Part 4 (1/2)

He even gambled away the ”Stradivarius” that had been presented to him, and when his money, watch and jewels were gone, his new-found friends of course decamped, and this gave the young man time to ponder on the vanities of life.

When he played again it was on a borrowed ”Guarnerius,” and after the rich owner, himself a violinist, had heard him play, he said, ”No fingers but yours shall ever play that violin again!”

Paganini accepted the gift, and this was the violin he played for full forty years, and which, on his death, was willed to his native city of Genoa. There it can be seen in its sealed-up gla.s.s case.

Up to his thirtieth year Paganini continued his severe work of subduing the violin. By that time he had sounded its possibilities, and thereafter no one heard him play except in concert. It is told that one man, anxious to know the secrets of Paganini's power, followed him from city to city, watching him at his concerts, d.o.g.g.i.ng him through the streets, spying upon him at hotels. At one inn this man of curiosity had the felicity to secure a room next to the one occupied by Paganini; and one morning as he watched through the keyhole, he was rewarded by seeing the master open the case where reposed the precious ”Guarnerius.”

Paganini lifted the instrument, held it under his chin, took up the bow and made a few pa.s.ses in the air--not a sound was heard. Then he kissed the back of the violin, muttered a prayer, and locked the instrument in its case.

At concert rehearsals he always played a mute instrument; and Harris, his manager, records that for the many years he was with Paganini he never heard him play a single note except before an audience.

I have a full-length daguerreotype of Paganini taken when he was forty years of age. No one ever asked this man, ”Kind sir, are you anybody in particular?”

Paganini was tall and wofully slim. His hands and feet were large and bony, his arms long, his form bowed and lacking in all that we call symmetry. But the long face with its look of abject melancholy, the curved nose, the thin lips and the sharp, protruding chin, made a combination that Fate has never duplicated. You could easily believe that this man knew all the secrets of the Nether World, and had tasted the joys of Paradise as well. Women pitied and loved him, men feared him, and none understood him. He lived in the midst of throngs and mult.i.tudes--the loneliest man known in the history of art.

Paganini, when he had reached his height, played only his own music; he played divinely and incomprehensibly; next to his pa.s.sion for music was his greed for gold. These three facts sum up all we really know about the master--the rest fades off into mist--mystery, fable and legend. We do know, however, that he composed several pieces of music so difficult that he could not play them himself, and of course no one else can.

Imagination can always outrun performance. Paganini had no close friends; no confidants: he never mingled in society, and he never married.

At times he would disappear from the public gaze for several months, and not even his business a.s.sociates knew where he was. On one such occasion a traveler discovered him in a monastic retreat in the Swiss Mountains, wearing a horsehair robe and a rope girdle; others saw him disguised as a mendicant; and still another tells of finding him working as a day-laborer with obscure and ignorant peasants. Then there are tales told of how he was taken captive by a t.i.tled lady of great wealth and beauty, who carried him away to her bower, where he eschewed the violin and tinkled only the guitar the livelong day.

Everywhere the report was current that Paganini had killed a man, and been sentenced to prison for life. The story ran that in prison he found an old violin, three strings of which were broken, and so he played on one string, producing such ravis.h.i.+ng music that the keepers feared he was ”possessed.” They decided they must get rid of him, and so contrived to have him thrown overboard from a galley; but he swam ash.o.r.e, and although he was everywhere known, no man dared place a hand on him.

A late writer in a London magazine, however, has given evidence of being a psychologist and man of sense; he says, and produces proof, that after the concert season was over Paganini withdrew to a monastery in the mountains of Switzerland, and there the monks who loved him well, guarded his retreat. There he found the rest for which his soul craved, and there he practised on his violin hour after hour, day after day.

All this is better understood when we remember that after each retreat, Paganini appeared with brand-new effects which electrified his hearers--”effects taught him by the devil.”

Constant appearing before vast mult.i.tudes and ceaseless travel create a depletion that demands rest. Paganini held the balance true by fleeing to the mountains; there he worked and prayed. That Paganini had a soft heart, in spite of the silent, cold and melancholy mood that usually possessed him, is shown in his treatment of his father and mother, who lived to know the greatness of their son. He wrote his mother kind and affectionate letters, some of which we have, and provided lavishly for every want of both his parents. At times he gave concerts for charity, and on these occasions vast sums were realized.

Paganini died in Eighteen Hundred Forty, aged fifty-six years. His will provided for legacies to various men and women who had befriended him, and he also gave to others with whom he had quarreled, thus proving he was not all clay.

The bulk of his fortune, equal to half a million dollars, was bequeathed to his son, Baron Achille Paganini. And as if mystery should still enshroud his memory and this, true to his nature, should be carried out in his last will, there are those who maintain that Achille Paganini was not his son at all--only a waif he had adopted. Yet Achille always stoutly maintained the distinction--but what boots it, since he could not play his father's violin?

Yet this we know--Paganini, the man of mystery and moods, once lived and produced music that, Orpheus-like, transfixed the world. We are better for his having been and this world is a n.o.bler place in that he lived and played, for listen closely and you can hear, even now, the sweet, sad echoes of those vibrant strings, touched by the hand of him who loved them well.

And when we remember the prodigious amount of practise that Paganini schooled himself to in youth; and join this to the recently discovered record of his long monastic retreats, when for months he worked and played and prayed, we can guess the secret of his power. If you wish me to present you a recipe for doing a deathless performance, I would give you this: Work, travel, solitude, prayer, and yet again--work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FREDERIC CHOPIN]

FREDERIC CHOPIN

Nature does not design like art, however realistic she may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences, because it is too limited to reproduce them. Chopin was a resume of these inconsequences which G.o.d alone can allow Himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by instinct and full of a legitimate pride which was unconscious of itself. Hence arose sufferings which he did not reason and which did not fix themselves on a determined object.

--_George Sand in ”The Story of My Life”_

FREDERIC CHOPIN

Maybe I am all wrong about it, yet I can not help believing that the spirit of man will live again somewhere in a better world than ours.

Fenelon says, ”Justice demands another life in order to make good the inequalities of this.” Astronomers prophesy the existence of stars long before they can see them. They know where they ought to be, and training their telescopes in that direction they wait, knowing they will find.

Materially, no one can imagine anything more beautiful than this earth, for the simple reason that we can not imagine anything we have not seen; we may make new combinations, but the whole is all made up of parts of things with which we are familiar. This great green earth out of which we have sprung, of which we are a part, that supports our bodies, and to which our bodies must return to repay the loan, is very, very beautiful.