Thus it comes about that there is a certain family likeness common to the conventions of expression of every system of music—a family likeness which does not exist among the conventions of the various systems of pictorial art. But even in music the differences between the conventions of expression are very great. Music affects us physiologically through rhythm and the volume and quality of sounds. Conventions, which we have come to regard as fundamental, but which do not involve these particular factors, are found, when we compare them with the conventions of other systems, to be purely arbitrary. Thus, what we regard as the fundamental difference between major and minor keys—the minor being for us essentially melancholy—is not fundamental at all, but the result of a recent and arbitrary convention of Western musicians. Before the seventeenth century the convention did not exist even in European music, and in Oriental music it is not thought of, the most cheerful, jolly, and martial music being pitched in the minor.
So much for physiology. There are other and purely intellectual reasons why the conventions of expression should vary more widely in the different systems of visual art than they do in the systems of music. The visual arts lend themselves to storytelling and the symbolical exposition of philosophical theories and religious dogmas. Music does not. Thus, to Western eyes, the picture of a man with four arms, an elephant’s head, and a lotus growing out of his navel seems grotesque. But an orthodox Hindu would see nothing comical in it. To us pictures of monsters and impossible hybrids are by convention, funny. To him they are symbolical of the highest truths.
AMRITSAR
The Golden Temple of the Sikhs is genuinely eighteen carat. It is also exceedingly sacred. Holiness and costliness make up for any lack of architectural merit. For architecturally the temple is less than nothing. We went in bare-footed—the Sikhs insist on this sign of respect. Picking our way among the bird droppings and expectorated betel that strewed the causeway, we advanced gingerly towards the most golden and holiest of the shrines which stands islanded in the middle of the sacred tank. In the holy of holies three magnificent old men were chanting ecstatically to the accompaniment of a small portable harmonium, which was being played with one finger by a fourth, yet more superbly patriarchal. We listened with reverence, were offered by the verger some sugar-plums—symbolical, no doubt, of something—deposited an alms and retraced our squeamish steps along the causeway.
In the street a young beggar, half-witted, or feigning imbecility, pursued us, pitiably moaning as though he were being tortured. Bearded Akalis passed us carrying their swords. A group of male prostitutes, painted, jewelled, and dressed like women, loitered at a street corner. We turned down a narrow passage and found ourselves in the Jalianwalla Bagh, the scene of General Dyer’s exploits in 1919. It is a piece of waste ground enclosed by walls and houses. The narrow passage down which we had come appeared to be the only entrance. A bad place for a crowd to be caught and fired on with machine-guns. One could kill more people here, and in a shorter time, than in most plots of ground of equal area. General Dyer proved it experimentally.
Dyer’s reversion to the old-fashioned methods of Aurangzeb evoked a good deal of unfriendly comment at home. It was found shocking and un-English. At the same time, it had to be admitted that his ruthlessness had achieved what it had been intended to achieve. It put a stop to what might have turned into a revolution. The blood of the martyrs is by no means invariably the seed of the church. The victims of the Inquisition died in vain; Protestantism disappeared from Spain as completely as the Albigensian faith from Southern France, or as Christianity from North Africa. Persecution can always succeed, provided that it is sufficiently violent and long-drawn. The Romans persecuted feebly and by fits—enough to stimulate the persecuted to fresh efforts, but not enough to destroy them; enough to arouse sympathy for their victims, but not enough to deter the sympathisers. That was why the blood of the early Christian martyrs was indeed the seed of their church. If the Romans had been as systematically ruthless as the Christians were to show themselves in future centuries, the infant church could never have survived. Anybody who has the power and is prepared to go on using it indefinitely and without compunction, can force his will on the whole world. It is obvious.
It was rarely in the past that any one possessed of power showed himself in the least reluctant to use it to the full. If the Romans failed to persecute Christianity with an adequate ferocity, that was due to their failure to realise its anti-Imperial significance, not to any conscientious dislike to violent persecution as such. Things are different now, at any rate in the West. Men have become reluctant to use their power to the full, to carry authority to its logical conclusion in brute force. Those who possessed power have voluntarily abstained from making full use of it, have even deprived themselves of their power for the benefit of the powerless. Oligarchs have granted privileges to the disinherited; industrialists have passed laws to restrain themselves from exploiting to excess their workmen. Instead of shooting their unwilling subjects wholesale, the owners of colonies have dealt out constitutions. The criminal is no longer cruelly punished, and even the domestic animal is now legally protected from the violences of its human master.
Living as we do in the midst of this historical process, which we vaguely call “the humanitarian movement,” we are unable to realise the strangeness and fundamental novelty of it. Tennyson warned us against “the craven fear of being great” (at other people’s expense); but the craven fear has gone on steadily growing, in spite of him. What seems to us extraordinary to-day is not some symptom of reluctance to use power but its ruthless, full, and unhesitating employment. We are amazed, not by President Wilson, but by Mussolini; not by Chelmsford and Montague, but by Dyer. At any other period of the world’s history than this, Dyer and Mussolini would have seemed the normal ones.
In Europe the new feelings about force and power have gradually grown up, the new policy which is the result of them has been developed by degrees. We have been brought up with them; they seem natural to us. We are too familiar with them to realise them. The anti-democratic reaction in Italy and Spain and Russia has made many of us for the first time acutely conscious of these humanitarian feelings, has rendered the nature of this democratic policy explicitly clear.
Nowhere is the contrast between old and new more striking than in India. For humanitarian feelings are not native to the Indian soil. The life of a cow, it is true, is respected, but not the life of a man. Humanitarian feelings with regard to men have been introduced artificially, from outside. And the democratic system of policy in which these feelings normally result has been grafted suddenly on another system, whose general benevolence of intention made it none the less despotic. Old and new strangely co-exist, and India is ruled in accordance with two completely incompatible theories of government: that of Akbar, shall we say, and that of Woodrow Wilson. On Monday the watchword of the Executive is “Reform and Responsible Self-Government”; like Oliver Twist, the Indians immediately ask for more; their demands become alarmingly insistent, and the Government nervously decides to be firm. On Tuesday some General Dyer rivals the exploits of the Moguls; repressive legislation is passed, the gaols are crowded. On Wednesday the Government is seized with conscientious qualms; remembering what Mr. Gladstone said in 1882 and why the Great War was fought, it makes a “generous gesture.” The response is so unenthusiastic that it becomes necessary on Thursday to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act and imprison several thousand suspects without a trial. By the end of the week, everybody, including the Government itself, is feeling rather muddled. And what about next week, and the week after that, and all the other weeks that are to follow?
AGRA
I am always a little uncomfortable when I find myself unable to admire something which all the rest of the world admires—or at least is reputed to admire. Am I, or is the world the fool? Is it the world’s taste that is bad, or is mine? I am reluctant to condemn myself, and almost equally reluctant to believe that I alone am right. Thus, when all men (and not the professors of English literature only, but Milton too, but Wordsworth and Keats) assure me that Spenser is a great poet, I wonder what to do. For to me Spenser seems only a virtuoso, a man with the conjuror’s tricks of extracting perfectly rhymed stanzas by the hundred, out of an empty mind. Perhaps I am unduly prejudiced in favour of sense; but it has always
