Introductory material (continued 4)

A spick and span mania seizes at times upon restorers of all schools.

A relative of mine had a Spagnoletti restored to him by a cleaner, but so repainted as to be worthless.

Have not half the cathedrals in the land been disfigured by whitewash, starched and bleached just like so much dirty linen, and the old frescoes obliterated like so many disfiguring stains; and even now, in these more enlightened days, how many old carvings have been replaced by modern routine-work sculpture, whilst the walls, façade, and floor of grand old St Mark’s at Venice have been smeared over with Salviati’s modern mosaic. Thus have I seen a Maggini botched and browned over so completely with bad German varnish as to leave only faint traces here and there of the original coating.

Never in the matter of varnish dare to replace what time has stolen; that loss of old varnish is a tribute paid not ungrudgingly to “the Vandal years,” who have spared the life and been unable materially to injure the fabric of the rare old instrument. Above all, thou favoured guardian of a Cremona, never let it get near damp, or suffer from any other mouldering or corrosive influence.

A friend of mine, finding that the worm had got into his violin case, which contained a Guadagnini, proceeded to saturate his case with benzoin, and before it was properly dry replaced the precious instrument, with the result that the old varnish was brought up in blisters all over the back, which is now one crinkled mass, as rough to the touch as a nutmeg-grater. The varnish was completely ruined, and what is worse, the violin has never sounded like itself since; a clear proof to my mind that the varnish affects the tone, or at least that damaged varnish impairs it.

It is not at all an uncommon thing to find a violin, which has been left unplayed upon for some months, sulky when first taken out.

Do not be rash or fidget with the bridge or soundpost. Warm the fiddle up gently; rub it lightly with all due care, and play on it without taking any notice of its temper; go on for a couple of hours; you will find, to your surprise, that it has recovered all its own sweetness and charm, and will be ready to charm you with the delightful sensitiveness of its response. All that was really wanted was for the temporarily disused channels of vibration to be again filled with sound—the pores—the desiccated hollows to be once more shaken up in the old way. The instrument has really gone to sleep—some of its nerve currents have got sluggish—that is, the desiccated powder molecules have stuck in the pores and must be set rolling again. But, like one just awakened, the fiddle takes a little time to be “all there,” as the idiom runs.

Something similar may be observed in a large hall. When, after the atmosphere has been quiescent for some time, speaking first begins, the speaker will not be heard well; the atmosphere is stiff, and only when the whole of it has been set in vibration—and that takes a little time—does it become sensitive and sufficiently elastic to be capable of transmitting the slightest inflections of sound.

There is, again, an electric as well as an atmospheric and molecular state of the air and all other vibratory substances, but this is a side of acoustics extremely little understood, and can only be dealt with empirically by speakers, singers, players, and especially handlers of violins, who will instinctively make use of some laws which they do not understand, and which indeed do not yet seem to have been correctly formulated.

I feel that something ought to be said about the position of the sound-post, though frankly I would rather not say anything.

Whatever advice one gives is certain to be wrongly and mischievously applied.

Technically, the sound-post should be a little behind the right foot of the bridge, if you look from head to neck, which is of course the left foot if you look from neck to head. It ought also to be straight—if it is aslant—unless the surface of the ends be cut on a slope. Of course it clings but partially to back and belly, whose throbs it is intended to blend; a little too near the bridge will often produce a light hard tone; a little too far will tend to a loose, muffled, or tubby quality; a little to the right will brighten the right string at the expense of the left, and vice versâ. Get it exactly in the fit place, and you attain the utmost sensibility and equal sonority of which your violin is capable. But so capricious are the vibrational laws, and so subtle are the peculiarities of each violin’s nervous system, that the position which at first has failed to yield good results will ultimately be found to have won its way to the heart of your violin, the instrument adjusting itself to what was at first an uncongenial treatment of its nerves, until the nerves learn to sympathise, and even rejoice, in special directions of pressure and tension induced by the sound-post. When this happens, better let well alone and don’t attend to outside advice of experts.

It is seldom wise to encourage an amateur, or any but a skilful hand, to trifle with the position of the sound-post. If it must be moved or has fallen down, why then by all means take the advice of an expert; go to the doctor.

The same sort of advice may be given about the position of the bridge. Granted that you have a bridge which suits your instrument (and the importance of this I have elsewhere dwelt upon), then consider whether ’tis worth while to move your bridge at all. The two little side slits in the ∫ ∫ indicate approximately the position of the bridge; let a violin-doctor determine the right height, which, remember, must be modified according to its position, and the slope and elevation of the finger-board. But here again there is a vague and subtle margin for readjustment; the importance of the bridge’s position is of course directly related to the whereabouts of the sound-post, as the bridge is a prime factor in dealing first with the vibrations transmitted by the sound-post from belly to back.

There are violins which gain brilliancy by the bridge leaning a little forward, but this is of course dangerous, as a little more, and down comes the bridge. The theory of course is for the feet of the bridge to grip equally at all points the surface of the belly—flat and close, and with equal pressure. Now, if the bridge leans forward, the grip of the back part of the feet is slightly lifted, whilst the pressure of the front part is accentuated, and if it leans backwards, precisely the reverse takes place. Yet so capricious are fiddles, that some do not seem to like to have their bridges quite straight, and so they have got to be humoured.

