Sit juvenis quondam, nunc fæmina.—Virg.
To the foregoing hints on distinctive peculiarities among the Fiddle tribe, I am tempted to add a few words about the two extremes that constitute, respectively, the giant and the dwarf of the race; namely, the double-bass (or contra-basso) and the kit. The former of these, then—the double-bass—is a fellow of imposing appearance, with the weight and strength of an Ajax, and a voice that you might conceive him to have borrowed from a thunder-cloud. In the assembled circle, he is dogmatical, slow, and heavy; yet one is forced to confess that there is a depth in all he utters, and that what he wants in brilliancy, is amply made up in profundity. He hears the flourishes of those around him, but seems to take little heed of them—and sometimes makes a solemn pause, as if in meditation, while the rest are chattering away. His manner, even when he perfectly agrees with what is advanced by others, has a bluffness in it, that is not very unlike dissent. His arguments are of the sledge-hammer kind, knocking down contradiction. He is the Doctor Johnson of the society—he settles matters with a growl. With all his surliness, however, he is a thoroughly good fellow at bottom, and, as he is well-understood, and pretty much humoured, by his associates, the general harmony is none the worse for his presence—nay, rather, would be very sensibly subtracted from, were he absent.—As for the kit, he is a pert little whipper-snapper, with a voice as uppish as his notions of himself, and a figure any thing but symmetrical, since it is, at once, by an odd contrariety, stunted in height, and lanky in appearance. He is hardly ever seen in the company of his own kith and kin, his own fraternity of the larger growth—for his vanity leads him to seek distinction on any terms, and so he goes into dancing academies, or among family step-hop-and-jump-learners, where he is a sort of cock-of-the-walk, and where, to judge from the quaint and abruptly intermitted strains that proceed from him, he seems to crow and chuckle at the absurdities of the “awkward squad” whom he delights to set in motion. As he is prone to imitation, and proud of his squeaking voice, you will sometimes hear him mimic the style and accents of his bigger brethren, behind their backs; but these attempts incline you only to a smile—which he mistakes for approbation. On the whole, though tolerated, he is never respected. The very person who introduces him into such society as that just mentioned, makes a mere convenience of him; but, because he is usually carried thither in the pocket of his introducer, he fancies himself, forsooth, a prodigious pet! Was there ever such impudence?
If there be, by a strange possibility, any special admirers of the Pigmy, who shall think him too sharply dealt with in the above sketch, let them turn for comfort to Sir John Hawkins, in whose pages they will find mention of a certain London dancing-master, named Pemberton, who was so consummate a handler of the kit, as to be able to play entire solos on it, and to exhibit in his performance (so declares the statement) all the graces and elegancies of the violin, although himself a man of the most corpulent make! Besides this consolatory reference, let me hint to the affecters of the kit, that possibly the classic term “lyra jocosa” might, without much violence, be appropriated to the honour of their queer little favourite!
A Caricature repudiated.—A correspondent of the Harmonicon, who has played on the violin amusingly enough with his pen, but appears, from sundry indicative points, to have been no bowman, has designated the instrument as “a box, half beech, half fir, on which are stretched the entrails of a cat,” and from which, sounds are drawn “with a few horse-hairs,” and which, moreover, “cannot be held without a distortion of the frame, and obliges us to assume an attitude so disagreeable to the head, by the chin of which, it is held.”—This is a description wherewith the true Amateur will hold no sympathy: he will regard it no otherwise than with “hatefullest disrelish.” He will not fail to remember, too, that it is the sheep’s interior which is laid under contribution, and not the cat’s. Then, again, doubtless, the depression of the chin is sometimes the reverse of agreeable; but this is an objection rarely in great force, except with those round-headed gentlemen who have short chins. A little punchy man, with a broad, baffling, double chin, cannot be great upon the fiddle—and should not aim at it. It is the business of a perfect performer to have a long chin—a chin whose inclination or “facilis descensus” amounts to a fixed welcome towards the instrument, which it embraces with a continuity that in no degree compromises the head. Such a chin is the fiddler’s firm friend;—its holdfast properties entitle it, as fitly as the virtuous man in Horace, to the appellation of “tenax propositi.” Such a chin, for example, had Paganini.
