Books › The violin : how to choose one, 1893 › scan 67
Scan 67
The violin : how to choose one, 1893
2 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 63. See the scan on archive.org.
1teenth century men cannot improve. Strange that we, who speak of the hills and what they tell us of their age and formation, as revealed by themselves, will not listen to the voice of the violin, which can as certainly tell its own story, and reveal the whole secret of its formation. There does not exist to-day one violin which will refuse to tell its story—ay, even though strings were denied it. Surely the giant minds that could throw the Forth Bridge across a raging sea, and measure the millionth part of an inch, and even weigh the stars, cannot be defeated in the copying of a fiddle, even though that fiddle be the work of a giant mind. Some say—"Oh, it is hopeless to try." I say it is not—their tone may be copied, to any given peculiarity of tone or string, and I shall now show how it may be done. I shall give no measurements here. Measurement has kept the violin in the rut of chance long enough, and is continually at war with the different density and resonance and age of different pieces of wood, even though the wood be of the right kind, and unless by what is called a happy hit, mediocrity generally claims the modern violin as her own. I am not a dreamer, but a very practical man, who can paint a picture, or make a brass-railed fender for the fireside, and I wish to impress on all how true and certain is the result of my studies. It is ten years since I began to note down what I am about to give, and for five years I have been able to copy the tone of any violin. I taught myself French to see if M. Savart mentioned how the plates were held when he got the notes during his experiments; but no—absolute silence. It was a mean omission, if intentional; though I do not think he knew all the notes, or he would not have made a trapezoid violin, knowing it to be so very bad. Perhaps Vuillaume knew, but never revealed the knowledge. Otto, who writes on the construction of the violin, may have known, but, with a selfishness quite unworthy of a real lover of the violin, he coolly says that there is something more which he will not tell. When I think that the commonest in the land—the man in the bothy or the shieling—who fills up his time with the fascinating work of violin making, may get the best tone that is in the wood he is using, and produce a work as thrilling to the musical ear as the most finished worker, I am more than rewarded for the study and toil of ten years' research. Violin makers will not know what they have got until they make one or two this way. It is not possible to
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