Without grave cause I should advise not meddling with bridge or sound-post after they have been readjusted by a good repairer. He may not have been quite right; he may not have had the time or patience to deal with your malade imaginaire of a fiddle—for amongst fiddles as amongst people, there are malades imaginaires which baffle the profession—but your fiddle-doctor will be probably more right than you—fussy, irritable, discontented, inexperienced amateur, and, if you leave off tampering with the works, the fiddle will very probably adjust itself and get all right.

Then of course you must remember that whenever you touch the bridge you touch the elevation of the strings above finger-board. Put bridge back, you slacken the touch for the player by bringing the strings close down on the finger-board; put it forward or tilt it, and you lighten the touch; make it harder for the fingers by lifting the strings higher from the finger-board.

And now a word about your finger-board. This is generally made of ebony; the old masters used various brownish woods, choosing, of course, the harder ones, which they often inlaid beautifully. Sometimes even they used ivory; you may perhaps have noticed that on some violins you have a difficulty in stopping fifths, or indeed any chords, in tune. This, unless you are a mere blunderer, comes from the state of your finger-board. You may not have noticed it, but you will observe that the strings, by constantly being squeezed by the fingers against the smoothly-arched surface of the ebony, have worn channels in the wood, but channels of unequal depths; the consequence is that the same pressure, forcing two strings down on unequally raised surfaces, fails to produce that relatively equal pressure necessary for producing your true fifth; the string also being sunk, it does not get the full benefit of the finger’s pressure, as the shock of impact will be broken by the higher level of the finger-board on either side of the sunken string.

In this way the tone quality as well as the intonation suffers from what so constantly eludes observation—a worn finger-board.

Of course a new finger-board, or the restoration of an old one, is a very easy matter, and can in no way affect, except for the better, any violin.

It may safely be said that no violin now in use has either its original finger-board or, for the matter of that, its original neck. Strings of very ill-assorted thickness are also responsible for imperfect fifths.

The management of the pegs sometimes presents difficulties to the novice. Rosewood, ivory, and boxwood have been tried, but ebony seems to be the favourite, though many incline, as I do personally, to rosewood, which is less dense, and thus, in contact with the maple-head (which is again less dense in fibre than the rosewood), offers a less hard and violent contrast than does the iron ebony to the porous maple.

But the all-essential thing is for the pegs to be nicely fitted, and it is a vile practice to rosin the pegs to make them stiffer, or to rub them with lead-pencil or whitening to make them turn more easily.

If your peg sticks, it is either because it does not fit the hole, is not smooth, or because you have rammed it in too far in order to resist the pull of a string, probably coiled round and round the pegs in a tangled, twisted mess.

There never should be a need for this over-ramming in of the screw, nor would there be if, when you pulled up your new string to pitch, you immediately let it down, drew the stretched part tight, and then screwed up again, when you would find, instead of ever so many coils, you had reduced the number to one or two, which would at once lift the strain from your screw, and make it needless for you to force it in till it stuck and almost refused to move at all.

You should be able, when your fiddle is at your chin, to nip the peghead between the first and third joint of your forefinger, and adjust the pitch to a nicety and in a moment; but then the resistance of the screw must be so nicely balanced with the tension of the string as to allow of its moving easily when gripped, and keeping in its exact place when left.

It is a very strange thing that, whilst all sorts of mechanical contrivances for moving violin screws have been suggested, and even tried and adopted for guitars and double basses, the violin retains its simple and primitive screw; nor would any one who lays claim to a decent position in the trade dream of advising a departure in this, or indeed in any other respect from the custom of the Cremona school and its successors.

Concerning the stringing of your violin, beyond the hints I have given with regard to the accumulation of evils round the peg, there is not very much to be said.

The quality, manufacture, preservation, and price of strings has already been dealt with; and here, as in everything connected with violins, there must be fine and sympathetic adaptation of strings both to the performer and to his instrument.

A young girl will naturally incline to thinner strings than a strong man, just as she will usually prefer a lower bridge, which will reduce the resistance because of the reduced distance between the strings and the finger-board.

Some players will prefer a thick first or third string, according to the quality of tone they are able to elicit; some a smooth or rather thin patent fourth in preference to the usual more roughly-coiled and thicker G string, which, however, is preferable for orchestral playing; but, as a rule, buy your strings according to gauge, if you can’t trust your eye, in a good shop, and you will not be disappointed.

Remember, as I have previously intimated, that any great inequality in the relative thickness of your strings may be quite as much responsible for your imperfect fifths as an old channelled finger-board. Use plenty of rosin, and let the string be seasoned with it right up to the bridge, but not much, if at all, below the top of the finger-board. The rosin must be well rubbed in before you attempt solo work, as any excess of what I may call raw undigested powder will produce a most vile screeching.

The tone of a fine violinist never reminds you of the cat-gut and rosin. In the pure disembodied tone of Piatti, Joachim, or Sarasate we entirely lose the sense of all beggarly elements; they have suffered a change into “something rare and strange.”

