Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/603

the fitness of things it should be. At present it seems to me your energies are chiefly confined to making your houses of worship beautiful, and the houses in which you live comfortable. But even when you aim at the Beautiful, it is in mere imitation of old forms, which no doubt appealed to the heart of your ancestors, but which have little meaning to you. Now I would ask you to try and understand for yourselves through reading, and the study of drawings of the most beautiful buildings in the world, or by studying with your eyes any beautiful building that may be within your ken, what is beautiful, what is ennobling, what is delightful in such structures, what it is that makes you feel that you would like to see, or to pray in, or to live in the building you admire; and then apply the ideas you have conceived to the forms that meet you in your daily life; and when applying try to imagine how you, if you had the power, would remedy the defects you notice, or beautify, when only the beautiful is lacking. Picture to yourselves the perfect home, all local circumstances considered, in which to live, and the most beautiful temple in which to worship. Believe me, if you study architecture in this practical way, and cultivate your imagination in regard to convenient and beautiful forms of building, you will gain for yourselves a pleasure -giving faculty, and render yourselves, though indirectly, the means of helping your people as they rise in civilization to make their habitations, their buildings of assembly, rise in the standard of beauty too. And I would not have you forget how great an educative effect the good and beautiful in buildings has upon the people who inhabit or frequent them. To this sentiment is chiefly due the erection of some of the noblest buildings in the world,—Churches, Palaces, Courts of Law and Houses of Convocation. Music you have cultivated from generation to generation, but as yet it has only reached the point at which the Greeks left it. And now it remains for you to add to melody harmony, without which Music can be but the art of the individual. Melody is the most perfect expression of emotion, for where words end music begins, but without harmony music can hardly be a great social cementing force. Who can say how great has been the influence of the German chorale in giving cohesion to the heterogeneous elements of the German people; or how great has been the moral, and social, yes, the political effect too in promoting the harmonious life of the English people, of the gathering together of men and women of all grades of society in rendering under one leader the great choruses of Handel, of Haydn or of Mendelssohn. In asking you therefore to develop on scientific lines your system of music, I am only asking you to add to your means of promoting