Indian Art
A GOOD deal of hostile or unsympathetic western criticism of Indian civilisation has been directed in the past against its aesthetic side and taken the form of a disdainful or violent depreciation of its fine arts, architecture, sculpture and painting. Mr. Archer would not find much support in his wholesale and undiscriminating depreciation of a great literature, but here too there has been, if not positive attack, much failure of understanding; but in the attack on Indian art, his is the last and shrillest of many hostile voices. This aesthetic side of a peopleʼs culture is of the highest importance and demands almost as much scrutiny and carefulness of appreciation as the philosophy, religion and central formative ideas which have been the foundation of Indian life and of which much of the art and literature is a conscious expression in significant aesthetic forms. Fortunately, a considerable amount of work has been already done in the clearing away of misconceptions about Indian sculpture and painting and, if that were all, I might be content to refer to the works of Mr. Havell and Dr. Coomaraswamy or to the sufficiently understanding though less deeply informed and penetrating criticisms of others who cannot be charged with a prepossession in favour of oriental work. But a more general and searching consideration of first principles is called for in any complete view of the essential motives of Indian culture. I am appealing mainly to that new mind of India which long misled by an alien education, view and influence is returning to a sound and true idea of its past and future; but in this field the return is far from being as pervading, complete or luminous as it should be. I shall confine myself therefore first to a consideration of the sources of misunderstanding and pass from that to the true cultural significance of Indian aesthetic creation.
Mr. Archer pursuing his policy of Thorough devotes a whole chapter to the subject. This chapter is one long torrent of sweeping denunciation. But it would be a waste of time to take
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his attack as serious criticism and answer all in detail. His reply to defenders and eulogists is amazing in its shallowness and triviality, made up mostly of small, feeble and sometimes irrelevant points, big glaring epithets and forcibly senseless phrases, based for the rest on a misunderstanding or a sheer inability to conceive the meaning of spiritual experiences and metaphysical ideas, which betrays an entire absence of the religious sense and the philosophic mind. Mr. Archer is of course a rationalist and contemner of philosophy and entitled to his deficiencies; but why then try to judge things into the sense of which one is unable to enter and exhibit the spectacle of a blind man discoursing on colours? I will cite one or two instances which will show the quality of his criticism and amply justify a refusal to attach any positive value to the actual points he labours to make, except for the light they throw on the psychology of the objectors.
I will give first an instance amazing in its ineptitude. The
Indian ideal figure of the masculine body insists on two features among many, a
characteristic width at the shoulders and slenderness in the middle. Well, an
objection to broadness of girth and largeness of belly — allowed only where they
are appropriate as in sculptures of Ganesha or the Yakshas — is not peculiar to
the Indian aesthetic sense; an emphasis, even a pronounced emphasis on their
opposites is surely intelligible enough as an aesthetic tradition, however some
may prefer a more realistic and prosperous presentation of the human figure. But
Indian poets and authorities on art have given in this connection the simile of
the lion, and lo and behold Mr. Archer solemnly discoursing on this image as a
plain proof that the Indian people were just only out of the semi-savage state!
It is only too clear that they drew the ideal of heroic manhood from their
native jungle, from theriolatry, that is to say, from a worship of wild beasts!
I presume, on the same principle and with the same stupefying ingenuity he would
find in Kambanʼs image of the sea for the colour and depth of Sitaʼs eyes clear
evidence of a still more primitive savagery and barbaric worship of inanimate
nature, or in Valmikiʼs description of his heroineʼs “eyes like wineˮ,
madirekṣanā,
evidence of a chronic inebriety and semi-drunken inspiration of
the Indian poetic mind. This is one example of Mr. Archerʼs most telling
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points. It is by no means an isolated though it is an extreme specimen, and the absurdity of that particular argument only brings out the triviality of this manner of criticism. It is on a par with the common objection to the slim hands and feet loved of the Bengal painters which one hears sometimes advanced as a solid condemnation of their work. And that can be pardoned in the average man who under the high dispensation of modem culture is not expected to have any intelligent conception about art, — the instinctive appreciation has been already safely killed and buried. But what are we to say of a professed critic who ignores the deeper motives and fastens on details in order to give them this kind of significance?
But there are more grave and important
objections in this criticism; for Mr. Archer turns also to deal with philosophy
in art. The whole basis of Indian artistic creation, perfectly conscious and
recognised in the canons, is directly spiritual and intuitive. Mr. Havell
rightly lays stress on this essential distinction and speaks in passing of the
infinite superiority of the method of direct perception over intellect, an
assertion naturally offensive to the rationalistic mind, though it is now
increasingly affirmed by leading western thinkers. Mr. Archer at once starts out
to hack at it with a very blunt tomahawk. How does he deal with this crucial
matter? In a way which misses the whole real point and has nothing whatever to
do with the philosophy of art. He fastens on Mr. Havellʼs coupling of the master
intuition of Buddha with the great intuition of Newton and objects to the
parallel because the two discoveries deal with two different orders of
knowledge, one scientific and physical, the other mental or psychic, spiritual
or philosophic in nature. He trots out from its stable the old objection that
Newtonʼs intuition was only the last step in a long intellectual process, while
according to this positive psychologist and philosophic critic the intuitions of
Buddha and other Indian sages had no basis in any intellectual process of any
kind or any verifiable experience. It is on the contrary the simple fact,
well-known to all who know anything of the subject, that the conclusions of
Buddha and other Indian philosophers (I am not now speaking of the inspired
thought of the Upanishads which was pure spiritual experience enlightened by
intuition and
gnosis,) were preceded by a very acute scrutiny of relevant
psychological phenomena and a process of reasoning which, though certainly not
rationalistic, was as rational as any other method of thinking. He clinches his
refutation by the sage remark that these intuitions which he chooses to call
fantasies contradict one another and therefore, it seems, have no sort of value
except their vain metaphysical subtlety. Are we to conclude that the patient
study of phenomena, the scrupulous and rigidly verifiable intellectual
reasonings and conclusions of western scientists have led to no conflicting or
contradictory results? One could never imagine at this rate that the science of
heredity is torn by conflicting “fantasiesˮ or that Newtonʼs “fantasiesˮ about
space and gravitational effect on space are at this day in danger of being upset
by Einsteinʼs “fantasiesˮ in the same field. It is a minor matter that Mt.
Archer happens to be wrong in his idea of Buddhaʼs intuition when he says that
he would have rejected a certain Vedantic intuition, since Buddha neither
accepted nor rejected, but simply refused at all to speculate on the supreme
cause. His intuition was confined to the cause of sorrow and the impermanence of
things and the release by extinction of ego, desire and
saṁskāra,
and so far as he chose to go, his intuition of this
extinction, Nirvana, and the Vedantic intuition of the supreme unity were the
seeing of one truth of spiritual experience, seen no doubt from different angles
of vision and couched in different intellectual forms, but with a common
intuitive substance. The rest was foreign to Buddhaʼs rigidly practical purpose.
All this leads us far afield from our subject, but our critic has a remarkably
confused mind and to follow him is to be condemned to divagate.