The rough-and-ready way of testing false strings by setting them in vibration, holding by each end, and twitching till the double line is seen, and if a third line appears condemning the string as false, is a method often, not always, reliable. You can never be quite sure till you have put the string on. If false, you may get a true length out of it by trying another part; but, as a rule, if one length of a string is false, it is bad all through. A player, especially a soloist, should always have a length or two of stretched and tested firsts in his case, or, better still, in his waistcoat pocket, before he goes on the platform, unless he can ensure the presence of a second reliable instrument at hand in case of a sudden breakage.

Strings have every kind of vice short of downright falseness. You need not put up with wheezy or dull, or any sort of impure vibration, and beware of laying the blame on the violin when the string is the offender.

Of course, if the sound-bar or the back or belly of the violin is loose, or the sound-bar askew, that will account for a good deal. By tapping all round the front and the back, just where these join the ribs, you can easily discover by a certain jar or rattle whether and where something is loose; it may be one of the blocks or linings.

Test the fiddle and you may acquit the strings; test the strings and you may acquit the fiddle.

You may sometimes experience a difficulty in playing the A or D string without striking the E or G; this may be due to your own clumsiness, but it may also be due to the curve of your bridge being too flat, or someone or more of the strings having eaten too deeply into the bridge.

If your hand perspire much—and all hands perspire—your strings, especially your E string, will rag out. It is difficult to say exactly at what stage in the ragging process it is advisable to change your string. It is strange, but true, that the tone of an old ragged string is not materially impaired. I have sometimes fancied that such thorough tough and seasoned strings are even improved in spite of age and infirmity. Certain it is that the smoothest string will go without warning, and the raggedest will sometimes hang on down to a mere thread.

Paganini perspired frightfully, so much so that he always carried a dry shirt in his violin case, and a gentleman noticed that when he opened his case to take out his violin for a public solo, his strings were in rags.

I have sometimes observed that, oddly enough, a second or third string is less durable after it has ragged than a first; the wearing of the threads which compose the thick strings seems less hard and tight than those of the thin chanterelle, or the resultant material is softer and gets soaked and cheesy, and like cheese is readily cut through by the nails.

Lastly, the amateurish and falsely-assumed economical habit of slackening all the strings each time the violin is replaced in its case is a delusion and a snare; it only worries your instrument’s nervous system.

Slacken your bow, not your strings.

The violin gets accustomed to the normal strain, and adjusts itself to it, and resents being deprived of its due tension as much as an athlete would resent his dumb-bells being removed.

The strings are quite as likely to break by being constantly fidgeted up and down, and the violin is much more likely to get demoralised by the wearing action and reaction of a varying strain, than if you let it alone with all its strings at their accustomed pitch.

CHAPTER XV

VIOLIN DEALERS, COLLECTORS, AND AMATEURS

I Have come to the conclusion, “after long years,” that there are three things about which your averagely honest man has no conscience whatever—the first is a horse, the second is an umbrella, and the last, but not least, is a fiddle.

He will buy from some needy ignoramus a fiddle worth £100 for a £5 note, if he can. He will sell a fiddle which cost him £5 for £100, if he can. Truly, the caveat emptor of the ancient Romans covers a multitude of sins.

On the other hand, the extreme ignorance of many persons who have violins to sell offers singular temptations to dealers, who are a class of people constitutionally on the make.

In bygone days, people who did not play the violin used to be criminally careless about the instruments that happened to be in their possession. Cremonas might lie for years in damp attics, or hung up in disused cupboards on rusty nails, or away in the dust of ages on the top of old beds and cabinets. Even if the fiddle was ultimately stolen—borrowed and not returned—it was thought hardly worth a serious inquiry; it “was all to pieces” or “only an old fiddle”; and, indeed, I have before now seen such with the belly off converted into serviceable dustpans.

Credulity has succeeded to ignorance, and now any one who has any sort of shabby-looking fiddle fancies he has got a rare Cremona!

He will advertise it unblushingly in the halfpenny papers, bring it gravely to supposed judges, and make a favour of even showing it to a dealer.

Nothing will shake the confidence of these simple folk in their spurious wares; they will bring out a common brown German dated Maggini, and you point out that Maggini never dated his instruments; they suppose you to be envious. Or they show you a Stainer rashly dated fifty years after that maker’s death (such an one was lately brought to me), with a label so recent that you wonder at the brazen fraud. As to the good and tolerably deceptive French copies of Strad, their name is legion, and for a moment a person fairly conversant with fiddles may be deceived by such a subtle and withal honest copyist as Lupôt, but to the eye of the experienced dealer the varnish is quite enough. The varnish that chips off instead of rubbing away, thus leaving the raw wood more exposed than permeated, is not Cremona varnish.

Of course as to the new labels in modern type I have nothing to say. No one but a complete fool in fiddles could be taken in by them.

Still, when all gross cases are put aside, there is an excusable margin left for honest error, especially when personal interest is on the side of error.

