MUSIC AND EDUCATION IN INDIA. 201

' The more thoughtful critics saw that the opera was now in
the best sense of the word, and marked a fresh departure in Art-r-
Tthe will of a genuine school of Russian music....He did not merely
•play with local colour, but recast the primitive speech of the
folk-song into a new and polished idiom, so that henceforth Russian
music was able to take its place among the distinctive schools of
"Western Europe.'

India may learn from England's experience. From
the age of Purcell to the present day, the music of England
has been essentially foreign—Italian, German, Russian,
Hungarian, but not English.

" The question now to be considered," says a writer quoted above,
"u is whether English music is capable oi: resuscitation. One thing
is certain, the present vogue of training English musicians to
disp in the tongue of the foreigner can have no beneficial outcome-
It is emphatically not that way that salvation lies. "*

It was long believed that the English people were
Actually unmusical, and that there were amongst them no
folk-songs, comparable to those of other European nations.
This opinion has proved in recent times erroneous; a vast
iDody of English folk-song still exists, and is known to the
last generation of country folk, though the present gene-
ration is generally scornful of the old songs. It is, however,
with the true folk-music that the hope of a School of Eng-
lish music rests. The movement for the teaching of
folk-music as a part of all educational schemes is growing
stronger daily. Its importance has long been recognised
in other countries, as Denmark and Hungary.

As Mr. Sharp remarks, the spectacle of a great
progressive nation like England, " intent upon the in-
istruction of her people in their own folk-songs," gathered,
very often, from the lips of illiterate peasants is a strange
one. And yet, if in India we have no more love for our
•own music than England had in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, we too must pass through a long epoch of barrenness
C. J. Sharp, 'English^oik-Song.' 1907.