Old Violins by H. R. Haweis

It is an amusing fact that hardly a Continental writer on musical instruments, M. Vidal excepted, has thought it worth while to give any reasoned account of the English viol and violin-makers who have occupied such a distinguished place in the history of the art.

I heard the other day of an American school atlas which left out all the islands in the world as unimportant details calculated to confuse the minds of young students. England, of course, being a small island, was one of the first to disappear.

The names of Barak Norman, Banks, Forster, and Duke may be somewhat confusing, but we must risk the mention of them just for the sake of an approximate completeness.

The fact is, that in Queen Elizabeth's time the English were really almost a musical people. Whether the viols came across from the Low Countries or Germany or from Italy has never seemed to me a matter of much importance. Undoubtedly the viol and its descendants is cloisteral, and that means Italian, since all the arts along with Christianity spread from the great Italian centres -- Rome, Florence, Milan, Brescia; and in Elizabeth's time Italian influence is as marked in English music as it is in the Shakspearian drama, or in these gorgeous brocades, silks, and tapestries that still dazzle us behind glass at the South Kensington Museum, or in such Elizabethan gems of Renaissance architecture as Knole and Hatfield, which seem to touch as with the glory of a foreign world the palatial seats "of our old nobility."

Modern music rises in Elizabeth's reign with Monte Verde and the discovery of the octave and the perfect cadence.

Along with it rise the Italian singing-schools of Naples; whilst the viols, improved to meet the new demands, culminate in the Brescian, Maggini and the Cremonese Amati patterns (the very word Madrigala, the hymn of the Mother of God, is Italian and cloisteral), and the viols which accompanied such part-songs were doubtless of Italian origin.

But, for all that, the viols were genuinely naturalised and acclimatised in England, and for a short time it seemed as if England were even going to lead the art of viol manufacture.

The father of Galileo the astronomer declared in 1583 that the best lutes were at that time _made in England_, and we know that lute-making and viol-making so invariably went together that in France and Italy the violin-maker is to this day called a "lutier"; and J. J. Rousseau remarks, a little loosely perhaps: "The viol passed from the Italians to the English, who _first_ began to compose and play harmonised pieces for it, and who imparted the knowledge to other kingdoms."

Mace, an old writer and quite a musical expert (1676), mentions the viols of Ross (1598) and Smith (1633) as "old instruments" in his day. But the movement did not go on, and I cannot for a moment doubt that what checked the rise of music and the manufacture of musical instruments in this country was that same Puritan craze which snubbed art, smashed the stained glass, and mutilated our cathedrals throughout the land.

Viols had by this time crept out of the cloister and joined hands with the frivolous Rebek, used at fairs and pothouses. At all events, in Cromwell's time and the "Barebones-praise-God period," everything that savoured of festivity was tabooed, and the fury against art seemed part and parcel of all sincere religion, according to the masses at least.

To Cromwell's honour be it set down that he was personally no such extremist, and that he, moreover, saved for us Raffael's cartoons; but still music in any of its secular forms was mightily discouraged by the Puritans, whilst in its higher religious form it was associated with Prelacy and Papacy, and we have to wait for that reaction in favour of the world, the flesh, and the devil, which marked the Restoration, and which also made provision for the more innocent as well as the more perilous delights of music in the home, the concert room, the theatre, and the sanctuary.

In Charles I. 's band (1625) there were "eleven violins and four viols," so at last the violin was creeping up; but not until Charles II. 's restoration did the full-fledged violin come in with a rush of "four-and-twenty" fiddlers, over whom presided no less a person than the immortal Thomas Purcell, who, in a brief span of life, achieved his almost Mozartian fame, and died at the early age of twenty-seven, just ten years younger than the incomparable Wolfgang Amadeus.

The King had no doubt got his notion of fiddle bands from Louis XIII. 's "petits violons du roi"; and from the French Court, our "merrie monarch" borrowed a good many other ideas of a less respectable and harmless character.

The King was so seriously addicted to music that he could hardly hear a sermon and never eat his dinner without the solatium of his four-and-twenty fiddlers.

"They played before him at his meals," writes Anthony Wood in the diary of his life, "as being more airy and brisk than the viols"; and the grave Evelyn much resents the invasion of the upstart "petit violon" and its profane intrusion. He writes in 1662: "One of his Majesty's chaplains preached, after which, instead of anthem or solemn wind music accompanying the organ, was introduced a concert of twenty-four violins between every pause, in the French fantastical light way, better suiting a tavern or a playhouse than a church."

'Tis an ill wind that blows nobody and nothing any good, and we cannot doubt that his Majesty's royal mistresses, like the Duchess of Cleveland (Barbara Palmer), the Duchess of St Albans (Nell Gwynn, the actress), the mother of the Duke of Monmouth (Lucy Walters), the Duchess of Portsmouth (Louise de Querouaille, a French girl), greatly favoured all the more frivolous diversions with which secular music, and especially the new-fangled violin, were associated.

These ladies were bound to be musical, as music undoubtedly delighted the "merrie monarch," and flattered his jaded tastes by its frequent novelty and emotional excitations.