Thus far Mr. Archer on intuition. This is the character
of his excursions on first principles in art. Is it really necessary to point
out that a power of mind or spirit may be the same and yet act differently in
different fields? or that a certain kind of intuition may be prepared by a long
intellectual training, but that does not make it a last step in an intellectual
process, any more than the precedence of sense activity makes intellectual
reasoning a last step of sense-perception? The reason overtops sense and admits
us to other and subtler ranges of truth; the intuition
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similarly overtops reason and admits us to a more direct and luminous power of truth. But very obviously, in the use of the intuition the poet and artist cannot proceed precisely in the same way as the scientist or philosopher. Leonardo da Vinciʼs remarkable intuitions in science and his creative intuitions in art started from the same power, but the surrounding or subordinate mental operations were of a different character and colour. And in art itself there are different kinds of intuition. Shakespeareʼs seeing of life differs in its character and aids from Balzacʼs or Ibsenʼs, but the essential part of the process, that which makes it intuitive, is the same. The Buddhistic, the Vedantic seeing of things may be equally powerful starting-points for artistic creation, may lead one to the calm of a Buddha or the other to the rapture dance or majestic stillness of Shiva, and it is quite indifferent to the purposes of art to which of them the metaphysician may be inclined to give a logical preference. These are elementary notions and it is not surprising that one who ignores them should misunderstand the strong and subtle artistic creations of India.
The weakness of Mr. Archerʼs attack, its
empty noise and violence and exiguity of substance must not blind us to the very
real importance of the mental outlook from which his dislike of Indian art
proceeds. For the outlook and the dislike it generates are rooted in something
deeper than themselves, a whole cultural training, natural or acquired
temperament and fundamental attitude towards existence, and it measures, if the
immeasurable can be measured, the width of the gulf which till recently
separated the oriental and the western mind and most of all the European and the
Indian way of seeing things. An inability to understand the motives and methods
of Indian art and a contempt of or repulsion from it was almost universal till
yesterday in the mind of Europe. There was little difference in this regard
between the average man bound by his customary first notions and the competent
critic trained to appreciate different forms of culture. The gulf was too wide
for any bridge of culture then built to span. To the European mind Indian art
was a thing barbarous, immature, monstrous, an arrested growth from humanityʼs
primitive savagery and incompetent child-
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hood. If there has been now some change, it is due to the remarkably sudden widening of the horizon and view of European culture, a partial shifting even of the standpoint from which it was accustomed to see and judge all that it saw. In matters of art the western mind was long bound up as in a prison in the Greek and Renascence tradition modified by a later mentality with only two side rooms of escape, the romantic and the realistic motives, but these were only wings of the same building; for the base was the same and a common essential canon united their variations. The conventional superstition of the imitation of Nature as the first law or the limiting rule of art governed even the freest work and gave its tone to the artistic and critical intelligence. The canons of western artistic creation were held to be the sole valid criteria and everything else was regarded as primitive and half-developed or else strange and fantastic and interesting only by its curiosity. But a remarkable change has begun to set in, even though the old ideas still largely rule. The prison, if not broken, has at least had a wide breach made in it; a more flexible vision and a more profound imagination have begun to superimpose themselves on the old ingrained attitude. As a result, and as a contributing influence towards this change, oriental or at any rate Chinese and Japanese art has begun to command something like adequate recognition.
But the change has not yet gone far
enough for a thorough appreciation of the deepest and most characteristic spirit
and inspiration of Indian work. An eye or an effort like Mr. Havellʼs is still
rare. For the most part even the most sympathetic criticism stops short at a
technical appreciation and imaginative sympathy which tries to understand from
outside and penetrates into so much only of the artistic suggestion as can be at
once seized by the new wider view of a more accomplished and flexible critical
mentality. But there is little sign of the understanding of the very well-spring
and spiritual fountain of Indian artistic creation. There is therefore still a
utility in fathoming the depths and causes of the divergence. That is especially
necessary for the Indian mind itself, for by the appreciation excited by an
opposing view it will be better able to understand itself and especially to
seize what is essential in Indian art and must be clung to in the
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future and what is an incident or a phase of growth and can be shed in the advance to a new creation. This is properly a task for those who have themselves at once the creative insight, the technical competence and the seeing critical eye. But everyone who has at all the Indian spirit and feeling, can at least give some account of the main, the central things which constitute for him the appeal of Indian painting, sculpture and architecture. This is all that I shall attempt, for it will be in itself the best defence and justification of Indian culture on its side of aesthetic significance.
The criticism of art is a vain and dead
thing when it ignores the spirit, aim, essential motive from which a type of
artistic creation starts and judges by the external details only in the light of
a quite different spirit, aim and motive. Once we understand the essential
things, enter into the characteristic way and spirit, are able to interpret the
form and execution from that inner centre, we can then see how it looks in the
light of other standpoints, in the light of the comparative mind. A comparative
criticism has its use, but the essential understanding must precede it if it
is to have any real value. But while this is comparatively easy in the wider and
more flexible turn of literature, it is, I think, more difficult in the other
arts, when the difference of spirit is deep, because there the absence of the
mediating word, the necessity of proceeding direct from spirit to line and form
brings about a special intensity and exclusive concentration of aim and stress
of execution. The intensity of the thing that moves the work is brought out with
a more distinct power, but by its very stress and directness allows of few
accommodations and combined variations of appeal. The thing meant and the thing
done strike deep home into the soul or the imaginative mind, but touch it over a
smaller surface and with a lesser multitude of points of contact. But whatever
the reason, it is less easy for a different kind of mind to appreciate.
The Indian mind in its natural poise finds it almost or quite as difficult
really, that is to say, spiritually to understand the arts of Europe, as the
ordinary European mind to enter into the spirit of Indian painting and
sculpture. I have seen a comparison made between a feminine Indian figure and a
Greek Aphrodite which
illustrates the difficulty in an extreme form. The critic tells
me that the Indian figure is full of a strong spiritual sense, — here of the very breath and being of devotion, an
ineffable devotion, and that is true, it is a suggestion or even a revelation
which breaks through or overflows the form rather than depends on the external
work, — but the Greek creation can only awaken a sublimated carnal or sensuous
delight. Now having entered somewhat into the heart of meaning of Greek
sculpture, I can see that this is a wrong account of the matter. The critic has
got into the real spirit of the Indian, but not into the real spirit of the
Greek work; his criticism from that moment, as a comparative appreciation, loses
all value. The Greek figure stresses no doubt the body, but appeals through it
to an imaginative seeing inspiration which aims at expressing a certain divine
power of beauty and gives us therefore something which is much more than a
merely sensuous aesthetic pleasure. If the artist has done this with perfection,
the work has accomplished its aim and ranks as a masterpiece. The Indian
sculptor stresses something behind, something more remote to the surface
imagination, but nearer to the soul, and subordinates to it the physical form.
If he has only partially succeeded or done it with power but with something
faulty in the execution, his work is less great, even though it may have a
greater spirit in the intention; but when he wholly succeeds, then his work too
is a masterpiece, and we may prefer it with a good conscience, if the spiritual,
the higher intuitive vision is what we most demand from art. This however need
not interfere with an appreciation of both kinds in their own order.
But in viewing much of other European
work of the very greatest repute, I am myself aware of a failure of spiritual
sympathy. I look for instance on some of the most famed pieces of Tintoretto, —
not the portraits, for those give the soul, if only the active or character soul
in the man, but say, the Adam and Eve, the St. George slaying the dragon, the
Christ appearing to Venetian Senators, and I am aware of standing baffled and
stopped by an irresponsive blankness somewhere in my being. I can see the
magnificence and power of colouring and design, I can see the force of
externalised imagination or the spirited dramatic rendering of action, but I
strive in vain to get out
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any significance below the surface or equivalent to the greatness
of the form, except perhaps an incidental minor suggestion here and there and
that is not sufficient for me. When I try to analyse my failure, I find at first
certain conceptions which conflict with my expectation or my own way of seeing.
