Any man who caters to the public is to a great degree spoiled by the public. Actors act off the stage as well as on, falling victims to their trade: their lives are stained by pretense and affectation, just as the dyer's hand is subdued to the medium in which it works. The man of talent who is much before the public poses because his audience wishes him to; one step more and the pose becomes natural--he can not divest himself of it. Paganini by hard work became a consummate player; and then so the dear public should receive its money's worth, he evolved into a consummate poseur--but he was still the Artist. * * * * * A large number of writers have described the appearance and playing of Niccolo Paganini, but none ever did the assignment with the creepy vividness of Heinrich Heine. The rest of this chapter is Heine's. I make the explanation because the passage is so well known that it would be both indiscreet and inexpedient for me to bring my literary jimmy to bear and claim it as my own--much as I would like to. Says Heinrich Heine: I believe that only one man has succeeded in putting Paganini's true physiognomy upon paper--a deaf painter, Lyser by name, who, in a frenzy full of genius, has with a few strokes of chalk so well hit the great violinist's head that one is at the same time amused and terrified at the truth of the drawing. "The devil guided my hand," the deaf painter said to me, chuckling mysteriously, and nodding his head with a good-natured irony in the way he generally accompanied his genial witticisms. This painter was, however, a wonderful old fellow; in spite of his deafness he was enthusiastically fond of music, and he knew how, when near enough to the orchestra, to read the music in the musicians' faces, and to judge the more or less skilful execution by the movements of their fingers; indeed, he wrote critiques on the opera for an excellent journal at Hamburg. And yet is that peculiarly wonderful? In the visible symbols of the performance the deaf painter could see the sounds. There are men to whom the sounds themselves are invisible symbols in which they hear colors and forms.