I have very little doubt that my old friend, the late Mr Cox, well known as an acute picture dealer, really believed in a certain violin which he called the Red Knight. He bought it at the great sale of Gillott’s fiddles as a rare Joseph Guarnerius.

I would never tell the old man to his face that his Joseph was a very plausible red Landolpho copy of Joseph, and I was even weak enough to allow it to lie on the table of the Royal Institution side by side with the “Dolphin,” Enthoven’s Maggini, the Emperor of Russia’s Strad, a genuine Nicolas, a Joseph and a Jacob Stainer; in short, the Red Knight lay by favour for one evening in company with some twenty gems of worldwide reputation.

In the course of my lecture, to please my old friend, I took up the Red Knight, remarking, “Here is a fine violin labelled Joseph Guarnerius, once the property of Mr Gillott, now owned by Mr Cox.” I said no more.

A few weeks afterwards the Red Knight was sold for £300, partly on the strength of my having vouched for it at the Royal Institution.

Meanwhile the Jupiter of judges, William Ebsworth Hill, had been consulted by the purchaser, who, on finding that he had only got hold of a Landolpho, wanted his money back.

I think they would have gone to law if they could have counted on me as a witness; but when I was threatened with a subpœna, I replied, “I would certainly go into the box, but should have utterly to deny that I had vouched for the genuineness of the Red Knight or expressed any opinion whatever about it except that it was ‘a good fiddle labelled Guarnerius,’ worth perhaps £60 but not £300.”

The upshot was that I was not subpœnaed. Mr Cox refunded the money and the buyer restored the fiddle.

No one doubts but what Mr Gillott, of steel-pen celebrity, did obtain, chiefly through Charles Reade of “Never Too Late to Mend” fame, a great many very fine fiddles, but I am afraid that Mr C. Reade was also responsible for some comparative rubbish like the Red Knight. Certainly I find a very dubious Strad tenor (one of Gillott’s) labelled 140 in the South Kensington collection. As to this particular collector’s specimen, if I grant him his belly and his sound-holes, it is about all that I can do—for Strad never threw that scroll nor touched with plane or chisel that back and ribs.

I brought home from Australia a so-called Peter Guarnerius—really an excellent violin—but it was no more a Guarnerius than a Strad, and was sold far under its value as a Camillo Camilli, which it probably was. But what will you? After all, a fiddle at any given time is worth what it will fetch.

The most impudent fraud or the most blatant delusion which has ever come under my notice was the so-called Maggini exhibited by Mr J. W. Joyce (110, South Kensington Exhibition, 1872).

It was made by Bernhardt Fendt, and I gave in the Pall Mall Gazette of the period its history and the names of its chief owners; but it was not removed, neither was the Amati tenor (No. 147), labelled and hung as Maggini, ever re-labelled, nor was a Klotz fiddle which bore a Stainer label ever corrected.

The only fraud I succeeded in dislodging was a spurious Bergonzi—also sent up by Mr J. W. Joyce—which after my attack on the South Kensington collection of 1872 disappeared.

The poor thing, no worse than the Bernhardt Fendt which brazened it out like a false claimant, was merely made a scapegoat of.

These be among the humours of your loan collections!

But we must be indulgent. Some mistakes are sure to be made, but it is only fair to remember that the fiddle world is vastly indebted to these grand fiddle exhibitions all the same. The exhibition of 1885 at South Kensington was not one whit less important than the 1872 show.

The 1885 specimens were more discreetly selected than those of 1872. They had the advantage of being largely controlled by Mr Hill.

Besides the usual supply of leading Italian makers, the English school was remarkably well represented. There was found a capital Ford, a maker who has not received due credit for his excellent work. A good Duke and Walmsley, and a yellow fiddle by Tobin, a man quite noticeable for the cut of his scrolls, which are always full of character.

There was an interesting John Lott, richly varnished. A romantic interest must always attach itself to this fine maker on account of his early Bohemian life, recorded by Charles Reade in a memoir called “Jack of All Trades.”

Charles Reade, who knew Lott intimately, tells us how at one time he travelled through Europe with a menagerie and became famous as the keeper of a most clever but vicious elephant called Djek, who, after killing ever so many men, had to be demolished herself with a cannon, and was then cut up for elephant steaks to feed the town.

It was only after the loss of Djek that John Lott came again to London and took up the fiddle trade, which he had learned in boyhood.

Joseph Hill, Lockey Hill, and Banks, were also well seen at South Kensington in 1885. There was also a matchless Urquhart, very venerable—Anno 1666—the date of the great fire of London, which happily spared it!

The Stradivarius case contained Mr Hill’s interesting 1732 Strad (now Ysaÿe’s violin), which, although made so late in his life, was signed by the old man, who after 1730, as a rule, had left off signing his instruments.

A truly serio-comic chapter might be written on the huge prices given for frauds. A friend of mine gave £200 forty years ago for a supposed Strad (which was only a Lupôt) at a time when £40 was a long price for the clever Frenchman.

A violin professor I know sold a very poor Strad the other day, but made a very good thing out of it. When the lady showed it me, I took a liberal view, and said that £300 would have been a long price. Her countenance fell.