This muscular Adam, the sensuous beauty of this Eve do not bring home to me the
mother or the father of the race, this dragon seems to me only a surly
portentous beast in great danger of being killed, not a creative embodiment of
monstrous evil, this Christ with his massive body and benevolent philosophic
visage almost offends me, is not at any rate the Christ whom I know. But these
are after all incidental things; what is really the matter is that I come to
this art with a previous demand for a kind of vision, imagination, emotion,
significance which it cannot give me. And not being so self-confident as to
think that what commands the admiration of the greatest critics and artists is
not admirable, I can see this and pause on the verge of applying Mr. Archerʼs
criticism of certain Indian work and saying that the mere execution is beautiful
or marvellous but there is no imagination, nothing beyond what is on the
surface. I can understand that what is wanting is really, the kind of
imagination I personally demand; but though, my acquired cultured mind explains
this to me and may intellectually catch at the something more, my natural being
will not be satisfied, I am oppressed, not uplifted by this triumph of life and
the flesh and of the power and stir of life, — not that I object to these things in
themselves or to the greatest emphasis on the sensuous or even the sensual,
elements not at all absent from Indian creation, if I can get something at least
of the deeper thing I want behind it, — and I find myself turning away from the
work of one of the greatest Italian masters to satisfy myself with some
“barbaricˮ Indian painting or statue, some calm unfathomable Buddha, bronze
Shiva or eighteen-armed Durga slaying the Asuras. But the cause of my failure is
there, that I am seeking for something which was not meant in the spirit of this
art and which I ought not to expect from its characteristic creation. And if I
had steeped myself in this Renascence mind as in the original Hellenic spirit, I
could have added something to my inner experience and acquired a more catholic
and universal aesthesis.
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But, ordinarily, place this mind before
anything ancient, Hindu, Buddhistic or Vedantic in art and it looks at it with a
blank or an angry incomprehension. It looks for the sense and
does not find any, because either it has not in itself the experience and finds it difficult to have the imagination, much more the realisation of what this art does really mean and express, or because it insists on looking for what it is accustomed to see at home and, not finding that, is convinced that there is nothing to see or nothing of any value. Or else if there is something which it could have understood, it does not understand because it is expressed in the Indian form and the Indian way. It looks at the method and form and finds it unfamiliar, contrary to its own canons, is revolted, contemptuous, repelled, speaks of the thing as monstrous, barbarous, ugly or null, passes on in a high dislike or disdain. Or if it is overborne by some sense of unanalysable beauty of greatness or power it still speaks of a splendid barbarism. Do you want an illuminating instance of this blankness of comprehension? Mr. Archer sees the Dhyani Buddha with its supreme, its unfathomable, its infinite spiritual calm which every cultured oriental mind can at once feel and respond to in the depths of his being, and he denies that there is anything, — only drooped eyelids, an immobile pose and an insipid, by which I suppose he means a calm passionless face.1 He turns for comfort to the Hellenic nobility of expression of the Gandharan Buddha, or to the living Rabindranath Tagore more spiritual than any Buddha from Peshwar to Kamakura, an inept misuse of comparison against which I imagine the great poet himself would be the first to protest. There we have the total incomprehension, the blind window, the blocked door in the mind, and there too the reason why the natural western mentality comes to Indian art with a demand for something other than what its characteristic spirit and motive intend to give, and, demanding that, is not prepared to enter into another kind of spiritual experience and another range of creative sight, imaginative power and mode of self-expression.
This once understood, we can turn to the difference in the spirit and method of artistic creation which has given rise to the
1 In a note Mr. Archer mentions and very rightly discounts an absurd apology for these Buddhas, viz., that the greatness and spirituality are not at all in the work, but in the devotion of the artist! If the artist cannot put into his work what was in him, — and here it is not devotion that is expressed, — his work is a futile abortion. But if he has expressed what he has felt, the capacity to feel it must also be there in the mind that looks at his work.
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mutual incomprehension; for that will bring us to the positive
side of the matter. All great artistic work proceeds from an act of intuition,
not really an intellectual idea or a splendid imagination, — these are only
mental translations, — but a direct intuition of some truth of life or being,
some significant form of that truth, some development of it in the mind of man.
And so far there is no difference between great European and great Indian work.
Where then begins the immense divergence? It is there in everything else, in the
object and field of the intuitive vision, in the method of working out the sight
or suggestion, in the part taken in the rendering by the external form and
technique, in the whole way of the rendering to the human mind, even in the
centre of our being to which the work appeals. The European artist gets his
intuition by a suggestion from an appearance in life and Nature or, if it starts
from something in his own soul, relates it at once to an external support. He
brings down that intuition into his normal mind and sets the intellectual idea
and the imagination in the intelligence to clothe it with a mental stuff which
will render its form to the moved reason, emotion, aesthesis. Then he missions
his eye and hand to execute it in terms which start from a colourable “imitationˮ of life and Nature
— and in ordinary hands too often end there — to
get at an interpretation that really changes it into the image of something not
outward in our own being or in universal being which was the real thing seen.
And to that in looking at the work we have to get back through colour and line
and disposition or whatever else may be part of the external means, to their
mental suggestions and through them to the soul of the whole matter. The appeal
is not direct to the eye of the deepest self and spirit within, but to the
outward soul by a strong awakening of the sensuous, the vital, the emotional,
the intellectual and imaginative being, and of the spiritual we get as much or
as little as can suit itself to and express itself through the outward man.
Life, action, passion, emotion, idea, Nature seen for their own sake and for an
aesthetic delight in them, these are the object and field of this creative
intuition. The something more which the Indian mind knows to be behind these
things looks out, if at all, from behind many veils. The direct and unveiled
presence of the Infinite and
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its godheads is not evoked or thought necessary to the greater greatness and the highest perfection.
The theory of ancient Indian art at its
greatest — and the greatest gives its character to the rest and throws on it
something of its stamp and influence — is of another kind. Its highest business
is to disclose something of the Self, the Infinite, the Divine to the regard of
the soul, the Self through its expressions, the Infinite through its living
finite symbols, the Divine through his powers. Or the Godheads are to be
revealed, luminously interpreted or in some way suggested to the soulʼs
understanding or to its devotion or at the very least to a spiritually or
religiously aesthetic emotion. When this hieratic art comes down from these
altitudes to the intermediate worlds behind ours, to the lesser godheads or
genii, it still carries into them some power or some hint from above. And when
it comes quite down to the material world and the life of man and the things of
external Nature, it does not altogether get rid of the greater vision, the
hieratic stamp, the spiritual seeing, and in most good work — except in moments
of relaxation and a humorous or vivid play with the obvious — there is always
something more in which the seeing presentation of life floats as in an
immaterial atmosphere. Life is seen in the self or in some suggestion of the
infinite or of something beyond or there is at least a touch and influence or
these which helps to shape the presentation. It is not that all Indian work realises this ideal; there is plenty no doubt that falls short, is lowered,
ineffective or even debased, but it is the best and the most characteristic
influence and execution which gives its tone to an art and by which we must
judge. Indian art in fact is identical in its spiritual aim and principle with
the rest of Indian culture.
A seeing in the self
accordingly becomes the characteristic method of the Indian artist and it is
directly enjoined on him by the canon. He has to see first in his spiritual
being the truth of the thing he must express and to create its form in his
intuitive mind; he is not bound to look out first on outward life and Nature for
his model, his authority, his rule, his teacher or his fountain of suggestions.
Why should he when it is something quite inward he has to bring out into
expression? It is not an idea
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7. Kandarya Mahadeva Temple, Khajuraho
The great temples of the north have often...
a singular grace in their power,
a luminous lightness relieving their mass and strength,
a rich delicacy of beauty in their ornate fullness.