Ambition let down.—During the last year of Spagnoletti’s Saturnian rule at the Opera-House, when the reins of leadership were somewhat relaxed in the hands of that good senior, it chanced that one of his subjects, scarcely less ambitious than was Jove of old, and equally hopeful of his own succession, aspired prematurely to a position in the orchestral realm as elevated as the throne of the great directing power. In plainer language, a certain noted First Violinist, scarcely satisfied with being second to the Leader, sought to magnify his importance by the help of a stool that was considerably more stilted in its proportions than that occupied by his brethren of the band. Thus raised into notice, he managed, with many flourishes of his bow-arm, to divide the public attention with the Leader himself, and was enabled to look down on all besides. But pride does not triumph thus to the end. Spagnoletti himself, perhaps indisposed, through his then feebler condition, to contend with usurpation, took no notice of this upstart proceeding; but the members of the band, feeling it to be an indignity to their Leader, still more than to themselves, took counsel together for the purpose of putting it down. The expedient they hit upon was equally ingenious and successful. One of the carpenters of the establishment had private instructions to saw off a small bit from the lanky legs of the stool, previously to each night’s sitting in the orchestra; and, by this graduated system of reduction, or what musicians would term a “sempre diminuendo,” the obnoxious pretender was “let down easy,” and brought to a reasonable level. Thus, though not going down, in his own estimation, he was much depressed, in the eyes of all beside. Whether he thought it worth while, when he discovered his situation, to enquire how it happened, is more than remains on record—but, if he did so, it is easy to conceive the sort of vague reply by which his mystification would be “made absolute.”
A new resource in difficulty.—The following graphic sketch—a piece of what our American brethren delight to designate as the real grit—is from Colonel Crockett’s “Adventures in Texas:”—
“As we drew nigh to the Washita, the silence was broken alone by our own talk and the clattering of our horses’ hoofs; and we imagined ourselves pretty much the only travellers, when we were suddenly somewhat startled by the sound of music. We checked our horses, and listened, and the music continued. ‘What can all that mean?’ says I. We listened again, and we now heard, ‘Hail, Columbia, happy land!’ played in first-rate style. ‘That’s fine,’ says I. ‘Fine as silk, Colonel, and leetle finer,’ says the other; ‘but hark, the tune’s changed.’ We took another spell of listening, and now the musician struck up, in a brisk and lively manner, ‘Over the water to Charley.’ ‘That’s mighty mysterious,’ says one; ‘Can’t cipher it out, no-how,’ says a third. ‘Then let us go ahead,’ says I, and off we dashed at a pretty rapid gait, I tell you—by no means slow.
“As we approached the river, we saw, to the right of the road, a new clearing on a hill, where several men were at work, and running down the hill like wild Indians, or rather like the office-holders in pursuit of the depositees. There appeared to be no time to be lost; so they ran, and we cut ahead for the crossing. The music continued all this time stronger and stronger, and the very notes appeared to speak distinctly, ‘Over the water to Charley!’
“When we reached the crossing, we were struck all of a heap at beholding a man seated in a sulky, in the middle of the river, and playing for his life on a fiddle. The horse was up to his middle in the water: and it seemed as if the flimsy vehicle was ready to be swept away by the current. Still the fiddler fiddled on composedly, as if his life had been insured, and he was nothing more than a passenger! We thought he was mad,—and shouted to him. He heard us, and stopped his music. ‘You have missed the crossing,’ shouted one of the men from the clearing.—‘I know I have,’ returned the fiddler.—‘If you go ten feet farther, you will be drowned.’—‘I know I shall,’ returned the fiddler.—‘Turn back,’ said the man.—‘I can’t,’ said the other. ‘Then how will you get out?’—‘I’m sure I don’t know.’
“The men from the clearing, who understood the river, took our horses, and rode up to the sulky, and, after some difficulty, succeeded in bringing the traveller safe to shore, when we recognised the worthy parson who had fiddled for us at the puppet-show at Little Rock. They told him that he had had a narrow escape; and he replied, that he had found that out an hour ago! He said he had been fiddling to the fishes for a full hour, and had exhausted all the tunes that he could play without notes. We then asked him what could have induced him to think of fiddling at a time of such peril; and he replied, that he had remarked, in his progress through life, that there was nothing in universal natur so well calculated to draw people together, as the sound of a fiddle; and he knew that he might bawl until he was hoarse for assistance, and no one would stir a peg; but they would no sooner hear the scraping of his catgut, than they would quit all other business, and come to the spot in flocks.”