“Good gracious! I gave £600!”

“Keep it long enough, and anything by Strad will fetch that; but probably not,” I added, “in your lifetime or mine.” This was some years ago.

On the other hand, bargains in Strads and Josephs, Bergonzis and Stainers, are still no doubt to be got, but only about as often as bargains in Raphaels, Rubens, Rembrandts, or Tintorets; but amateurs of pictures and fiddles are mostly wrecked on school-pictures and school-fiddles, often getting fair money’s worth, but not what they pay for.

Betts purchased one of the finest Stradivari in the world for 20s. When John Lott opened it in Vuillaume’s presence, he found the original bass-bar. The bar—so Charles Reade tells us—was low and short, and quite incapable of bearing the strain of concert pitch, and John Lott replaced it with one stronger. The Betts Strad was sold to George Hart for 800 guineas—a heavy price fifty years ago.

Mr John Hart, father of George Hart, picked up a violoncello in Oxford Street for a sovereign or two. The timbre caught his ear as he passed three street-musicians—violin, cornet, and ’cello.

Lindley, the great player, came into his shop and bought a fine Forster ’cello for a round sum. This was the Oxford Street ’cello.

The destiny of violins has ever been one full of ups and downs, and, like human beings, they have been literally kidnapped, as in the case of Spohr’s, which was lifted from behind his travelling carriage; shipwrecked, like the Peter and Paul, vide page 96; murdered by those Vandals who patch stray bits of slaughtered Cremonas into modern fabrics, and sold for slaves, as in last century, to be scraped in dim churches or ancient orchestras, until found out to be royalties in disguise by the Chanôts and Vuillaumes of the nineteenth century.

One would suppose that the stealing of a first-class instrument would be next to impossible. Hardly a fiddle of mark now exists which is not known to one or other of the great dealers in Paris, London, or Berlin; and whenever it changes hands, it is likely to come before them again for inspection and verification. Yet some of the famous Spanish Court Strads have vanished no one knows where, and another famous Strad from the Plowden Collection, whilst in possession of one of our diplomats at St Petersburg, disappeared, and has never since been traced.

Many years ago I left a Vuillaume, labelled Albani, in a railway carriage when I got out to take refreshment. I was not gone five minutes, but in that five minutes my Vuillaume had gone.

After the death of a well-known nobleman, a certain so-called Strad in an elaborate case, with finely-mounted bows, was submitted to Mr Hill for inspection. It was nothing but a common German fiddle; but Mr Hill told me he had no doubt that the original occupant of the noble case had been stolen. Probably many such thefts have been committed by dishonest servants. Nothing could be easier than to substitute one fiddle for another in houses—and they are legion—where people do not know one fiddle from another, and where fiddles lie unused and unvisited in lofts and cupboards, I might almost say from generation to generation. No soloist who travels should fail to insure his treasure. Sarasate had a heavy insurance on his violin when he went to America.

But worse than theft is mutilation. The chances are that what is stolen, unless it be stolen deliberately to cut up, will some day reappear intact; but the chances are small that a mutilated instrument will ever collect its disjecta membra.

Still, as in the case of Tarisio’s Spanish bass, that too is possible, just as the recovery of the Hercules Farnese statue, before alluded to, was possible.

A well-known amateur whose Strad had been taken to pieces for repair and the pieces wrapped in bits of paper, on unfolding the fragments found the head missing. The loss seemed irreparable, but a day or two afterwards an old apple-woman picked it up in the gutter, and happened to take it to the very fiddle-shop charged with the repair of the Strad. That Strad head was worth just 2s.—to the old woman!

Nothing is easier than the perpetration of a fraud by a clever copyist if he chooses to attempt it. Incredible as it may appear, Paganini was shown by Vuillaume two fiddles, one of which was his own and the other a counterfeit, and was quite unable at the moment to decide which was which.

Chanôt’s copy of the Carlino or Kerlino 1454 viol, No. 14, South Kensington 1872 Exhibition, completely deceived me until I had the opportunity of handling both instruments at leisure.

These frauds extend to bows. The Tourte and Dodd bows in existence that know not Dodd or Tourte are legion.

I should recommend my readers never to leave a valuable bow in their case when they send their violins for repair.

I lost a good Dodd myself in that way. Fine bows are not safe even in the orchestra anteroom; they get “changed.” It seems so simple to some people, when a bow, a crush-hat, or an umbrella happens to be lying about, to mistake it for their own and leave theirs behind, especially if it is inferior in quality to the one they chance to catch up by mistake! As luck will have it, ’tis seldom a worse one that gets caught up!

A friend of mine happened to leave a fine Tourte bow in his case, and then he sent his fiddle for repairs to a smart dealer who shall be nameless here. When the case returned, it had a bow in it, but it was a copy, and a very good copy, of a Tourte. In this instance the dealer restored the original under pressure.

In everything connected with a fiddle and a bow I say, Beware! Beware! Further, let me say to amateurs, not one in a thousand of you, even with practice and opportunity, is fit to judge of a violin; you may easily know what suits you, and that no doubt for practical purposes is the essential. You can hardly know what is genuine.

