ORIGINAL AND EARLY HISTORY OF THE VIOLIN.
First seat him somewhere, and derive his race.—Dryden.
The Fiddle Family, like other tribes that have succeeded in making a noise in the world, has given exercise to the ingenuity of learned theorists and time-seekers, who have laboured to discover for it an origin as remote from our own era, as it is, I fear, from any kind of truth. It has probably been conceived that the Fiddle, associated as he has been, from generation to generation, with jigs, country-dances, fairs, junketings and other rusticities, had descended too low in the scale of society—that he had rendered himself, as Shakspeare for a while did his own genius, “stale and cheap to vulgar company”—and that he required to be reminded of his primitive dignity, and of his very high ancestral derivation—if he had any. This latter point was of course to be first established; but, as your zealous antiquary is a wholesale dealer in time, and is never at a loss for a few centuries to link his conjectures to, the matter was easy enough; indeed, the more doubtful, the better, since doubt is the very life of theory. Accordingly, we have been invited to fall back upon “the ancients,” and to recognize the Epigonion as the dignified and classic prototype of our merry and somewhat lax little friend, the Fiddle. To certain ancient Greek tablets relative to music, which have been somewhere brought to light, Professor Murchard has minutely assigned the date of 709 years before the Christian era; and the following passage, Englished from his translation, is stoutly alleged by the antiquarian advocates of the glories of the violin race:—“But Pherekydes began the contest, and sat himself down before all the people, and played the Epigonion;—for he had improved the same; and he stretched four strings over a small piece of wood, and played on them with a smooth stick. But the strings sounded so, that the people shouted with joy.”
This is plausible enough, but far from conclusive. It is but the outline of a description, and admits of various modes of filling up. If the instrument partook at all of the violin character, it might seem, from the reference which its name bears to the knees, to have been the rude progenitor of either the double-bass or the violoncello, which have both, as is well known, their official post between the knees: but then, the prefix of ἐπί would denote that it was played upon the knees of the artist. “Very well,” says the antiquarian; “it was a fiddle reversed.” “Nay, Dr. Dryasdust, if you yourself overturn what you are about, I have no need to say more.” Au reste, let any body stretch four strings over a small piece of wood, and play on them with a smooth stick, and then take account of what it comes to. No, no; whatever the Epigonion may have been to the Greeks, he is nothing to us: he may have been a respectable individual of the musical genus of his day, when people blew a shell or a reed, and called it music; but we cannot for a moment receive him as the patriarch of the Fiddle Family. As soon should we think of setting up Pherekydes against Paganini.
Dismissing the Epigonion, we come to the Semicon, another pretender of Greek origin. This also, we are farther told, was a kind of violin: but we deny that he was father to the violin kind. The Semicon is said to have been played on with a bow; and yet a learned German (Koch), in the fulness of his determination to have strings enough to his bow, has claimed no less than thirty-five, as the complement of the Semicon. How could any bow pay its devoirs distinctly to thirty-five strings? Here, then, the dilemma is this: either to translate the thing in question into a bow is to traduce the term, or else the strings are an impertinence. Utrum horum mavis, accipe.
If the word plectrum could, by any ingenuity, be established to mean a bow, quotations enough might be accumulated to prove that instruments played with bows had their origin in a very remote period. But the translation of the word into a bow, or such like thing, as we find it in the Dictionaries, arises simply from the want of a known equivalent—a deficiency which makes it necessary to adopt any term that offers even the shadow of a synonym.
It has been stated, on the authority of a passage from Euphorion’s book on the Isthmian Games, that there was an ancient instrument called magadis, which was surrounded by strings; that it was placed upon a pivot, upon which it turned, whilst the performer touched it with the bow (or, at least, the plectrum); and that this instrument afterwards received the name of sambuce.
The hieroglyphics of Peter Valerian, page 628, chap. 4, present the figure of a muse, holding, in her right hand, a kind of bass or contra-violin, the form of which is not very unlike that of our violins or basses.
Philostratus, moreover, who taught at Athens, during the reign of Nero, gives a description of the lyre, which has been thus translated:—
“Orpheus,” he says, “supported the lyre against his left leg, whilst he beat time by striking his foot upon the ground; in his right hand he held the bow, which he drew across the strings, turning his wrist slightly inwards. He touched the strings with the fingers of his left hand, keeping the knuckles perfectly straight.”