(P. 221)
8. Sarangapani Temple, Kumbakonam
The wealth of ornament, detail, circumstance
in Indian temples represents the infinite variety
and repetition of the worlds
— suggests the infinite multiplicity in the infinite oneness.
(P. 219)
9. Jambukesvara Temple, Tiruvanaikkaval
To appreciate this spiritual-aesthetic truth
of Indian architecture...
The straight way...is not to detach the temple from its surroundings,
but to see it in unity with the sky and low-lying landscape...
and feel the thing common to both...
the reality in nature
and the reality expressed in the work of art. (P. 217)
10. Keshava Temple, Somanathpur, Mysore
An Indian temple,
to whatever godhead it may be built,
is in its inmost reality
an altar raised to the divine Self,
a house of the Cosmic Spirit,
and appeal and aspiration to the Infnite.
(P.214)
in the intellect, a mental imagination, an outward emotion on
which he has to depend for his stimulants, but an idea, image, emotion of the
spirit, and the mental equivalents are subordinate things for help in the
transmission and give only a part of the colouring and the shape. A material
form, colour, line and design are his physical means of the expression, but in
using them he is not bound to an imitation of Nature, but has to make the form
and all else significant of his vision, and if that can only be done or can best
be done by some modification, some pose, some touch or symbolic variation which
is not found in physical Nature; he is at perfect liberty to use it, since truth
to his vision, the unity of the thing he is seeing and expressing is his only
business. The line, colour and the rest are not his first, but his last
preoccupation, because they have to carry on them a world of things which have
already taken spiritual form in his mind. He has not for instance to re-create
for us the human face and body of the Buddha or some one passion or incident of
his life, but to reveal the calm of Nirvana through a figure of the Buddha, and
every detail and accessory must be turned into a means or an aid of his purpose.
And even when it is some human passion or incident he has to portray, it is not
usually that alone, but also or more something else in the soul to which it
points or from which it starts or some power behind the action that has to enter
into the spirit of his design and is often really the main thing. And through
the eye that looks on his work he has to appeal not merely to an excitement of
the outward soul, but to the inner self, antarātman.
One may well say that beyond the ordinary cultivation
of the aesthetic instinct necessary to all artistic appreciation there is a
spiritual insight or culture needed if we are to enter into the whole meaning of
Indian artistic creation, otherwise we get only at the surface external things
or at the most at things only just below the surface. It is an intuitive and
spiritual art and must be seen with the intuitive and spiritual eye.
This is the distinctive character of Indian art and to ignore it is to fall into
total incomprehension or into much misunderstanding. Indian architecture,
painting, sculpture are not only intimately one in inspiration with the central
things in Indian philosophy, religion, Yoga, culture, but a specially intense
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expression of their significance. There is much in the literature which can be well enough appreciated without any very deep entry into these things, but it is comparatively a very small part of what is left of the other arts, Hindu or Buddhistic, of which this can be said. They have been very largely a hieratic aesthetic script of Indiaʼs spiritual, contemplative and religious experience.
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2
ARCHITECTURE, sculpture and painting,
because they are the three great arts which appeal to
the spirit through the eye, are those too in which the sensible and the
invisible meet with the strongest emphasis on themselves and yet the greatest
necessity of each other. The form with its insistent masses, proportions,
lines, colours, can here only justify them by
their
service for the something intangible it
has to express; the
spirit needs all the possible help of the material
body to interpret itself to itself through the eye, yet asks of it that it
shall be as transparent a veil as possible of its own greater significance.
The art of the East and the art of the West,
—
each in its characteristic or mean, for there are
always exceptions, —
deal with the
problem of these two interlocking powers in a quite different way. The western
mind is arrested and attracted by the form, lingers on it and cannot get away
from its charm, loves it for its own beauty, rests on the emotional,
intellectual, aesthetic suggestions that arise directly from its most visible
language, confines the soul in the body; it might almost be said that for this
mind form creates the spirit, the spirit depends for its existence and for
everything it has to say on the form. The Indian attitude to the matter is at
the opposite pole to this view. For the Indian mind form does not exist except
as a creation of the spirit and draws all its meaning and value from the
spirit. Every line, arrangement of mass, colour, shape, posture, every physical
suggestion, however many, crowded, opulent they may be, is first and last a
suggestion, a hint, very often a symbol which is in its main function a support
for a spiritual emotion, idea, image that again goes beyond itself to the less
definable, but more powerfully sensible reality of the spirit which has excited
these movements in the aesthetic mind and passed through them into significant
shapes.
This characteristic attitude of the Indian
reflective and creative mind necessitates in our view of its creations an
effort to get beyond at once to the inner spirit of the reality it expresses
and see from it and not from outside. And in fact to start from the
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physical details and their synthesis appears to me quite the wrong way to look at
an Indian work of art. The orthodox style of western criticism seems to be to
dwell scrutinisingly on the technique, on form, on the obvious story of the
form, and then pass to some appreciation of beautiful or impressive emotion and
idea. It is only in some deeper and more sensitive minds that we get beyond
that depth into profounder things. A criticism of that kind applied to Indian
art leaves it barren or poor of significance. Here the only right way is to get
at once through a total intuitive or revelatory impression or by some
meditative dwelling on the whole, dhyāna
in the technical Indian term, to the spiritual meaning
and atmosphere, make ourselves one with that as completely as possible, and
then only the helpful meaning and value of all the rest comes out with a
complete and revealing force. For here it is the spirit that carries the form,
while in most western art it is the form that carries whatever there may be of
spirit. The striking phrase of Epictetus recurs to the mind in which he
describes man as a little soul carrying a corpse, psucharion ei bastazon
nekron. The more ordinary western outlook is upon animate matter carrying
in its life a modicum of soul. But the seeing of the Indian mind and of Indian
art is that of a great, a limitless self and spirit, mahān
ātmā,
which carries to us in the sea
of its presence a living shape of itself, small in comparison to its own
infinity, but yet sufficient by the power that informs this symbol to support
some aspect of that infiniteʼs self-expression. It is therefore essential that
we should look here not solely with the physical eye informed by the reason and
the aesthetic imagination, but make the physical seeing a passage to the
opening of the inner spiritual eye and a moved communion in the soul. A great
oriental work of art does not easily reveal its secret to one who comes to it
solely in a mood of aesthetic curiosity or with a considering critical
objective mind, still less as the cultivated and interested tourist passing
among strange and foreign things; but it has to be seen in loneliness, in the
solitude of oneʼs self, in moments when one is capable of long and deep
meditation and as little weighted as possible with the conventions of material
life. That is why the Japanese with their fine sense in these things, — a sense
which modern Europe with her assault
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of crowded art galleries and over-pictured walls seems to have quite lost, though perhaps I am wrong, and those are the right conditions for display of European art, — have put their temples and their Buddhas as often as possible away on mountains and in distant or secluded scenes of Nature and avoid living with great paintings in the crude hours of daily life, but keep them by preference in such a way that their undisputed suggestions can sink into the mind in its finer moments or apart where they can go and look at them in a treasured secrecy when the soul is at leisure from life. That is an indication of the utmost value pointing to the nature of the appeal made by eastern art and the right way and mood for looking at its creations.
