The Music of Hindostan c5.9

c5.9

Music in India, as elsewhere, is of varying excellence; and it is as rare perhaps to hear the best there as it is in Europe. If we look away, however, from the less worthy kind, which is apt to deal in cheap contrast and to indulge in personal display, to the noblest which is to be found there, our chief difficulty is to feel the religious element in it which an Indian feels. To hold any intelligible language about the emotional content of music is difficult; it is still more difficult when the content is that subject which ‘every sensible man keeps to himself’. The range and depth of religious feeling varies in different countries, in one land it rides close, in another it sits loosely, to ethics, and the manifestations of it look different as they proceed from the intellectual or animal extremes of our nature—from the Vedantists or the Tantriks, from the Fourth Gospel or the Song of Solomon. Without questioning the spirituality of the religion of Europe or India, we may call the former practical and the latter contemplative; though it is difficult to say even as much as that without seeming to assert that the converse is never true, which would be absurd. But Europe, certainly England, thinks poorly of a religion that does not result in a good life: while India fixes its attention on the quality of the religion, the amount of realization and of vision it contains, and leaves the good life to follow as a natural consequence. India is still living the age of Faith. It is no accident, therefore, that the nearest analogue we can find to its music is that which culminated in the work of the Cinquecentists. Why it is that the Gregorian Tones portray a self-surrendering faith we can no more explain than we can say why it is that we agree with Heine’s description of *Ein’ feste Burg* as the Marseillaise of the Reformation, or that we recognize an undemonstrative pietism in Charles Wesley’s tunes and an undeniable suitability for their purpose in the hymns of the Salvation Army; but we easily feel that none of these can be divorced from their age or occasion. And though we may be unable to point to definite characteristics in Indian music which are due to its impregnation with a most spiritual form of religion, yet its extraordinary correspondence in detail both of time and tune with the music of Ecclesiastical Europe justifies the view that a peculiar outlook on the world, such for instance as the specifically religious outlook, does bring as a result a peculiar form of music. The best Indian feels towards his music, as perhaps the best of us do towards ours, like the Devout Lover: