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Scan 57
The story of the violin, 1904
9 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Story of the Violin
3rather than emotion; or be it purified emotion, such as the pious Hindoo might feel when he sees the sun rise over the sacred waters of the Ganges? It is not a tone which, with voluptuous ring, will hold back the thought in its flight to Nirvana,1 back to this lovely, wicked earth, but rather one which gives it wings to get away. You cannot play Paganini's "Witches' Dance" on it, or even "Home, Sweet Home"; but you can sing within your soul to its accompaniment, and your lips can mutter prayers while you draw the artless bow over its two or three low-tuned strings. Therefore also your Hindoo beggar (and philosopher) loves it, and he will love it in spite of your Cremonas, which since have found their way out to him and challenged comparison with it. He will love his ravanastron, his sarinda, his omerti (see Fig. 2), when our own admired violin may be forgotten.2
5Although to India may justly belong the distinction of having given birth to bowed instruments, and to have sheltered and cherished them in their prehistoric childhood when other greater nations closed their doors against them, or de-
71 See Sir William Jones, On the Music of the Hindoos.
82 For particulars on Indian and other Oriental bowed instruments, their construction, etc., see Carl Engel's Researches into the Early History of the Violin Family.
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