The Lost Stradivarius was written by J. Meade Falkner. Falkner (1858-1932) was an antiquarian by trade and an authority on medieval ritual and paleography. He is today remembered for his historical novel Moonfleet (1898) and for The Lost Stradivarius, which a number of critics see as one of the classic nineteenth century ghost stories. Most readers will find it ordinary, though not entirely without interest.

The Lost Stradivarius is about John Maltravers, a student at Oxford. He is a lover of music and is best friends with William Gaskell, and one night John finds an old book of Italian music in Gaskell’s room. John is taken with one of the suites, “l’Areopagita,” and begins playing it on his violin. When he plays the Gagliarda passage, he hears noises coming from a wicker chair in the room, as if someone is sitting in the chair. But John is alone in the room, and when he stops playing the sound stops. However, the next night, when John plays the Gagliarda with Gaskell, John hears the sounds again, as does Gaskell. They initially ascribe it to an affinity of vibration between the wicker and the violin, although both feel that something was sitting in the wicker chair listening to them play. This continues throughout the semester, but toward the end of the semester Gaskell has a vision of a fete in an old-fashioned Italian hall, and of an Englishman to whom something awful is about to happen. That spring John meets Constance Temple, the daughter of a distant cousin, and the pair are immediately attracted to each other. Back at Oxford John plays the Gagliarda by himself one morning, and when he does he sees a man sitting in the wicker chair. The man is older than John, dressed in a fashion of a bygone day and clean-shaven but with a displeasing expression and a generally “malign and wicked”¹ air about him. But the man keeps his eyes cast down, so that John cannot see them, and after a few seconds the man walks into a wall and disappears, alarming John considerably. John tells Gaskell about his vision, and Gaskell tells him that he saw a ghost, someone particularly attached to the Gagliarda. John is not particularly pleased to hear this, but the ghost does not reappear. Over the summer John meets up with Constance again and they grow closer, with an engagement expected by both families. That fall the man does not reappear, but both Gaskell and John hear what seems to be an echo when they play the Gagliarda.

Then John finds a cabinet in the wall, in the same spot that the ghost walked into. In the cabinet is an old violin. The violin is in fine condition, and there is evidence that it was made by Stradivarius himself. John consults an expert, who is shocked at the find: it is a Stradivarius, made at the height of the master’s powers, and in better condition than the expert has ever seen. The expert holds on to the violin, to have other experts examine the violin and to have it restrung. But even without the violin, John begins to change, lying to everyone about his find–he tells them he bought the Stradivarius–and becoming obsessed with playing the Gagliarda. Over Christmas vacation John and his sister visit the Temples at their mansion, and the changes in John become evident to his sister; he seems more distracted and disinterested in those around him, and she wonders if he loves Constance as much as he used to. One night, during a thunderstorm, John faints and takes sick with brain fever. John’s sister Sophy and Constance discover that John was looking at a portrait of Adrian Temple, Constance’s wicked ancestor, when he fainted; Temple looks exactly like the man who John saw sitting on the wicker chair. John eventually recovers and returns to Oxford. He gets the Stradivarius back but continues to lie about it to everyone. He plays the “Areopagita” constantly, even obsessively, and he and Gaskell part on strained terms. John marries Constance but after only a few months, when they’ve been traveling in Italy, their marriage is in trouble, for he seems to care only about the violin and playing the “Areopagita,” over and over, almost like a machine. They return home for the holidays, but he is greatly altered and withdrawn from everyone, including his wife. He returns to Italy, leaving a pregnant Constance behind. She gives birth to their son and then dies of brain fever. Sophy receives word that John is ill in Italy and goes to visit him, and he tells her all about his past and Adrian Temple’s past, and shows her his discovery, the hall in which Temple was murdered. They return to England, where John continues to decline and then dies. The last part of the story is a note from Gaskell, explaining things from his perspective and telling the story of Adrian Temple.

The Lost Stradivarius was old-fashioned when it first appeared. The story is deliberately written in the thicker and slower-reading mid-century style of a Bulwer Lytton in “The Haunted and the Haunters.” Many of the horror stories of the 1890s were written in the lighter, brisker, more dialogue-heavy style which was popular in that decade and the one following, and which has not aged significantly, but Falkner, antiquarian that he was, seemingly deliberately went in the face of contemporary style and wrote a throwback story.

Most readers will not count Falkner’s style against him in considering the story. But what is particularly unimpressive about the story is its first half, which has a marked lack of narrative momentum and is narrated rather than recounted, so that the reader is told what happened rather than shown what happened. Falkner describes the type of horror John is feeling in wooden third-person descriptions, and does not describe what is making John feel the horror. Falkner’s approach to the horror itself is overdone and unsubtle, and his hints of forthcoming evil do not build suspense but rather belabor what the reader knows will happen. All of this will leave most modern readers underwhelmed. The second half of The Lost Stradivarius is usually told in the present tense rather than in the past and does pick up some speed, though not enough to redeem the novel. Falkner’s sensibilities were apparently so refined that he could only hint in the vaguest terms about Temple’s wickedness and could never disclose what Temple did that was so evil. Some critics call this “understatement;” most modern readers are likely to find it annoyingly vague and unclear. Falkner does make some good use of his antiquarian learning, but there is only a little of it, and it is less interesting here than the better use of same in R.S. Hawker’s “The Botathen Ghost.”

The Lost Stradivarius is well-thought of by modern critics—Brian Stableford calls it “a masterpiece of its own restrained kind”²—and is often cited as a work of Decadent horror, with its use of Naples "a symptomatic model of the association between place and morality that characterised the conservative idea of a 'decadent' culture."³ But most modern readers are not likely to find reading The Lost Stradivarius a good use of their time.

Print: John Falkner, The Lost Stradivarius. London: The British Library, 2011.

¹ J. Meade Falkner, The Lost Stradivarius (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1896), 36.

² Brian Stableford, “Falkner, J(ohn) Meade,” in David Pringle, ed., St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers (Detroit: St. James Press, 1998), 216.

³ Alex Murray, Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2016), 42.