The Tibetans are a very simple folk, though not without a very definite civilisation of their own. Art and music exist in all nations, if the art be merely the fashioning of utensils, and the music be the crudest of rhythms played on a tom-tom. Yet in Tibet the rudimentary music and art associated with so many Eastern races is carried a stage farther, and what is in wilder people merely natural instinct has become in Tibet a definite culture. For I presume that culture is merely organised art, and certainly on that criterion the Tibetan is to some extent cultured. He is a fine architect, and many of his houses have a simple stateliness which raises them in artistic value high above the average dwelling-house of most other Oriental countries, to say nothing of our own garden suburbs. The Monasteries of Tibet are still more imposing, and some of them are real objects of beauty, for the dignified simplicity of the buildings themselves is combined with an elaborate and often beautiful decoration of windows and cornices. The Tibetans have learned the true principles of decoration—they do not cover the surfaces of their buildings with unnecessary ornament, but reserve the wooden parts alone for elaboration. The cornices are often intricate in workmanship, 314but throughout the great principle of design is carried to perfection—the principle that all ornament should be founded on utility. Thus economy in the use of scrolls is combined with the multiplication of brackets, supports, and rafter-ends, so that the whole is satisfying to the eye as being beautiful, rather than useless. Considerable Chinese influence is shown in their decorative art, but the Tibetans have a personal, or rather national, touch which distinguishes their work in all branches of art from the Chinese. In painting, too, the influence of China, and very occasionally of India, is felt: though through it all the refined austerity of the better-class Tibetan shines unmistakably. The older pictures, nearly always of sacred subjects, are drawn with consummate skill, coloured with great taste, and in the matter of design rank much higher than the contemporary art of India. But, alas! the story of painting in Tibet is the same as it is everywhere in this commercial world of ours; the modern Tibetan picture is worthless, careless and meretricious. No doubt the demand for “native art” at the bazaars of Darjeeling and other places around has caused this deterioration of what was once a fine and noble art; pictures which used to be the life-work of devoted lamas and conscientious hermits are now “dashed off” to satisfy the capacious maw of the tasteless traveller. Though Tibet is still in measure “The Forbidden Land,” yet the tentacles of commercialism cannot but penetrate between its bars, and the same thing is now happening to Tibet as happened to Europe last century and 315produced oleographs and official artists. It seems almost as if man by nature does bad work only when he is working for reward.
 
Religious Banners in Shekar Monastery.
This is a mere flashlight sketch of the art of Tibet, for details of which other books must be consulted; but the music of Tibet will be described more fully, for two reasons—first, that no accurate record of it has to my knowledge been obtained until now, and second, that the writer is himself particularly fond of music, which he believes to be the highest of the arts.
Just as in Europe to-day we have both the traditional folk-song and the highly organised orchestral music, so in Tibet both these forms of the art exist. The two are also more or less interdependent in Tibet, while in Western nations each often goes its own way without the other.
The airs sung by the Tibetan people are usually simple, short, and oft-repeated. They are nearly always in the pentatonic scale, represented best to the general reader by the black notes of the piano. Most isolated races evolve this scale at some time during their history, and the tunes of the Highlands of Scotland, the Forests of Central Africa, the Appalachians of America, and the Tibetans are all in this scale.[8]
8.  Sir Walford Davies has pointed out that, starting (on the black notes) from A flat, and using only the perfect fifth, this scale is very soon developed. From A flat one gets E flat and D flat, each a fifth away; from D flat one obtains G flat, a fifth down, and from E flat a fifth upwards gives us B flat............