Over and above culture and wide observation and experience, a certain instinct is required, and few are they that have it. Why, my friend, if William Ebsworth Hill, from whose judgment there was no appeal, got “his eye out” when only for a few weeks he left off looking at fiddles, or distrusted his own judgment on certain days, as to my knowledge was the case—for he was at once the most diffident and absolute of men—what chance have you? Why, none at all!

I will go further than this, and declare that half the violinists now before the public are no more judges of a genuine fiddle than my cook. A man may be a judge without being able to play, and a man may play divinely and not be a judge. At the same time Charles Reade’s opinion would have been even more valuable than it was had he played himself. He never would have written those foolish paragraphs about modern-made fiddles sounding as well as old Cremonas had he played himself. It is all the difference between a man who looks at another man on horseback and one who has got to ride the horse himself; the first may not see much difference in two horses, but the second soon finds it out!

Playing the fiddle won’t make you a judge, but you will be a better judge if you can play the fiddle. I remember showing Remenyi a very fine copy of Strad which had deceived many. He walked up and down my room playing upon it with delight, and pronounced it a genuine Strad beyond a question. It was a Lupôt for all that.

As for your ordinary amateur, he will judge by an old-looking label, being unaware that forgers keep old battered counterfeit type in stock, or he will note the place of the little buttons which fasten the inner blocks, supposing that each maker had his favourite position for these buttons from which he never deviated. Others will prate about Strad’s wasp sting purfle running counter to the angle of his corners, or declare that one maker never made his back in two pieces, whilst another never made it otherwise.

But there is one mark occasionally found in old Italian violins which I do not remember to have seen forged or imitated, or indeed even so much as alluded to by any writer.

If the amateur happens to have an instrument with a little round hole in the back of his fiddle a few inches below the nut, filled up skilfully so as to be almost imperceptible, he may be quite sure he has got an old violin, probably one of the oldest, as the practice of falling suddenly on the knees and letting the violin hang, in processions in which the singers went before and the minstrels followed after, has long been abandoned.

That little hole, so cunningly plugged, shows the place where a slight chain connected the instrument to a button-screw or hook, so that at the elevation of the Host, the minstrel might suddenly fall on his knees without the fear of dropping his fiddle. I have an old Andrew Guarnerius so plugged, and the violinist Oury first pointed this out to me and explained the reason of the plugged hole!

Scores have sent me descriptions of their fiddles, and expected me to pronounce on the genuineness of them, or are sure that they own a real Strad or Amati, because theirs (in their opinion) exactly corresponds to my description of Strad or Amati in “Music and Morals.” All this shows that the outside public have not the faintest inkling of true violin lore.

Oliver Wendell Holmes felt this when he wrote to me in 1885.

He had himself written very charmingly on the violin, and the passage is quoted with approval even by so redoubtable a critic as Mr George Hart in his admirable book “The Violin” (1887).

Oliver Wendell Holmes had the acuteness to see that all mere picturesque writing was valueless from a technical point of view, and he thus expresses himself to me in a letter dated December 5, 1885:—

“I never knew until I read what you say of the instrument what profanation I had been guilty of to touch one, much more to write about it!” and he was kind enough to add: “You have given a life to the fiddle such as nothing but its own music ever gave it before!”—words which, coming so spontaneously from the author of the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-table,” I think I may be allowed to quote with pardonable pleasure.

There is a point interesting alike to collectors, amateurs, dealers, and players, which I feel somewhat strongly about in view of much recent, and, as it seems to me, ignorantly conducted controversy.

It is whether, as far as tone and sensibility are concerned, the best modern fiddles are not quite as good as the best old ones. We hear repeatedly stories of Strads and Josephs being played side by side with modern fiddles, whilst the best judges have failed to detect the superiority of the old over the new. This test is most unsatisfactory. The ear is as easily confused as the palate. It is currently reported that if you taste alternately port wine, cream, and sherry, you will not, after a few sips with your eyes shut, be able to tell the difference; but no one argues from this that there is no difference. The ear is not only easily confused about the quality, but even about the direction of sound.

Let one man shut his eyes and another snap his fingers on the right, left, and above the other’s head several times running, and this one shall be utterly unable to tell after a few turns where the fingers are being snapped. No one is a real judge of the distance from which a sound comes. If, then, we can be easily puzzled when plied with such tests about the direction and the distance, no wonder if tests expressly designed to confuse us about timbre should be equally successful. But the question is practically settled by soloists invariably preferring a fine old fiddle to a fine new one, not as connoisseurs, but as players, and there must be a reason for this.

Therefore, I will hear of no talk, even from the lips of a Charles Reade, about the varnish, the finish, the artistic beauty in form or colour of the old violins being largely responsible for this avowed preference. It is tonal power—quality, sensibility, volume, timbre—a something personal, as it were, to the old fiddles, which points to certain real qualities in their makers which have not since been rivalled, and this is quite apart from the item of age.

