ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

called upon Sarasvati, and like Gaedmon, his lips were-
opened. This true music is as exalted as its source. All
great art is truly of supersensuous origin. If art and music-
are thus expressions, manifestations, it is obvious that the
result of imitation and borrowing of the natural modes of"
expression belonging to other nations whose idiosyncracy
&r<d environment are different, must be disastrous ; and in
point of fact, the attempt to replace Indian by Western
music in India, results only in vulgarization,—that essential
vulgarization which, as Huskin remarks, consists in not
understanding the effect produced by the imitation.

There may be some whose broad culture enables them
truly to appreciate the music evolved by temperaments and
in environments so different as those of East and West-
There must necessarily be few, and meanwhile the standard
of Western music in India, is set by those altogether out of
touch with it, a bourgeois public satisfied with gramophones.
One thing is certain, that a pretence at the same time of
despising Indian and of admiring European music is for a
true Indian ridiculous. Western culture may be. and will
"be, of value to the East, but it must be as a post-graduate
course—it will not stand in the place of mother milk. We
cannot understand others by ceasing to understand our-
selves.

Pierre Loti in his book on India, describes the music which
he heard in Travan core. The Maharajah's musicians had been
playing. •* This orchestra, " he says, "and these singers belong to-
* the. Maharajah...How far away this Prince's dreams must be from
ours, how different his conceptions of the sorrows that belong to
love and death. But this exquisite and rare music of his, reveals to-
»ae something of his soul, something that I should never see in our
short ancj formal interviews, burdened with ceremony and foreign
words."

Now mark the effect of the introduction of European
music at such a court; the Raja replaces his group of skilled