Page:The music of Bohemia.djvu/37

 PART II

hy Bohemian music or Czech music or Slovak music or Czechoslovak music? Does there exist any nationality in music?

Every nation, with its mother-tongue, its peculiar customs, its distinct mode of life, varies more or less in form of culture from all other nations. The differences of geographical positions, racial inclinations, and inborn influence all departments of life—even Art. "No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the, usages, and arts of his times shall have no share. He cannot wipe out of his work every trace of his thoughts amidst which it grew. Above his will and out of his sight he is by the air he breathes and the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times, without knowing what that manner is." (Emerson.)

And as a man cannot escape from his own