Books › The story of the violin, 1904 › scan 44
Scan 44
The story of the violin, 1904
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Family Likeness
3Some musical historians have rejected it on the ground that the instrument in question was not proved to be of ancient origin—that is, primitive in the true sense—nor is the existence of primitive instruments of the bowed kind confined to-day to India. Many Asiatic and East European tribes use similar musical contrivances, and might perhaps with equal right claim for them originality and antiquity.
5Tradition in Eastern countries is a factor to be reckoned with to an extent of which Western people have hardly any conception. In the West, change, constant, relentless, uncompromising change, is the watchword; change which destroys to-day what men kept holy yesterday: in the East it is stability which cherishes the old more than the new. In many instances tradition is the one only link which binds the past to the present, taking the place of all other records. In India it is, as it were, the sap which runs through the whole tree of national life, from the roots deeply bedded in the soil of antiquity, up into every branch of the broad and lofty crown; a living thing therefore, and not, as with us, a dead weight which one or two generations shoulder patiently and a third throws off never to pick up again.
7In a country, then, where not only the ground is tilled and corn is thrashed and bread baked in exactly the same fashion as 2000 or 3000 years ago, but where also a tale, a poem, a prayer, a melody will
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