The music of Hindostan - Ibiblio

—;
340 MELODY
other a vivid insight, the eager quest after wayside beauty, the
dexterous touch that turns it to account. The one seems to say
Life is puzzling, its claims are many, its enthusiasms hardly come
by; but we will hammer out a solution not by turning away from
ugliness but by compelling it to serve the ends of beauty. The
other—Life is simple, and beauty close at hand at every moment
whenever we look or listen or wherever we go ; the mistake is in
ourselves if we do not train our eyes and ears and hearts to find it.
Who would wish to decide which way was the best ? Both are
human. There is no need to decry one in favour of, or to exalt one
at the expense of the other. Are those Europeans who smile at
'
tomtoms ' sure that they understand the grounds of their faith in
their own music ? And are those Indians who scoff at Equal
Temperament, at the dullness of
European song and the screaming
tones of the European voice, able to reach the governing principles
of their own art through the mass of tradition and imagery in
which it has become involved ?
Art expresses. It finds words or tones for what was hitherto
unnamed ; it actually calls into being an experience which has not
previously existed ; it does not communicate to us, or acquaint us
with, an antecedent experience. And what it expresses is the fact
of emotion, not particular feelings. It is not that words or tones
cannot indicate these, but that directly they do so the result ceases
in so far to be a work of art. That music can, as most would
agree, express emotion more immediately than other arts, depends
on the fact that ' in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not
distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from
the expression ; they inhere in and completely saturate each other
and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the
arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire '}
But if music at its best obliterates those distinctions, it will be at
something less than its best when it maintains them. Thus both
the ' popular ' music which exalts matter at the expense of form,
and extreme 'absolutism^ in which the form dwarfs the matter,
depart, to some extent, from the ideal.
less than ours of this falsehood of extremes.
Indian music knows perhaps
It seldom descends to
the merely popular because it refuses to compress itself into a
square tune, something that you can carry away with you like an
^ Pater, The Renaissance, 1904, p. 139.