Page:The Music of India.djvu/160

 the nightingale. It was so childishly imitative of the mere externals of nature that I could take little pleasure in it.'

'And what food for musical inspiration would a Hindu find in the song of the nightingale?' asked the questioner. 'He would find the soul-state of the listener; he would make music in the same way that Keats wrote his ode. It seems to me that Indian music concerns itself more with human experience as interpreted by religion, than with experience in an everyday sense. For us, music has above all a transcendental significance. It disengages the spiritual from the happenings of life; it sings of the relationship of the human soul with the soul of things beyond. The world by day is? like European music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and tender raga. They both stir us, yet the two are contradictory in spirit- But that cannot be helped. At the very root nature is divided into two, day and night, unity and variety, finite and infinite. We men of India live in the realm of night; we are overpowered by the sense of the One and Infinite. Our music draws the listener away beyond the limits of everyday human joys and sorrows, and takes us to that lonely region of renunciation which lies at the root of the universe, while European music leads us a variegated dance through the endless rise and fall of human grief and joy.'

On the same subject Mr. Fox Strangways says :

'One shows a rejection of what is transient, a soberness in gaiety, endurance in sorrow, a search after the spiritual ideals of life. The other shows a vivid insight, an eager quest after wayside beauty and the dexterous touch that turns it to account. The one seems to say, 'Life is puzzling, its claims are many, 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, wherever we go; the mistake is in ourselves if we do not train our eyes and ears and hearts to find it.' (F.S. pp. 339, 340).

Mrs. Mann says in the same strain :

'While western music speaks of the wonders of God's creation, eastern music hints at the inner beauty of the Divine in man and in the world. Indian music requires of its hearers something of that mood of divine discontent, of yearning for the infinite and impossible.'

Another writer remarks :

'An Indian banquet with its vast variety of dishes of every taste and savour, is bewildering to the European who enjoys eating one thing at a time, with his whole gastric soul concentrated on it. Similarly the European's multiplicity of sounds in music bewilders the Indian, who likes to elaborate one particular melody to what seems to the western tedious lengths.' (I.S.R., Sept. 21.1920.)