THE FIDDLE TRADE.
"There is, for instance, Old Borax, whom those who want to know whereabouts to look for—within the shadow of St. Martin's Church.
"Borax makes but little demonstration of his wealth in the dingy hole that serves him for a shop, where a Double-Bass, a couple of Violoncellos, a Tenor or two hanging on the walls, and half-a-dozen Fiddles lying among a random collection of bows, bridges, coils of catgut, packets of purified resin, and tangled horsehair in skeins, serve for the insignia of his profession. But Borax never does business in his shop, which is a dusty desert from one week's end to another. His warehouse is a private sanctum on the first floor, where you will find him in his easy chair reading the morning paper, if he does not happen to be engaged with a client. Go to him for a Fiddle, or carry him a Fiddle for his opinion, and you will hardly fail to acknowledge that you stand in the presence of a first-rate judge. The truth is, that Fiddles of all nations, disguised and sophisticated as they may be to deceive common observers, are naked and self-confessed in his hands. Dust, dirt, varnish, and bees'-wax are thrown away upon him; he knows the work of every man, of note or of no note, whether English, French, Dutch, German, Spaniard, or Italian, who ever sent a Fiddle into the market, for the last two hundred years; and he will tell you who is the fabricator of your treasure, and the rank he holds in the Fiddle-making world, with the utmost readiness and urbanity—on payment of his fee of one guinea.
"Borax is the pink of politeness, though a bit of a martinet after an ancient and punctilious model. If you go to select a Fiddle from his stock, you may escape a lecture of a quarter of an hour by calling it a Fiddle, and not a Violin, which is a word he detests, and is apt to excite his wrath. He is never in a hurry to sell, and will by no means allow you to conclude a bargain until he has put you in complete possession of the virtues, and failings, if it have any, of the instrument for which you are to pay a round sum. As his Fiddles lie packed in sarcophagi, like mummies in an Egyptian catacomb, your choice is not perplexed by any embarras de richesses; you see but one masterpiece at a time, and Borax will take care that you do see that, and know all about it, before he shows you another. First unlocking the case, he draws the instrument tenderly from its bed, grasps it in the true critical style with the fingers and thumbs of both hands a little above the bridge, turning the scroll towards you. Now and then he twangs, with the thumb of his left hand, the third or fourth string, by way of emphasis to the observations which he feels bound to make—instinctively avoiding, however, that part of the strings subject to the action of the bow. Giving you the name of the maker, he proceeds to enlighten you on the peculiar characteristics of his work; then he will dilate upon the remarkable features of the specimen he holds in his hand—its build, its model, the closeness and regularity of the grain of the wood of which the belly was fashioned: the neatness, or, wanting that, the original style of the purfling—the exquisite mottling of the back, which is wrought, he tells you, 'by the cunning hand of nature in the primal growth of the tree'—twang. Then he will break out in placid exclamations of delight upon the gracefulness of the swell—twang—and the noble rise in the centre—twang—and make you pass your hand over it to convince yourself; after which, he carefully wipes it down with a silk handkerchief. This process superinduces another favourite theme of eulogium—namely, the unparalleled hue and tone (of colour) imparted by the old Italian varnish—a hue, he is sure to inform you, which it is impossible to imitate by any modern nostrums—twang. Then he reverts to the subject of a Fiddle's indispensables and fittings; discourses learnedly on the carving of scrolls, and the absurd substitution, by some of the German makers, of lions' heads in lieu of them; hinting, by the way, that said makers are asses, and that their instruments bray when they should speak—twang. Then touching briefly on the pegs, which he prefers unornamented, he will hang lingeringly upon the neck, pronounce authoritatively upon the right degree of elevation of the finger-board, and the effects of its due adjustment upon the vibration of the whole body-harmonic, and, consequently, upon the tone. Then, jumping over the bridge, he will animadvert on the tail-piece; after which, entering at the f-holes—not without a fervent encomium upon their graceful drawing and neatness of cut—twang—he will introduce you to the arcanum mysterii, the interior of the marvellous fabric—point out to you, as plainly as though you were gifted with clairvoyance, the position and adaptation of the various linings, the bearings of the bass-bar, that essential adjunct to quality of tone—twang—and the proper position of the sound-post. Lastly, he will show you, by means of a small hand-mirror throwing a gleam of light into its entrails, the identical autograph of the immortal maker—Albani, Guarneri, or Amati, as the case may happen—with the date printed in the lean old type and now scarcely visible through the dust of a couple of centuries, 'Amati Cremonæ fecit 1645,' followed by a manuscript signature in faded ink, which you must take for granted.
"Borax has but one price; and if you do not choose to pay it, you must do without the article. The old fellow is a true believer, and is accounted the first judge in Europe; Fiddles travel to him from all parts of the Continent for his opinion, bringing their fees with them; and for every instrument he sells, it is likely he pronounces judgment upon a hundred. It is rumoured that the greatest masterpieces in being are in his possession.
"A dealer of a different stamp is Michael Schnapps, well known in the trade, and the profession too, as a ravenous Fiddle-ogre, who buys and sells everything that bears the Fiddle shape, from a Double-Bass to a dancing-master's pocketable Kit. His house is one vast warehouse, with Fiddles on the walls, Fiddles on the staircases, and Fiddles hanging like stalactites from the ceilings. To him the tyros resort when they first begin to scrape; he will set them up for ten shillings, and swop them up afterwards, step by step, to ten or twenty guineas, and to ten times that amount if they are rich enough and green enough to continue the experiment. Schnapps imports Fiddles in the rough, under the designation of toys, most of which are the production of his peasant-countrymen bordering on the Black Forest; and with these he supplies the English provinces and the London toy and stationers' shops. He is, further, a master of the Fiddle-making craft himself, and so consummate an adept in repairing that nothing short of consuming fire can defeat his art. When Pinker, of Norwich, had his Cremona smashed all to atoms in a railway collision, Schnapps rushed down to the scene of the accident, bought the lot of splintered fragments for a couple of pounds, and in a fortnight had restored the magnificent Stradivari to its original integrity, and cleared 150 guineas by its sale. But Schnapps is a humbug at bottom—an everlasting copyist and manufacturer of dead masters, Italian, German, and English. He has sold more Amatis in his time than Amati himself ever made. He knows the secret of the old varnish; he has hidden stores of old wood—planks of cherry-tree and mountain-ash centuries old, and worm-eaten sounding-boards of defunct Harpsichords, and reserves of the close-grained pine hoarded for ages. He has a miniature printing press, and a fount of the lean-faced, long-forgotten type, and a stock of the old ribbed paper torn from the fly-leaves of antique folios; and, of course, he has always on hand a collection of the most wonderful instruments at the most wonderful prices, for the professional man or the connoisseur.
"'You vant to py a Pfeedel,' says Schnapps. 'I sall sell you de pest—dat ish, de pest for the mowny. Vat you sall gif for him?'
"'Well, I can go as far as ten guineas,' says the customer.
"'Ten kinnis is good for von goot Pfeedel; bote besser is tventy, tirty, feefty kinnis, or von hunder, look you; bote ten kinnis is goot—you sall see.'
"Schnapps is all simplicity and candour in his dealings. The probability is, however, that his ten-guinea Fiddle would be fairly purchased at five, and that you might have been treated to the same article had you named thirty or forty guineas instead of ten.