The United States had no reason to be proud of her musical--or unmusical--son that dull day in November, 1878. When I arrived in my garret I swore I was through and seriously thought of studying the xylophone. But my mood of profound discouragement was succeeded by a more hopeful one. If you can't enter the Paris Conservatoire as an active student you may have influence enough to become an "auditeur," a listener; and a listener I became and in the class of Professor Georges Mathias, a genuine pupil of Chopin. My musical readers will understand my good luck. From that spiritual master I learned many things about the Polish composer; heard from his still supple fingers much music as Chopin had interpreted it. Delicate and discriminating in style, M. Mathias had never developed into a brilliant concert pianist; sometimes he produced effects on the keyboard that sounded like emotional porcelain falling from a high shelf and melodiously shattering on velvet mirrors. He also taught me that if a pianist or violinist or singer is too nervous before the public, then he or she has not a musical vocation--the case of Adolf Henselt to the contrary notwithstanding. But better would it be for me to admit that I failed because I didn't will earnestly enough to succeed.
With the hair of the horse and the entrails of the cat, magicians of the four strings weave their potent spells. What other instrument devised by the hand of man has ever approached the violin? Gladstone compared it with the locomotive; yet complete as is the mechanism of the wheeled monster, its type is transitional; steam is already supplanted by electricity; while the violin is perfection, as perfect as a sonnet, and in its capacity for the expression of emotion next to the human voice; indeed it is even more poignant. Orchestrally massed, it can be as terribly beautiful as an army with banners. In quartet form it represents the very soul of music; it is both sensuous and intellectual. The modern grand pianoforte with its great range, its opulence of tone, its delicacy of mechanism is, nevertheless, a monster of music if placed beside the violin, with its simple curves, its almost primitive method of music-making. The scraping of one substance against another goes back to prehistoric times, nay, may be seen in the grasshopper and its ingenious manner of producing sound. But the violin, as we know it to-day, is not such an old invention; it was the middle of the sixteenth century before it made its appearance, with its varnished and modelled back.