Scan 65
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators, 1909
4 lines. Read by computer on 1 October 2026. Printed page 29. See the scan on archive.org.
1art. The flow of curved lines which the eye detects upon its varied surface, one leading to another, and all duly proportioned to the whole figure, may remind us of the winding of a gentle stream, or the twine of tendrils in the trellised vine.
3Often is the question asked, What can there be in a simple Violin to attract so much notice? What is it that causes men to treat this instrument as no other, to view it as an art picture, to dilate upon its form, colour, and date? To the uninitiated such devotion appears to be a species of monomania, and attributable to a desire of singularity. It needs but little to show the inaccuracy of such hypotheses. In the first place, the true study of the Violin is a taste which needs as much cultivation as a taste for poetry or any other art, a due appreciation of which is impossible without such cultivation. Secondly, it needs, equally with these arts, in order to produce proficiency, that spark commonly known as genius, without which, cultivation, strictly speaking, is impossible, there being nothing to cultivate. We find that the most ardent admiration for the Violin regarded as a work of art, has ever been found to emanate from those who possessed tastes for kindred arts, Painters, musicians, and men of refined minds have generally been foremost among the admirers of the Violin. Much interest attaches to it from the fact of its being the sole instrument incapable of improvement, whether in form or in any other material feature. The only difference between
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