Indian architecture especially demands
this kind of inner study and this spiritual self-identification with its deepest
meaning and will not otherwise reveal itself to us. The secular buildings of
ancient India, her palaces and places of assembly and civic
edifices have not outlived the ravage of time; what remains to us is
mostly something of the great mountain and cave temples, something too of the
temples of her ancient cities of the plains, and for the rest we have the fanes
and shrines of her later times, whether situated in temple cities and places of
pilgrimage like Srirangam and Rameshwaram or in her great once regal towns like
Madura, when the temple was the centre of life. It is then the most hieratic
side of a hieratic art that remains to us. These sacred buildings are the
signs, the architectural self-expression of an
ancient spiritual and
religious culture. Ignore the spiritual
suggestion,
the religious significance, the meaning of the symbols
and
indications,
look only with the rational and secular aesthetic
mind,
and it is vain to expect that we shall get to any true and discerning
appreciation of this art. And it has to be remembered
too
that
the religious spirit here is something quite different from
the sense of European religions; and even mediaeval Christianity,
especially as now looked at by the modern European mind which has
gone through the
two great crises of the Renascence and
recent
secularism, will not in spite of its oriental origin and affinities be of much
real help. To bring in into the artistic look
on
an
Indian temple occidental memories or a comparison with
Greek Parthenon or Italian church or Duomo or
Campanile or
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even the great Gothic cathedrals of mediaeval
France, though these have in them something much nearer to the Indian
mentality, is to intrude a fatally foreign and disturbing element or standard
in the mind. But this consciously or else subconsciously is what almost every
European mind does to a greater or less degree, and it is here a pernicious
immixture, for it subjects the work of a vision that saw the immeasurable to
the tests of an eye that dwells only on measure.
Indian sacred architecture of whatever date,
style or dedication goes back to something timelessly ancient and now outside
India almost wholly lost, something which belongs to the past, and yet it goes
forward too, though this the rationalistic mind will not easily admit, to
something which will return upon us and is already beginning to return,
something which belongs to the future. An Indian temple, to whatever godhead it
may be built, is in its inmost reality an altar raised to the divine Self, a
house of the Cosmic Spirit, an appeal and aspiration to the Infinite. As that
and in the light of that seeing and conception it must in the first place be
understood, and everything else must be seen in that setting and that light,
and then only can there be any real understanding. No artistic eye however
alert and sensible and no aesthetic mind however full and sensitive can arrive
at that understanding, if it is attached to a Hellenised conception of
rational beauty or shuts itself up in a materialised or intellectual
interpretation and fails to open itself to the great things here meant by a
kindred close response to some touch of the cosmic consciousness, some
revelation of the greater spiritual Self, some suggestion of the Infinite.
These things, the spiritual Self, the Cosmic Spirit, the Infinite, are not
rational, but suprarational, eternal presences, but to the intellect only
words, and visible, sensible, near only to an intuition and revelation in our
inmost selves. An art which starts from them as a first conception can only
give us what it has to give, their touch, their nearness, their
self-disclosure, through some responding intuition and revelation in us, in our
own soul, our own self. It is this which one must come to it to find and not
demand from it the satisfaction of some quite other seeking or some very
different turn of imagination and more limited superficial significance.
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This is the first truth of Indian architecture and its significance which demands emphasis and it leads at once to the answer to certain very common misapprehennsions and objections. All art reposes on some unity and all its details, whether few and sparing or lavish and crowded and full, must go back to that unity and help its significance; otherwise it is not art. Now we find our western critic telling us with an assurance which would be stupefying if one did not see how naturally it arose, that in Indian architecture there is no unity, which is as much as to say that there is here no great art at all, but only a skill in the execution of crowded and unrelated details. We are told even by otherwise sympathetic judges that there is an overloading of ornament and detail which, however beautiful or splendid in itself, stands in the way of unity, an attempt to load every rift with ore, an absence of calm, no unfilled spaces, no relief to the eye. Mr. Archer as usual carries up the adverse criticism to its extreme clamorous top notes; his heavily shotted phrases are all a continous insistence on this one theme. The great temples of the South of India are, he allows, marvels of massive construction. He seems by the way to have a rooted objection to massiveness in architecture or great massed effects in sculpture, regardless of their appropriateness or need, although he admits them in literature. Still this much there is and with it a sort of titanic impressiveness, but of unity, clarity, nobility there is no trace. This observation seems to my judgment sufficiently contradictory, since I do not understand how there can be a marvel of construction, whether light or massive, without any unity, — but here is not even, it seems, a trace of it, — or a mighty impressiveness without any greatness or nobility whatever, even allowing this to be a titanic and not an Olympian nobleness. He tells us that everything is ponderous, everything here overwrought and the most prominent features swarming, writhing with contorted semi-human figures are as senseless as anything in architecture. How, one might ask, does he know that they are senseless, when he practically admits that he has made no attempt to find what is their sense, but has simply assumed from the self-satisfied sufficiency of his own admitted ignorance and failure to understand that there cannot be any meaning? And the whole thing he
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characterises as a
monstrosity built by Rakshasas, ogres, demons, a gigantesque barbarism. The
northern buildings find a little less disfavour in his eyes, but the difference
in the end is small or none. There is the same ponderousness, absence of
lightness and grace, an even greater profusion of incised ornament; these too
are barbaric creations. Alone the Mahomedan architecture, called
Indo-Saracenic, is exempted from this otherwise universal condemnation.
It is a little surprising after all, however natural the first blindness
here, that even assailants of this extreme kind, since they must certainly know
that there can be no art, no effective construction without unity, should not
have paused even once to ask themselves whether after all there must not be
here some principle of oneness which they had missed because they came with
alien conceptions and looked at things from the wrong end, and before
pronouncing this magisterial judgment should not have had patience to wait in a
more detached and receptive way upon the thing under their eye and seen whether
then some secret of unity did not emerge. But it is the more sympathetic and
less violent critic who deserves a direct answer. Now it may readily be
admitted that the failure to see at once the unity of this architecture is
perfectly natural to a European eye, because unity in the sense demanded by the
western conception, the Greek unity gained by much suppression and a sparing
use of detail and circumstance or even the Gothic unity got by casting everything into the mould of a single spiritual aspiration, is not there. And the
greater unity that really is there can never be arrived at all, if the eye
begins and ends by dwelling on form and detail and ornament, because it will
then be obsessed by these things and find it difficult to go beyond to the
unity which all this in its totality serves not so much to express in itself, but
to fill it with that which comes out of it and relieve its oneness by
multitude. An original oneness, not a combined or synthetic or an effected
unity, is that from which this art begins and to which its work when finished
returns or rather lives in it as in its self and natural atmosphere. Indian
sacred architecture constantly represents the greatest oneness of the Self, the
cosmic, the infinite in the immensity of its world-design, the multitude of its
features of
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self-expression, lakṣaṇa, (yet the oneness is greater than and
independent of their totality and in itself indefinable), and all its
starting-point of unity in conception, its mass of design and immensity of
material, its crowding abundance of significant ornament and detail and its
return towards oneness are only intelligible as
necessary
circumstances of this poem, this epic or this lyric —
for
there are smaller structures which are such lyrics —
of the
Infinite. The western mentality, except in those who
are coming or returning, since Europe had once something of this cult in her
own way, to this vision, may find it difficult to appreciate the truth and
meaning of such an art, which tries to figure existence as a whole and not in
its pieces; but I would invite those Indian minds who are troubled by these
criticisms or partly or temporarily overpowered by the western way of seeing
things, to look at our architecture in the light of this conception and see
whether all but minor objections do not vanish as soon as the real meaning makes
itself felt and gives body to the first indefinable impression and emotion
which we experience before the greater constructions of the Indian builders.