Age will make a good fiddle better, but it won’t make a bad fiddle good; it may also be possible to prematurely age a new fiddle, not with heat or acids, but quite legitimately, by incessantly and for long periods of time grinding it through every semitone of its compass, and well-made modern fiddles will doubtless improve every year, like good wine, up to a certain point. They will then probably deteriorate. But the age at which the old Cremonas are bound to deteriorate has happily not yet been reached.

The root of the matter lies here.

A listener behind the door may not know the difference between a Strad or Joseph or some other, but the player does. A spectator in the Park may see no great difference between the pet horse ridden by the lady and the even more handsome quadruped upon which her groom follows; but she knows. So the hunter knows his horse, and values him above another horse which looks better; the beast he rides will answer to his will, go anywhere with him, and rise to every occasion.

This is what your Strad fiddle does.

All violinists will tell you that there is a reserve of force about a Strad; you can “pull out,” and you will never be disappointed.

All lovers of Amati will tell you that they find in Nicolo a trembling sighing sensitiveness, a tenderness, and a tone delicate to the point of vanishing, which endears Amati to the women, and still leaves his finest instruments unapproachable for cabinet-playing.

And all players will tell you that for domination and downright big-battalion power, Joseph Guarnerius del Gesù has not his equal.

And the reason for this real, not fancied, supremacy of the great makers and their best pupils?

The reason is complex, no doubt—so complex that, when all precautions have been taken to imitate wood, proportions, varnish, workmanship, so as thoroughly to deceive the eye, the modern chef-d’œuvre is, in spite of puzzled auditors, still not identical in quality with the old Cremona gems.

I was called the other day to judge a set of English bells, cast with the same proportions of tin and copper, of exactly the same size, weight, and model as a suite of Belgian bells cast by Severin Van Aerschodt; but the sound?

Ye gods! No silver clang and tin-kettle parody could be further apart than were those English and Belgian bells.

But to return to our fiddles. The reasons of Cremona supremacy remain to be tackled.

I hazard the following points:—

1st. Selection of wood. No doubt the old Lombardian forests, with their salt-impregnated roots, provided rare planks. The vaunted American woods fail technically to satisfy the Cremona requirements.

2nd. The knowledge, at first empirical, then intuitive, born of a lifelong study of the relative density of woods fitted to vibrate together. Nothing can teach this, no rule or measurements; for every plank varies in porousness, density of fibre, age, and seasoning.

Charles Reade was napping when he expressed a hope that a certain Stradivari back, mated with a new belly, might some day be united to some Stradivari back of which he knew; but unless it happened to be the belly Strad had selected for that particular back, what reason is there to suppose that the result would be satisfactory?

3rd. I am of opinion that the old method of careful oil-sizing and the subsequent application of gum materially affected the tone.

Think for a moment only of what is implied in the saturation—too much or too little of the wood—with oils, spirit, gum of this or that quality.

Necessarily some vibratory capacities must be affected—for better, for worse—by the filling in, one way or another, of the wood pores; and do not the commonest of modern artificers admit that the Cremona varnish, and the exact mode of its application, is as yet undiscovered; and when they speak otherwise, do they not laugh in their sleeves?

4th. Admit that the proportions are exactly equal, the column of air almost identical in cubic measure, about 512 to the second; still remains the vibratory qualities of infinite varieties of grain—coarse or close, loose or serried—in wood fibre acting upon that air column.

The old makers varied their models, but, no doubt, had regard to the thicknesses and the subtle relations between the hard and soft woods which would produce the power or quickness of reply, or sweetness, or penetratingness aimed at.

It may be that the secret for the production of these is quite incommunicable, just as a painter, an actor, a singer, a sculptor will do a thing before you, which you cannot do, which he cannot teach you how to do, though he place his brush, his chisel, his music, his toga and footlights at your disposal.

5th. We have no time for failures; they had. Endless experiment, endless comparison, observation, meditation, unlimited leisure: one and the same man made each part, and knew the interpenetrative qualities and the mutual adaptation of the sundry parts.

We now have subdivision of labour; each man makes one of the parts, and some one else puts them together. How can such backs accord with such bellies? How can such ribs cotton with such strange and fortuitous planks? Truly a scratch company brought together like strangers, yet expected to accept their arbitrary assortment, and make sweet harmony together. But they were not fastened together, in view of one another, by one and the same master-mind, who knew what was good for them, and what they were good for!

6th. But given the possibility of favourable conditions—time, absorption, infinite experience, and all the accumulated knowledge of the past—and given a modern Nicolo, Strad, Joseph, or even Bergonzi, and given climate, and given wood galore, and might not we expect Cremona results?

Why, yes, with Cremona conditions, certainly, or at least a very fair approximation; and I am far from saying that we are not on the road to it.

Until lately it has not been worth while for makers like the Hills, the Gands, or the Chanôt firms to do aught seriously but repair or parody closely for the eye the old fiddles.

But such of Vuillaume’s fiddles as have not been aged with heat and acids, and the fine £10 to £30 violins now being made conscientiously by Messrs Hill, in proportion as old fiddles become rare and inaccessible, must come to the fore. Anyhow, players will, it is hoped, give up the idiotic folly of paying large sums for indifferent old fiddles, even with respectable names, when they can get really fine new ones for half the money with twice the tone—a good tone, too, which a very few years will suffice to mellow.

