Yours faithfully,
Arth-r B-lf-r.
BIG WORK AND LITTLE HANDS.
That a child prodigy should have been able twice last week to fill St. James’s Hall to overflowing, may not perhaps speak at the first glance very highly for the artistic instincts of the British Public, who, as a thoughtful musical critic remarks in the pages of a contemporary, are sometimes “more impressed by a little boy in an Eton jacket than by the finest music that might be played in less exciting circumstances;” still it cannot be denied that the couple of recitals referred to, given by Master Josef Hofmann, were altogether two exceptionally brilliant performances. Commenting, however, on the little fellow’s efforts to give a good rendering of a slow movement, the critic already alluded to asks how, in a long-drawn melody which is a matter of passion and of feeling, “a child of eleven can have much feeling or any passion?” Surely this is hypercriticism. Ask any boy of eleven who has had a whipping, or has come off second best in a fight with his little sister, whether he hasn’t much feeling;—and as for passion! Well: but, perhaps this is not exactly what the critic means. Nevertheless, he proceeds rather pertinently to ask whether this singularly gifted young artist will be suffered, “when he has served the immediate purposes of those who have control over him, to continue his studies in a rational manner and far from the fierce light and the hot-house temperature pertaining to the concert platform?” As Master Josef Hofmann is already booked for an American tour, there does not seem any prospect of this highly desirable consummation, at least in the near future. Judging, therefore, from little Master Josef’s present arrangements, one would be disposed to apostrophise him sympathetically in the language of Dr. Watts, and say:—
“Night after night, you’ll prove a sight
To draw the cute Yankee,
Because your little hands were made
To stretch from C to C!”
Still, as he is an unquestionable genius who has a future before him, it is to be hoped that he won’t be “worked out” early at high pressure, and stimulated by a success that will only blunt his powers by depriving him of that desire for true progress in his art by which alone they can be legitimately developed. “Not too much gaslight, some practice, and plenty of battledore and shuttlecock,” is the proper recipe for little Master Josef. With this he can’t go wrong, and will, without doubt, if he stick to it, command the musical world of the future as surely as he has astonished that of to-day.