in relatively few people. Yet this does not imply that the majority are
shut off from playing the violin and playing it well. Any student who
has music in his soul may be taught to play simple, and even relatively
more difficult music with beauty, beauty of expression and
interpretation. This he may be taught to do even though not endowed with
a _natural_ technical facility for the violin. A proof that natural
technical facility is anything but a guarantee of higher musicianship is
shown in that the musical weakness of many brilliant violinists, hidden
by the technical elaboration of virtuoso pieces, is only apparent when
they attempt to play a Beethoven _adagio_ or a simple Mozart _rondo_.

"In a number of cases the unsuccessful solo player has a bad effect on
violin teaching. Usually the soloist who has not made a success as a
concert artist takes up teaching as a last resort, without enthusiasm or
the true vocational instinct. The false standards he sets up for his
pupils are a natural result of his own ineffectual worship of the fetish
of virtuosity--those of the musical mountebank of a hundred years ago.
Of course such false prophets of the virtuose have nothing in common
with such high-priests of public utterance as Ysaye, Kreisler and
others, whose virtuosity is a true means for the higher development of
the musical. The encouragement of musicianship in general suffers for
the stress laid on what is obviously technical _impedimenta_. But more
and more, as time passes, the playing of such artists as those already
mentioned, and others like them, shows that the real musician is the
lover of beautiful sound, which technic merely develops in the highest
degree.

"To-day technic in a cumulative sense often is a confession of failure.
For technic does not do what it so often claims to--produce the artist.
Most professional teaching aims to prepare the student for professional