Old Violins by H. R. Haweis

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.