SINGERS AND INSTRUMENTALISTS.
ACORRESPONDENT, who should know his subject if anybody alive knows it, endorses all we said a fortnight ago about the wild whims of the great singers, and the pardon extended to them by the public ; but asks us to explain why the great instrumentalists are so different from their rivals. The very greatest instrumentalists, he intimates—justly, as far as our more limited knowledge extends—are, as a rule, distinctly able men and women ; people with minds, whose converse has charm, who are sane in all their acts and
thoughts, and who are just as capable of self-restraint as other self-respecting people. They keep their engagements, they are not mad about their places on bill-posters, and if they sometimes grow faddy about the quality of their instruments, they are no more given to wild luxury, or to flying kites in the streets, as Mr. Mapleson reports of Signor Giuglini, than other professional men and women who have achieved success. It is true that second and third- rate performers on instruments are occasionally dull to a most perplexing degree. A man shall play you the fiddle nearly to perfection, play till you think he must be a poet ; and a women shall interpret thought, and high poetical thought too, quite divinely on the piano, and yet seem,— well, to use the least brutal of depreciatory adjectives, a very ordinary kind of person. Even these second-rate musicians, however, are as a rule quite sane; live the lives of other people, keep their bargains, and, in fact, work as creditably as barristers or doctors for the incomes which they are never grudged. If depreciatory stories are told of them —we note this not only in memoirs, but in those curious pro- ductions, musical novels—they are always intended to indicate that they are abnormally selfish, which is probably a libel, but certainly indicates in them no line of conduct suggesting a predominance of whim. It cannot be that devotion to music on the part of the singers is the cause of the difference, for the instrumentalists are just as devoted to their art, and occupy about eight times as much of their lives in cultivating it. Then what is the cause ?
We should say there were three reasons of accumulative force. One is, that the greatest singer is almost always a great actor or actress also, and shares in that sense of the unreality of most things, and especially of the unreality of apparent conduct, which habitual acting almost necessarily begets. Plenty of actors and actresses are good men and women ; but it is impossible to be another person—often a somewhat bad person, and always an exaggerated person—for hours of every day, and retain the ordinary full sense of re- sponsibility. That admirable actress, Mrs. Boucicault, used to say, or at least it was so reported, that at one time she felt as if she could not tell whether she were Mrs. Boucicault acting the Colleen Bawn—in the best melodrama ever written yet— or the Colleen Bawn acting Mrs. Boucicault ; and just so far as that was true, must the atmosphere of reality have pressed lightly on her. Every great singer or songstress must be more or leas under that influence—Jenny Lind, sanest and soundest of them all, latterly avoided opera—and to it is added another. Great instrumentalists work much harder for their bread than great singers. The latter are, as a rule, carefully trained— though Mr. Mapleson tells a story of one, a stupid man with a magical gift, who said, sincerely and not as a joke, that he would learn music as soon as he had done earning money—but when they are once fully appreciated, they dare not work too hard. They might strain their throats, and the health of their throats—which, curiously enough, are with some of them as sound as leather "found in the pit when the tanner died," and with others as delicate as babies' digestions— is worth hundreds of pounds an hour. They live lives of involuntary indolence, broken by performances which require long attendance, but actual effort only for portions of two hours a day. The instrumentalists, on the contrary, work every day and all day all their lives, work like students or professionals, at what, even when they enjoy as well as feel their art—a point upon which no two are quite alike—is most fatiguing, and occasionally even exhausting, labour. Work of that sort takes the nonsense out of all women and most men,—has, that is, the effect of a con- tinuous and severe training in personal self-restraint. Your fingers may ache, and your head be racked, and your nerves go to fiddlestrings with the strain ; but you must go on practising, or be pronounced by some critic "falling away from perfect form," which means twenty pounds less a night on the expiration of your contract. There is no cure for whims like the treadmill, especially if the sufferer sets it going for himself.
The third and greatest reason for the difference in character between singers and instrumentalists is, we take it, this. All artists or pleasers of the public who are conscious that their power, or their popularity, or their means of earning fortunes, depend mainly upon a "gift," tend to remain childish,—we do not mean childlike, but childish. That which banishes childishness is not merely natural growth, but pressure, the heavy weight of experience and difficulty and suffering which, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes with our full consciousness, trains us all. The great singer is nearly exempted from this discipline. At an early age, just when most men and women begin to realise that they have no protection from the wind, that life is heavy as well as light, that, in short, effort is indispensable, the great singer or songstress is released from effort, finds himself or herself in possession of an unearned and undeserved gift which is almost magical in its power, which makes it rain gold, which brings worshippers, flatterers, lovers, in streams—they say Mario at one time had a dozen " offers" a month—which lifts thousands of cultivated hearers on their feet panting with emotion, quivering with a rapture of enjoyment at once intellectual and sensual. A court forms round the successful primo tonere or prima donna in an instant, and thenceforward, till their throats give out, eager hands lift from them the very burden of the air. Their " agents " are as " devoted " as the equerries of Kings. How should they get experience, or training, or the habit of severe thought, any more than Princes in Asia or Princesses in Europe? They are from the first where severe effort lands a few of the ablest at the close of life, with this aggravation,—that they have suffered, in achieving eminence, from no passing or general dislikes ; have never, in all their intercourse with the world, seen that world look anything but enthusiastic approval. There is a pathetic passage in the Queen's Diary wherein she, just for a moment, and as it were with a suppressed sigh, notes the danger of being a Sovereign at eighteen ; and that, altering the age a little, but not the inexperience, is the lot of every prima donna. She, and her companion on the stage the tenor too, have no compulsion not to be childish ; and as childishness is enjoyable so long as all whims are gratified, they tend to remain in that mental position. Why learn, when learning brings nothing P Why strive, when all is obtainable without effort ? Why, above all, be self-restrained, when . no one asks of you to restrain yourself, and self-restraint may be as painful as breeches to a savage, or fine etiquette to a street rough? Unsuccessful, or half-successful, or slowly suc- cessful folk like the majority of us, hardly recognise how they have grown to bear self-restraint as they have grown to bear leather boots, by incessant repetitions of small endurances. It is not only that the first burden of life, pecuniary care, is not for the great singer. Most heads are turned by sudden fortune, but the possessor of a great voice has to bear more mental shocks than that,—sudden popularity, sudden adoration, sudden affec- tion, often real and deep, all drawn to him or her by something internal, involuntary, and incommunicable. Talk of genius ; ywhat is it in intoxicating power to the possession of a gift like this, unique, it may be, through all the singing-houses of the world? No wonder its possessor remains, till it departs, an enjoying, unrestrained, almost irresponsible, and some- times very naughty child. The instrumentalist has neither this joy nor this temptation. He, too, has his "gift," the something magical which learning cannot yield, or labour pro- .
duce; but it is not a given gift. Haas to pay a price, usually a full price, for its development ; and when, by strenuous toil, it is developed, it produces neither the same rain of gold nor the same passion of adoration. Joachim is admired where Mario is worshipped; and even to Joachim, supreme in his art, the necessity of the effort which trains the mind as well as the fingers never can end. Did Mario, who gave away a fortune rather than say "No !" ever make an effort in his life ?
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