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Scan 176
The Hawley Collection of violins, 1904
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 102. See the scan on archive.org.
1Epilogue
3ORE than three and a half centuries have elapsed since the advent of the violin in its present shape, and almost three hundred years have rolled by since the first solos written for the violin were published in Dresden. No other period in the world's history has been so prolific of grand benefits to mankind. The fine and mechanical arts, particularly the latter, have made stupendous progress, although the material benefits and comforts which we enjoy are derived mostly from comparatively modern times.
5Music has, if anything, distanced all her sister arts. Poetry, architecture, and sculpture existed in perfection many hundreds of years before the opening of the sixteenth century. But painting and music are the two graces which have, by their perfection of charm and influence, ennobled human existence during the long centuries of which we speak. Had not music possessed a perfected means of expression, the fruits of the genius of the masters of Brescia and Cremona, it is certain that the art would not have attained to the dignified position which it holds to-day. And it is very doubtful, the means of expression not being at hand, if the genius of Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms would have been developed. The genius of Bowmaker François Tourte, in the judgment of an authority so eminent as Mr. Theodore Thomas, made possible the modern symphony. To those whose minds are constantly awake to the great good accruing to all mankind by the cultivation of love for the beautiful, it does not seem possible to offer too many laurel wreaths in memory of such benefactors to their race.
7There is another benefit to be credited to the violin—one lying in an altogether different direction—from which we are direct beneficiaries, namely the mission it has fulfilled in the civilization of our own times. Professor Giddings, of Columbia College, affirms that "our Western settlements became communities when they began to fiddle"; and a writer in the "Budget" says: "The early settlers were scattered, and at first lived an isolated life. But after a while a fiddle came in; balls brought the people together for a hop as on the first night of the French Five Hundred in Gallipolis; the germs of society appeared; the law of etiquette asserted its sway; and so the settlement evolved a form of true community life."
9The romantic, weird character of Oncle Jazon, with his Carlo Bergonzi, as depicted by Maurice Thompson in his "Alice of Old Vincennes," has had its prototype a thousand times in stern reality in the winning over to civilization of the boundless plains of the great Middle West. The festive dance of Vincennes of a century and a quarter ago was but the counterpart of many such occasions which marked the course of those hardy settlers who, mostly from the Old Dominion, under the leadership of such intrepid men as Clark, Lewis, Daniel Boone, and others performed prodigies of valor in the occupation and holding of the Ohio and other Western valleys for their flag and their countrymen. Westward the violin pushed its way across the
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