Scan 41
The violin, its famous makers and their imitators, 1887
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1view of our subject would be singularly clear and defined. A declaration, however, resting on tradition, necessarily makes the gathering of evidence in support of it a task both dubious and difficult.¹
3It is said that Sanscrit scholars have met with names for the bow in Sanscrit writings dating back nearly two thousand years. If this information could be supplemented by reliable monumental evidence of the existence of a bow of some rude kind among the nations of the East about the commencement of the Christian era, its value would necessarily be complete. In the absence of such evidence we are left in doubt as to what was intended to be understood by the reported references to a bow in ancient Sanscrit literature. The difficulty of understanding what Greek and Roman authors meant, in reference to the same subject, must be greatly intensified in the works of ancient Eastern writers.²
5¹ In Mr. Engel's "Researches into the Early History of the Violin Family," 1883—a book containing much valuable evidence on the subject—the author rightly remarks: "Now, this may be true; still it is likewise true that most of the Asiatic nations are gifted with a remarkably powerful imagination, which evidently induces them sometimes to assign a fabulously high age to any antiquity of theirs the origin of which dates back to a period where history merges in myth. At the present day the Hindoos possess, among their numerous rude instruments of the Fiddle class, an extraordinarily primitive contrivance, which they believe to be the instrument invented by Ravanon. Their opinion has actually been adopted by some of our modern musical historians as if it were a well established truth."
7² In the "Reflections" at the end of Vol. I., "Burney's History of Music," we read, "The ancients had instead of a bow, the Plectrum." "It appears too clumsy to produce from the strings tones that had either the sweetness or brilliancy of such as are drawn from them by means of the bow or quill. But, notwithstanding it is represented so massive, I should rather suppose it to have been a quill, or piece of ivory in imitation of one, than a stick or blunt piece of wood or ivory."
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