We write these words in the interest of dealers, collectors, players, and artificers alike—indeed, it would be well worth while for collectors even now to get hold of the finest attainable specimens of new work. As a mere speculation it would be at least as sound an investment as laying down good vintages of port or sherry.

A good Hill recently made, price £30 or £40, e.g. the fine copy of the Tuscan Strad, only requires age to mellow it into a price of three figures.

These new and garish-looking instruments, which, after all, do not look more gaudy than the Messie Strad, are exceedingly loud in tone, and withal very sensitive.

A certain tartness of timbre merely calls aloud for another ten or twenty years to soften and refine it into the Cremona tone.

Meanwhile, the aspirants to Cremona excellence are entertainingly numerous. From time to time I get letters accompanied with samples from people who claim to have discovered the secret of the Cremona varnish.

Here and there some enterprising maker will get a literary friend to extol him as the successor of Stradiuarius.

I came across a pamphlet the other day assigning Cremona rank to a worthy musician who makes fiddles en amateur, and a certain German working in America, whose violins present all the usual characteristics of instruments made in Germany. I actually got half through this remarkable document, written au grand serieux, before I discovered that it belonged to the liver pill, patent syrup, and soap class.

Rumours may reach you from America of the wonderful Californian wood. Well, European experts tell me that, fine as is the marking, it does not yield the required timbre, and that the planks now coming over from the old forests of Herzgovina and Bosnia are far superior for fiddle-making purposes.

Then think of the care and study in selection made by those old Italian artificers who frequented the Brescian and Cremonese markets, and haggled over special bits of timber. They knew exactly where it came from—the peculiarities of the soil, iron or salt impregnated from whence it came; whether it was cut as it should be, in autumn, with the sap out of it, and exactly how long it had been cut, and to what conditions it had been exposed before it came to be worked up. The subtleties were endless. Who troubles their heads about such things now?

No! The fact about modern fiddles you, my anxious inquirer, may take it for granted is what I have stated. Take good new fiddles by Hill, Chanôt, Bernardel, Gand, and, according to the time and individual or one-man power and skill spent upon them, they will rank high, and higher by-and-by; and if ever the genius and the conditions which obtained at Cremona, anno 1700, are again found, then, and not till then, will the peers and rivals of the Cremona masterpieces be seen and heard—and paid for.

It may be rash to attempt a scale of prices, when the experience of the last fifty years proves that we have to deal with a sliding scale. Forty years ago my father bought a rather small Andrea Guarnerius at Puttick & Simpson’s for £4, which could not now be picked up under £20. No Cremona from 1660 to 1760 can be got for much less, though many better fiddles can be got for half that price. Of course the rise in the Strads is quite phenomenal. Stainer, on the other hand, is not valued as highly by comparison as he was last century; whilst, owing to the rarity of real Stainers, the demand for Klotz and Albani, more easily attainable, has somewhat increased, and generally all the second and third class makers are being hunted up and command good figures now, just as a man who can’t get Charles II. silver will put up with William and Mary, Queen Anne, and even the early Georges.

It is quite safe to buy Urquhart, Ford, Banks, Forster, Furber (Henry, David, or John), and Pamphilion; but the once popular “Duke” days are pretty well over.

Lupôt should be always secured, and Vuillaumes that have not been cooked with acids and heat; and no collector will go far wrong with Pique.

Venetian fiddles, and especially violoncellos, near akin to Cremona, will be sure to rise; and, as a rule, the Northern fiddles will command a better figure than the Southerners—Rome and Naples.

But all such hints are general, and must be taken for what they are worth, for stray specimens will often turn up belonging to almost any school, which will have rare merits and can hardly be accounted for by any systematic classification.

The following up-to-date (1898) scale of prices may be a useful but rough guide to the collector with money that burns his pocket:—

PRICES

[1898]

Stradivari £2000 to £200

Joseph Guarnerius 1000 ” 100

Other Guarnerii 300 ” 30

Nicolo Amati, and the brothers Anthony, and Gerome 500 ” 80 or £50

Stainer 200 ” 30

C. Bergonzi 600 ” 40

Maggini 500 ” 50

J. B. Vuillaume 60 ” 20

Lupôt 200 ” 50

Pique 60 ” 10

Forster (’cellos) 100 ” 20

Duke 40 ” 5

Banks 100 ” 20

There are two general rules, which, like all rules, may have some exceptions—not many:—

I. Never buy a fiddle simply at the owner’s valuation; judge it by your own knowledge if you have any, or that of an expert if you have none.

II. If you buy at auction, always go a few pounds better than the highest bid offered by a dealer, and if you win, you will be in luck.

III. Before sending a valuable violin to be “done up,” select your repairer carefully. A fiddle maker is not necessarily a fiddle restorer, and may be quite ignorant of the traditions which should regulate this branch of the luthier’s art.

IV. Get your violin’s pedigree as far as you can in detail, with names and dates. Had this been always done, exhibitions would have been spared many a delusion and collectors many a fraud.