To appreciate this
spiritual-aesthetic truth of Indian architecture, it will be best to look first
at some work where there is not the complication of surroundings now often out
of harmony with the building, outside even those temple towns which still
retain their dependence on the sacred motive, and rather in some
place
where there is room for a free background of Nature. I
have before me two prints which can well serve the purpose, a temple at
Kalahasti, a temple at Sinhachalam, two buildings entirely different in
treatment and yet one in the ground and the
universal
motive. The straight way here is not to detach the temple from its
surroundings, but to see it in unity with the sky and low-lying landscape or
with the sky and hills around and feel the thing common to both, the
construction and its environment, the reality in Nature, the reality expressed
in the work of art. The oneness to which this Nature aspires in her inconscient
self-creation and in which she lives, the oneness to which the soul of man
uplifts itself in his conscious spiritual upbuilding, his labour of aspiration
here expressed in stone, and in which so upbuilt he and his work live, are the
same and the soul-motive is one.
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Thus seen this work
of man seems to be something which has started out and detached itself against
the power of the natural world, something of the one common aspiration in both
to the same infinite spirit of itself,
—
the inconscient uplook and against it the strong
single relief of the self-conscient effort and success of finding. One of these
buildings climbs up bold, massive in projection, up-piled in the greatness of a
forceful but sure ascent, preserving its range and line to the last, the other
soars from the strength of its base, in the grace and emotion of a curving mass
to a rounded summit and crowning symbol. There is in both a constant, subtle yet
pronounced lessening from the base towards the top, but at each stage a
repetition of the same form, the same multiplicity of insistence, the same
crowded fullness and indented relief, but one maintains its multiple
endeavour and indication to the last, the other ends in a single sign. To find
the significance we have first to feel the oneness of the infinity in which
this nature and this art live, then see this thronged expression as the sign of
the infinite multiplicity which fills this oneness, see in the regular
lessening ascent of the edifice the subtler and subtler return from the base on
earth to the original unity and seize on the symbolic indication of its close
at the top. Not absence of unity, but a tremendous unity is revealed. Reinterpret intimately what this representation means in the terms of our own
spiritual self-existence and cosmic being, and we have what these great
builders saw in themselves and reared in stone. All objections, once we have
got at this identity in spiritual experience, fall away and show themselves to
be what they really are, the utterance and cavil of an impotent
misunderstanding, an insufficient apprehension or a complete failure to see. To
appreciate the detail of Indian architecture is easy when the whole is thus seen
and known; otherwise, it is impossible.
This method of interpretation applies, however different the
construction and the nature of the rendering, to all Dravidian architecture,
not only to the mighty temples of far-spread fame, but to unknown roadside
shrines in small towns, which are only a slighter execution of the same theme,
a satisfied suggestion here, but the greater buildings a grandiose fulfilled
aspiration. The architectural language of the north is of a different kind,
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there
is another basic style; but here too the same
spiritual, meditative,
intuitive method
has to be used and we get at the same
result, an aesthetic
interpretation or suggestion of the one spiritual experience, one in all its
complexity and diversity, which founds the unity of the infinite variations of
Indian spirituality and religious feeling and the realised union of the human
self with the Divine. This is the unity too of all the creations of this hieratic art. The different styles and motives arrive at or express that unity
in different ways. The objection that an excess of thronging detail and
ornament hides, impairs or breaks up the unity, is advanced only because the
eye has made the mistake of dwelling
on the detail first
without relation to this original spiritual
oneness,
which has first to be fixed in an intimate spiritual seeing and union and then
all else seen in that vision and experience.
When
we
look on the multiplicity of the world, it is only a
crowded plurality that we can find and to arrive at unity we have to
reduce, to suppress what we have seen or sparingly select a few indications or
to be satisfied with the unity of this or that separate idea, experience or
imagination; but when we have realised the Self, the infinite unity and look
back on the multiplicity of the world, then we find that oneness able to bear
all the infinity of variation and circumstance we can crowd into it and its
unity remains unabridged by even the most endless self-multiplication of its
informing creation. We find the same thing in looking at this architecture. The
wealth of ornament, detail, circumstance in Indian temples represents the
infinite variety and repetition of the worlds,
— not our world only, but all
the
planes,
— suggests the infinite multiplicity in the infinite oneness. It is a
matter of our own experience and fullness of vision how much
we leave out or
bring in, whether we express so much
or so little or
attempt as in the Dravidian style to give the impression of a teeming
inexhaustible plenitude. The largeness
of this unity is base and continent enough for any super-structure or
content of multitude.
To condemn this
abundance as barbarous is to apply a foreign standard. Where after all are we
bound to draw the line? To the pure classical taste Shakespeareʼs art once
appeared great but barbarous for a similar reason, one remembers the Gallic
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description of him as a drunken barbarian of genius, — his artistic unity non-existent or spoilt by crowding tropical vegetation of incident and character, his teeming imaginations violent, exaggerated, sometimes bizarre, monstrous, without symmetry, proportion and all the other lucid unities, lightnesses, graces loved by the classic mind. That mind might say of his work in language like Mr. Archerʼs that here there is indeed a titanic genius, a mass of power, but of unity, clarity, classic nobility no trace, but rather an entire absence of lucid grace and lightness and restraint, a profusion of wild ornament and an imaginative riot without law or measure, strained figures, distorted positions and gestures, no dignity, no fine, just, rationally natural and beautiful classic movement and pose. But even the strictest Latin mind has now got over its objections to the “splendid barbarismˮ of Shakespeare and can understand that here is a fuller, less sparing and exiguous vision of life, a greater intuitive unity than the formal unities of the classic aesthesis. But the Indian vision of the world and existence was vaster and fuller than Shakespeareʼs, because it embraced not merely life, but all being, not merely humanity, but all the worlds and all Nature and cosmos. The European mind not having arrived except in individuals at any close, direct, insistent realisation of the unity of the infinite Self or the cosmic consciousness peopled with its infinite multiplicity, is not driven to express these things, cannot understand or put up with them when they are expressed in this oriental art, speech and style and object to it as the Latin mind once objected to Shakespeare. Perhaps the day is not distant when it will see and understand and perhaps even itself try to express the same things in another language.
The objection that the crowding detail allows no calm, gives no relief or space to the eye, falls under the same heading, springs from the same root, is urged from a different experience and has no validity for the Indian experience. For this unity on which all is upborne, carries in itself the infinite space and calm of the spiritual realisation, and there is no need for other unfilled spaces or tracts of calm of a lesser more superficial kind. The eye is here only a way of access to the soul, it is to that that there is the appeal, and if the soul living in this realisation or dwelling under the
Page-220
influence of this aesthetic
impression needs any relief, it is not from the incidence of life and form, but
from the immense incidence of that vastness of infinity and tranquil silence,
and that can only be given by its opposite, by an abundance of form and detail
and life. As for the objection in regard to Dravidian architecture to its
massiveness and its titanic construction, the precise spiritual effect intended
could not be given otherwise; for the infinite, the cosmic seen as a whole in
its vast manifestation is titanic, is mighty in material and power. It is other
and quite different things also, but none of these are absent from Indian
construction. The great temples of the north have often in spite of Mr.
Archerʼs dictum, a singular grace in their power, a luminous lightness
relieving their mass and strength, a rich delicacy of beauty in their ornate
fullness. It is not indeed the Greek lightness, clarity or naked nobleness, nor
is it exclusive, but comes in
a fine blending of opposites which is in the very
spirit of the Indian religious, philosophical and aesthetic mind. Nor are these,
things absent from many
Dravidian buildings, though in certain styles they are boldly sacrificed or
only put into minor incidents, — one instance of the kind Mr. Archer rejoices in as an
oasis in the desert of this to him unintelligible mass of might and greatness,
— but in either case suppressed so that the
fullness of solemn and grandiose effect may have a complete, an undiminished expression.
