The Music of Hindostan c5.3

c5.3

Another kind of music which has for us an unfamiliar convention is the polyphony of the Middle Ages. Here it is not the place but the time that is unfamiliar; we have suddenly thought away four centuries of our civilization. We step aside from the battle of the styles to contemplate achieved beauty. We wonder where now there are such workmen as those who built these melodies, what their secret was, and what the life of which these were the expression. They move us like forlorn hopes and lost joys, like the places we knew when we were children, like the land to which Blake hurried home from Santa Cruz. They appeal by their freshness and strangeness, but still more by an intimate familiarity. As an Englishman who happened to see for the first time the slope of a Sussex down would feel, apart from its intrinsic beauty, that it was the most English thing that he ever saw, so from these, apart from their intrinsic beauty of tone, the man of religion gets best at that truth which is beyond all limit and condition. Here the different convention helps rather than hinders him; just as his deepest intimations of those thoughts which are beyond words are conveyed to him more easily in Elizabethan language and in Hebrew phraseology than in any other form. It is this strange familiarity, which we are conscious of in Indian melody, that makes us sure that "though our language is different and our habits are dissimilar, at the bottom our hearts are one".