The Moral of An Exhibition

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 261, 31 July 1937, Page 1 (Supplement)

The Moral of An Exhibition

4 4 w honour of Stradivari, the great violin-maker, an exhibition was held || at Cremona, and private owners were invited to send their violins B to be examined, to prove whether they were made by Stradivari or JI, not. Two hundred and thirty-nine violins were examined by an international commission of experts—and not one was pronounced to be an authentic Stradivari, although many of them bore imitated signatures," said the “Evening News,” of London. “In spite of the rather natural prejudice -which exists in most sensible minds against International commissions of experts, it Remains a very formidable verdict. Not a single genuine piece in all the 239. The fake and the genuine, in this world, march side by side; and it needs a keen eye to detect which is which. Picturesque ‘Tudor’ houses jostle one another through the pages of the estate agents’ catalogues; but the number of them in which an owner woke, one morning, to bear that by God’s grace and the valiant work of English seamen the Armada had been defeated is small indeed. There is ‘Chippendale’ furniture everywhere; but little of it graced the drawing-rooms of the eighteenth century. Highly-effective pearl necklaces may be bought at moderate cost. Paste tiaras can shine as augustly as genuine diamonds. Canvas roses bloom the

winter through; and wood pulp has made the silkworms into an idle and moribund race. “The artificial has thoroughly won, and on the whole it deserves its high place in the provision of life’s amenities. It has made existence more decorous, more decorative, more varied, and more comfortable. It has brought to many, if not the fundamentals of civilisation, at any rate most of its surface attractions; and thus far has made the extension of a genuinely civilised way of life easier. “If this is doubted, let comparison in general standards be made between the world as it was in the days when a few craftsmen painstakingly created a few genuine things of beauty, and as it is to-day. The standard of particular achievement may not have risen, but that of general and satisfying workmanship has immeasurably improved. , “Only in one realm is the artificial still firmly rejected—that of human character. The fake there stands no comparison with the real; falsity, shallowness, and artificiality are faults which, once discovered, are never forgiven—because they and forgiveness live in different worlds. Real qualities, however blemished and imperfect, make character; and it still remains the highest praise of a man to say that he is ‘genuine?