A Hindu
Is A Born Mystic, And The Luxuriant Nature Of His Country Has Made
Of Him A Zealous Pantheist.
Sounds of alguja, a kind of Pandean pipe with seven openings, struck
our attention; their music was wafted by the wind quite distinctly
from somewhere in the wood.
They also startled a whole family of
monkeys in the branches of a tree over our heads. Two or three
monkeys carefully slipped down, and looked round as if waiting
for something.
"What is this new Orpheus, to whose voice these monkeys answer?"
asked I laughingly.
"Some fakir probably. The alguja is generally used to invite the
sacred monkeys to their meals. The community of fakirs, who once
inhabited this island, have removed to an old pagoda in the forest.
Their new resting-place brings them more profit, because there are
many passers by, whereas the island is perfectly isolated."
"Probably they were compelled to desert this dreadful place because
they were threatened by chronic deafness," Miss X - - expressed her
opinion. She could not help being out of temper at being prevented
from enjoying her quiet slumber, our tents being right in the middle
of the orchestra.
"A propos of Orpheus," asked the Takur, "do you know that the lyre
of this Greek demigod was not the first to cast spells over people,
animals and even rivers? Kui, a certain Chinese musical artist,
as they are called, expresses something to this effect: `When I
play my kyng the wild animals hasten to me, and range themselvis
into rows, spellbound by my melody.' This Kui lived one thousand
years before the supposed era of Orpheus."
"What a funny coincidence!" exclaimed I. "Kui is the name of one
of our best artists in St. Petersburg. Where did you read this?"
"Oh, this is not a very rare piece of information. Some of your
Western Orientalists have it in their books. But I personally
found it in an ancient Sanskrit book, translated from the Chinese
in the second century before your era. But the original is to be
found in a very ancient work, named The Preserver of the Five Chief
Virtues. It is a kind of chronicle or treatise on the development
of music in China. It was written by the order of Emperor Hoang-Tee
many hundred years before your era."
"Do you think, then, that the Chinese ever understood anything
about music?" said the colonel, with an incredulous smile. "In
California and other places I heard some traveling artists of the
celestial empire. Well, I think, that kind of musical entertainment
would drive any one mad."
"That is exactly the opinion of many of your Western musicians on
the subject of our ancient Aryan, as well as of modern Hindu, music.
But, in the first instance, the idea of melody is perfectly arbitrary;
and, in the second, there is a good deal of difference between the
technical knowledge of music, and the creation of melodies fit to
please the educated, as well as the uneducated, ear. According to
technical theory, a musical piece may be perfect, but the melody,
nevertheless, may be above the understanding of an untrained taste,
or simply unpleasant. Your most renowned operas sound for us like
a wild chaos, like a rush of strident, entangled sounds, in which
we do not see any meaning at all, and which give us headaches. I
have visited the London and the Paris opera; I have heard Rossini
and Meyer-beer; I was resolved to render myself an account of my
impressions, and listened with the greatest attention. But I own
I prefer the simplest of our native melodies to the productions of
the best European composers. Our popular songs speak to me, whereas
they fail to produce any emotion in you. But leaving the tunes and
songs out of question, I can assure you that our ancestors, as well
as the ancestors of the Chinese, were far from inferior to the
modern Europeans, if not in technical instrumentation, at least
in their abstract notions of music."
"The Aryan nations of antiquity, perhaps; but I hardly believe
this in the case of the Turanian Chinese!" said our president doubtfully.
"But the music of nature has been everywhere the first step to
the music of art. This is a universal rule. But there are
different ways of following it. Our musical system is the greatest
art, if - pardon me this seeming paradox - avoiding all artificiality
is art. We do not allow in our melodies any sounds that cannot be
classified amongst the living voices of nature; whereas the modern
Chinese tendencies are quite different. The Chinese system comprises
eight chief tones, which serve as a tuning-fork to all derivatives;
which are accordingly classified under the names of their generators.
These eight sounds are: the notes metal, stone, silk, bamboo,
pumpkin, earthenware, leather and wood. So that they have metallic
sounds, wooden sounds, silk sounds, and so on. Of course, under
these conditions they cannot produce any melody; their music
consists of an entangled series of separate notes. Their imperial
hymn, for instance, is a series of endless unisons. But we Hindus
owe our music only to living nature, and in nowise to inanimate
objects. In a higher sense of the word, we are pantheists, and so
our music is, so to speak, pantheistic; but, at the same time,
it is highly scientific. Coming from the cradle of humanity, the
Aryan races, who were the first to attain manhood, listened to the
voice of nature, and concluded that melody as well as harmony are
both contained in our great common mother. Nature has no false
and no artificial notes; and man, the crown of creation, felt
desirous of imitating her sounds. In their multiplicity, all
these sounds - according to the opinion of some of your Western
physicists - make only one tone, which we all can hear, if we know
how to listen, in the eternal rustle of the foliage of big forests,
in the murmur of water, in the roar of the storming ocean, and even
in the distant roll of a great city.
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