. One day, having a mind to put his vanity to the test, I told him that he reminded me of the elder Cramer. He seemed rather disappointed than pleased with my praise;—he acknowledged Cramer had some merit, adding that he had played with him out of the same book at Mannheim, when Cramer was First Violin at that Court; but that the Elector said his tone was far beyond Cramer’s, for Cramer was tame and slothful, and he was all fire and spirit—and that, to make a comparison between them, would be to compare a dove to a game cock! In my life, I never knew any man who snuffed up the air of praise like this discordant idiot. After he had been heard by the Emperor (who laughed heartily at him), he set off for London, in order that the King of England might have an opportunity of hearing his dulcet strains!”