Books › The violin : some account of that leading instrument and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time : with hints to amateurs, anecdotes, etc., 1852 › scan 193
Scan 193
The violin : some account of that leading instrument and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time : with hints to amateurs, anecdotes, etc., 1852
2 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 177. See the scan on archive.org.
1the excellence of the French is of more modern growth, and, it should be remarked, of more limited character. Brilliancy of style, neatness and finish of execution, are their distinguishing traits. They are a gay and a polished nation—they are gay and polished fiddlers. They animate you in the vivace, they dazzle you in the allegro brillante—but they commonly fail to reach your heart through the adagio appassionato. Their violinists have all the skill that is independent of deep feeling. In expression, they fall short of what is required: they catch its lesser graces, but they seem rarely to attain its higher powers. The violin, considered more particularly as the fiddle, is an instrument too congenial to the temperament of the French, to have escaped their especial notice and close cultivation. To all that is mercurial in their tendencies, as well as to much that is artificial in their habits, it lends itself with the utmost readiness: it is the best instrument to dance to; it is the best instrument to protect from ennui your sitters at a theatre: it sharpens the pungency of an air de vaudeville; it sets off the ceremonial of a ballet. In this sense, the French have "marked it for their own," and achieved wonders with it. Out of this sphere—this lower empire—their power has been less considerable. It must be confessed, however, that this limitation applies with greater force and distinctness to the time preceding their great Revolution, than to later days. That mighty event, which stirred up the depths of the national mind, and opened the channels of thought in every direction, could not but exert some degree of influence, even on those arts that have least connection with the ordinary business of men. The French taste in music—formalistic, ungenial, and anti-catholic as it was—has undergone some change for the better, through the convul-
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