I
need not deal with adverse strictures of a more insignificant kind, — such as the dislike of the Indian form of the
arch and dome, because they are not the radiating arch and dome of other
styles. That is only an intolerant refusal to admit the beauty of unaccustomed
forms. It is legitimate to prefer oneʼs own things, those to which our mind and
nature have been trained, but to condemn other art and effort because it also
prefers its own way of arriving at beauty, greatness, self-expression, is a
narrowness which with the growth of a more catholic culture ought to disappear.
But there is one comment on Dravidian temple architecture which is worth noting
because it is made by
others
than Mr. Archer and his kind. Even a sympathetic mind
like
Professor Geddes is impressed by some sense of a monstrous effect of terror and
gloom in these mighty buildings. Such expres-
Page-221
sions are astonishing to an
Indian mind because terror and gloom are conspicuously absent from the feelings
aroused in it by its religion, art or literature. In the religion they are
rarely awakened and only in order to be immediately healed and, even when they
come, are always sustained by the sense of a supporting and helping presence, an eternal greatness and calm or love or Delight
behind; the very
goddess of destruction is at the same time the compassionate and loving Mother;
the austere Maheswara, Rudra, is also Shiva, the auspicious, Ashutosha, the
refuge of men. The Indian thinking and religious mind looks with calm, without
shrinking or repulsion, with an understanding born of its agelong effort at
identity and oneness, at all that meets it in the stupendous spectacle of the
cosmos. And even its asceticism, its turning from the world, which begins not
in terror and gloom, but in a sense of vanity and fatigue, or of something
higher, truer, happier than life, soon passes beyond any element of pessimistic
sadness into the rapture of the eternal peace and bliss. Indian secular poetry
and drama is throughout rich, vital and joyous and there is more tragedy,
terror, sorrow and gloom packed into any few pages of European work than we can
find in the whole mass of Indian literature. It does not seem to me that Indian
art is at all different in this respect from the religion and literature. The
western mind is here thrusting in its own habitual reactions upon things in the
indigenous conception in which they have no proper place. Mark the curious
misreading of the dance of Shiva as a dance of Death or Destruction, whereas,
as anybody ought to be able to see who looks upon the Nataraja, it expresses on
the contrary the rapture of the cosmic dance with the profundities behind of
the unmoved eternal and infinite bliss. So too the figure of Kali which is so
terrible to European eyes is, as we know, the Mother of the universe accepting
this fierce aspect of destruction in order to slay the Asuras, the powers of
evil in man and the world. There are other strands in this feeling in the
western mind which seem to spring from a dislike of anything uplifted far
beyond the human measure and others again in which we see a subtle survival of
the Greek limitation, the fear, gloom and aversion with which the sunny
terrestrial Hellenic mind commonly met the idea of the
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beyond, the limitless, the unknown; but that
reaction has no place in Indian mentality. And as for the strangeness or
formidable aspect of certain unhuman figures or the conception of demons or
Rakshasas, it must be remembered that the Indian aesthetic mind deals not only
with the earth but with psychic
planes in which these things
exist and ranges freely among them without being overpowered because it carries
everywhere the stamp of a large confidence in the strength and the omnipresence
of the Self or the Divine.
I have dwelt on Hindu and especially on
Dravidian architecture because the latter is the most fiercely attacked as the
most uncompromisingly foreign to European taste. But a word too may be said
about Indo-Moslem architecture. I am not concerned to defend any claim for the
purely indigenous origin of its features. It seems to me that here the Indian
mind has taken in much from the Arab and Persian imagination and in certain
mosques and tombs I seem to find an impress of the robust and bold Afghan and Moghul temperament; but it remains clear enough that it is still on the whole a
typically Indian creation with the peculiar Indian gift. The richness of
decorative skill and imagination has been turned to the uses of another style,
but it is the same skill which we find in the northern Hindu temples, and in
the ground we see, however toned down, something sometimes of the old epic mass
and power, but more often that lyric grace which we see developing before the
Mahomedan advent in the indigenous sculpture,
— as in the
schools of the North-East and of Java, — and sometimes a blending of the
two motives. The modification, the toning down sets the average European mind
at ease and secures its suffrage. But what is it that it so much admires? Mr.
Archer tells us at first that it is its rational beauty, refinement and grace,
normal, fair, refreshing after the monstrous riot of Hindu yogic hallucination
and nightmare. That description which might have been written of Greek art,
seems to me grotesquely inapplicable. Immediately afterwards he harps on quite
another and an incompatible phrase, and calls it a fairyland of exquisite
architecture. A rational fairyland is a wonder which may perhaps be hereafter
discovered by some strange intertwining of the nineteenth
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and twentieth century minds,
but I do not think it has yet existed on earth or in the heavens. Not rational
but magical beauty satisfying and enchanting to some deeper quite suprarational
aesthetic soul in us is the inexpressible charm of these creations. But still
where does the magic touch our critic? He tells us in a rapt journalistic
style. It is the exquisite marble traceries, the beautiful domes and minarets,
the stately halls of sepulture, the marvellous loggias and arcades, the
magnificent plinths and platforms, the majestic gateways, et cetera. And
is this then all? Only the charm of an outward material luxury and
magnificence? Yes; Mr. Archer again tells us that we must be content here with
a visual sensuous beauty without any moral suggestion. And that helps him to
bring in the sentence of destructive condemnation without which he could not
feel happy in dealing with Indian things: this Moslem architecture suggests not
only unbridled luxury, but effeminacy and decadence! But in that case, whatever its beauty, it belongs entirely to a secondary plane of artistic creation
and cannot rank with the great spiritual aspirations in stone of the Hindu
builders.
I do not demand
“moral
suggestionsˮ from architecture, but is it true that there is nothing but a
sensuous outward grace and beauty and luxury in these Indo-Moslem buildings? It
is not at all true of the characteristic greater work. The Taj is not merely a
sensuous reminiscence of an imperial amour or a fairy enchantment hewn from the
moonʼs lucent quarries, but the eternal dream of a love that survives death.
The great mosques embody often a religious aspiration lifted to a noble
austerity which supports and is not lessened by the subordinated ornament and
grace. The tombs reach beyond death to the beauty and joy of Paradise. The
buildings of Fatehpur-Sikri are not monuments
of
an effeminate luxurious decadence, — an absurd description
for the mind of the time of Akbar,
— but give form to
a nobility, power and beauty which lay hold upon but do not wallow on the
earth. There is not here indeed the vast spiritual content of the earlier
Indian mind, but it is still an Indian mind which in these delicate creations
absorbs the West Asian influence, and lays stress on the sensuous as before in
the poetry of Kalidasa, but uplifts it to a certain immaterial charm, rises
often from the earth
Page-224
11. Tomb of Salim Chisti, Agra
12. Humayunʼs Tomb, New Delhi
...in certain mosques and tombs I seem to find an impress
of the robust and bold Afghan and Moghul temperament... (P. 223)
The buildings of Fatehpur-Sikri
are not monuments of an effeminate luxurious decadence,
— but give form to a nobility, power and beauty
which lay hold upon but do not wallow on the earth.
There is not here indeed the vast spiritual content
of the earlier Indian mind,
but it is still an Indian mind which in these delicate creations
absorbs the West Asian influence.
(P. 224)
13. Tomb of Iʼtmat-ud-Daula, Agra
14. Taj Mahal, Agra
The Taj is not merely a sensuous reminiscence
of an imperial amour
or a fairy enchantment hewn from the moonʼs lucent quarries,
but the eternal dream of a love that survives death.
