Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 September 1884 — Paganini, the Henins. [ARTICLE]

Paganini, the Henins.

A young man who has imbibed the notion that he is a genius is apt to lose j his balance. > The flattery of friends I makes him so vain that he imagines that he, at least, may attain without labor. He ignores mental discipline, because it involves hard study. He trusts to his genius to push him up, and Scores of young men go to pieces at the beginning of the voyage, when they might have entered port with every sail drawing, hail they taken their departure from Carlyle’s definition of genius: A capacity for infinite painstaking. All Europe hailed Paganini as a gen--1 ins. During forty years he reigned the | monarch of the violin, no rival near his ; throne. ; If any one was ever born a violinist, Ihe was. As soon asfte could hold the J violin he began to play it. The worshippers in the churches of Genoa often looked towards the choir to see a child playing on a violin almost as large as himself. - ( His genius was phenomenal. It gave ’him capacity, and urged him to develop it by intense application. His precocity astonished those from whom he sought instruction: but they were amazed at the zeal and rapidity with which he worked at his lessons. He soon exhausted their ability to inktmet and so passed on from one great teacher to another. He went to Rolla, the great musician of Parma. The master was ill in ,bed, and Paganini waited in the ante-room. Some sheets of difficult music were lying on the table, alongside of a violin. The boy fooked at the music, and began playing it. "Who is the great master playing in my ante room?” asked Rolla, raising himself to listen. “A mere boy! impossible!" he exclaimed on being told that the player was a mere lad, who wished to become a pupil. When Paganini appeared before the invalid’s bed, the master said, “I can teach you nothing.” The boy had practised ten or twelve hours a day. He would try a passage over and over again in different ways, with such perseverence that at nightfall he was exhausted by fatigue. He composed as well as practised, writing music so difficult that he could not play it until he had mastered it by incessant pracice. Let the reader note the working of the boy’s genins. It prompted him to compose a hard task to be mastered by himself. It kept him up to his work day after day, until he had mastered the task. The boy had a capacity for infinite painstaking. The boys genius made him thorough. Faraday used to begin his investigation of a phenomenon by learning all that other scientists had written about it. With similar thoroughness young Paganini acquired a knowledge of what other violinists had done or left undone. He would have knowledge as well as art, so that he might not lail through ignorance or plaigiarism. He worked hard to produce new effects and combinations. He sighed for a new world for he had explored the old. His explorations gave him his point of departure. Hie sailed from it and discovered a new world in which he had no master, no equal, no follower. His art was born with him, but he developed it by study and practice. When he died men said he carried his secret with him to the grave. It may be so; but the intelligent reader of his life discerns that Paganini’s ability to master details accounts in part for his success. Youth’s Companion.