Scan 35
The Fiddle Fancier's Guide: A Manual of Information Regarding Violins …, 1892
2 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1for such a classification, but the pages of a brief manual like the present, which is chiefly concerned with the modern violin, are hardly a suitable medium for more detailed expression of those opinions. I will content myself with saying here that I still harbour the conviction that the cruth—through the viols—is the progenitor of the violin, and that I have found no reasons adduced in any quarter sufficiently cogent to change the tendency of this belief, but that most results of subsequent research have, on the contrary, tended to confirm it. I have shown, I think as clearly as words fairly dealt with can, that the Cruth of the sixth century was played with a bow, and there is very little room for doubt—seeing that almost everyone is agreed—that the cruth of the eleventh century is a similar instrument. And now I want my readers particularly to notice the fact that for a period of five hundred years there has not been found a single literary reference to, or artistic reminiscence of, this instrument between the two dates over the whole area of the then civilised world. I am not concerned at present with the reason for this temporary oblivion, I am merely asking an interest in it as a fact, for the purpose of enquiring if such a fact as this should not teach us to be chary in drawing conclusions. Should it not inoculate us securely against the inroads of the fever for immature classification? I certainly think it should. Here we have a popular instrument existing through a period of five centuries without the slightest reference to it being found in any literary or artistic monument of the period intervening these two dates! We may
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