Books › Old violins, 1905 › scan 153
Scan 153
Old violins, 1905
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 135. See the scan on archive.org.
1as a thing of beauty, wonder, mystery, more than enough to monopolise a lifetime of devotion—this is what made Mr Ebsworth Hill the spiritual heir of the grand old fiddle-makers. "Why," he said to me once, "talk about not knowing the touch of this or that maker? I know the sort of tools Stradivari or Joseph used. I can see the mark of a special favourite knife here or gouge there. I know which way he used to cut and slice, and how he held his tool for such and such a kind of finish. I can see 'em at work, and the handling of one is no more like another's than the touch of one painter is like another's."
3When you took a fiddle in to show Mr Hill, you had to wait Mr Hill's good time; he seldom answered immediately he was spoken to, but would look up dreamily through his spectacles without laying down his file or knife, and let off some such dogmatic and oracular sentence as: "You want to know how I can tell a fiddle. Well, I don't know how I can tell; and there are days when I don't trust my judgment—days I can't see, for instance. I leave off looking at fiddles for a day or two; and when I come back I take up this fiddle and that, and just at first I can't see anything—those fiddles tell me nothing; it's a peculiar state of mind—just as a player or a surgeon's hand gets out, so a judge's eye gets out. I know exactly when I see and when I can't see, and when I can't see I hold my tongue; and I know exactly how much I can see, but I don't tell everybody." The The casual visitor could make very little of old Hill at first. There
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