(P. 224)
15. Panchamahal, Fatehpuri Sikri
|
Not rational but magical beauty satisfying and enchanting to some deeper ...suprarational aesthetic soul in us is the inexpressible charm of these creations. (P. 224) |
16. Tomb of Iʼtmat-ud-Daula (Detail)
|
without quite leaving it into the magical beauty of the middle world and in the religious mood touches with a devout hand the skirts of the Divine. The all-pervading spiritual obsession not there, but other elements of life not ignored by Indian culture and gaining on it since the classical times are here brought out under a new influence and are still penetrated with some radiant glow of a superior lustre.
Page-225
3
THE sculpture and painting of
ancient India have recently been rehabilitated with a surprising suddenness in
the eyes of a more cultivated European criticism in the course of that rapid
opening of the western mind to the value of oriental thought and creation which
is one of the most significant signs of a change that is yet only in its
beginning. There have even been here and there minds of a fine perception and
profound originality who have seen in a return to the ancient and persistent
freedom of oriental art, its refusal to be shackled or debased by an imitative
realism, its fidelity to the true theory of art as an inspired interpretation of
the deeper soul-values of existence lifted beyond servitude to the outsides of
Nature, the right way to the regeneration and liberation of the aesthetic and
creative mind of Europe. And actually, although much of western art runs still
along the old grooves, much too of its most original
recent creation has elements or a guiding direction which brings
it nearer to the eastern mentality and understanding. It might then be possible
for us to leave it at that and wait for time to deepen this new vision and
vindicate more fully the truth and greatness of the art of India.
But we are concerned not only with the critical estimation of our art by Europe, but much more nearly with the evil effect of the earlier depreciation on the Indian mind which has been for a long time side-tracked off its true road by a foreign, an anglicised education and, as a result, vulgarised and falsified by the loss of its own true centre, because this hampers and retards a sound and living revival of artistic taste and culture and stands in the way of a new age of creation. It was only a few years ago that the mind of educated India — “educatedˮ without an atom of real culture — accepted contentedly the vulgar English estimate of our sculpture and painting as undeveloped inferior art or even a mass of monstrous and abortive miscreation, and though that has passed and there is a great change, there is still very common a heavy weight of second-hand occidental notions, a bluntness or
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absolute
lacking of
aesthetic taste,1
a
failure to appreciate, and
one still comes sometimes across
a strain of blatantly anglicised criticism which depreciates all that is in the
Indian manner and praises only what is consistent with western canons. And the
old style of European criticism continues to have some weight with
us, because
the lack of aesthetic or indeed of any real cultural
training
in our present system of education makes us ignorant
undiscriminating receptacles, so that we are ready to take the
considered opinions of competent critics like Okakura or Mr. Laurence Binyon
and the rash scribblings of journalists of the type of Mr. Archer, who write
without authority because in these
things
they
have neither taste nor knowledge, as of equal importance
and the latter even attract a greater attention. It is still necessary
therefore to reiterate things which, however obvious to trained or sensitive
aesthetic intelligence, are not yet familiar to the average mind still
untutored or habituated to a system of false weights and values. The work of
recovering a true and inward understanding of ourselves — our past and our
present self and from that our future — is only in its commencement for the
majority of our people.
To appreciate our own artistic past at its right value we have free ourselves from all subjection to a foreign outlook and see our sculpture and painting, as I have already suggested about our, architecture, in the light of its own profound intention and greatness of spirit. When we so look at it, we shall be able to see that the sculpture of ancient and mediaeval India claims its place on the very highest levels of artistic achievement. I do not know where we shall find a sculptural art of a more profound intention, greater spirit, a more consistent skill of achievement. Inferior work there is, work that fails or succeeds only partially, but take it in its whole, in the long persistence of its excellence, in the umber of its masterpieces, in the power with which it renders the soul and the mind of a people, and we shall be tempted to go further and claim for it a first place. The art of sculpture has indeed flourished supremely only in ancient countries where it
1 For example, one still reads with a sense of despairing stupefaction “criticismˮ that speaks of Ravi Varma and Abanindranath Tagore as artistic creators of different styles, but equal power and genius!
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was conceived against its
natural background and support, a great architecture. Egypt, Greece, India take
the premier rank in this kind of creation. Mediaeval and modern Europe produced
nothing of the same mastery, abundance and amplitude, while on the contrary in
painting later Europe has done much and richly and with a prolonged and
constantly renewed inspiration. The difference arises from the different kind
of mentality required by the two arts. The material in which we work makes its
own peculiar demand on the creative spirit, lays down its own natural
conditions, as Ruskin has pointed out in a different connection, and the art of
making in stone or bronze calls for a cast of mind which the ancients had and
the modems have not or have had only in rare individuals, an artistic mind not
too rapidly mobile and self-indulgent, not too much mastered by its own
personality and emotion and the touches that excite and pass, but founded
rather on some great basis of assured thought and vision, stable in
temperament, fixed in its imagination on things that are firm and enduring. One
cannot trifle with ease in this sterner material, one cannot even for long or
with safety indulge in them in mere grace and external beauty or the more
superficial, mobile and lightly attractive motives. The aesthetic
self-indulgence which the soul of colour permits and even invites, the
attraction of the mobile play of life to which line of brush, pen or pencil
gives latitude, are here forbidden or, if to some extent achieved, only within
a line of restraint to cross which is perilous and soon fatal. Here grand or
profound motives are called for, a more or less penetrating spiritual vision or
some sense of things eternal to base the creation. The sculptural art is
static, self-contained, necessarily firm, noble or severe and demands an
aesthetic spirit capable of these qualities. A certain mobility of life and mastering
grace of line can come in upon this basis, but if it entirely replaces the
original Dharma of the material, that means that the spirit of the statuette
has come into the statue and we may be sure of an approaching decadence.
Hellenic sculpture following this line passed from the greatness of Phidias
through the soft of Praxiteles to its decline. A later Europe has failed for
the most part in sculpture, in spite of some great work
by in-
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dividuals, an Angelo or a
Rodin, because it played externally with stone and bronze, took them as a
medium for the representation of life and could not find a sufficient basis of
profound vision or spiritual motive. In Egypt and in India, on the contrary,
sculpture preserved its power of successful creation through several great
ages. The earliest recently discovered work in India dates back to the fifth
century B.C. and is already fully evolved with an evident history of consummate
previous creation behind it, and the latest work of some high value comes down
to within a few centuries from our own time. An assured history of two
millenniums of accomplished sculptural creation is a rare and
significant fact in
the life of a people.
This greatness and continuity
of Indian sculpture is due to the close connection between the religious and
philosophical and the aesthetic mind of the people. Its survival into times not
far from us was possible because of the survival of the cast of the antique
mind in that philosophy and religion, a mind familiar with eternal things,
capable of cosmic vision, having its roots of thought and seeing in the
profundities of the soul, in the most intimate, pregnant and abiding
experiences of the human spirit. The spirit of this greatness is indeed at the
opposite pole to the perfection within limits, the lucid nobility or the vital
fineness and physical grace of Hellenic creation in stone. And since the
favourite trick of Mr. Archer and his kind is to throw the Hellenic ideal
constantly in our face, as if sculpture must be either governed by the Greek
standard or worthless, it is as well to take note of the meaning of the
difference. The earlier and more archaic Greek style had indeed something in it
which looks like
a reminiscent touch of a
first creative origin from Egypt and the
Orient, but there is already
there the governing conception which determined the Greek aesthesis and has
dominated the later mind of Europe, the will to combine some kind of expression
of an inner truth with an idealising imitation of external Nature. The
brilliance, beauty and nobility of the work which was accomplished, was a very great and perfect thing, but it is idle to maintain that that is
the sole possible method or the one permanent and natural law of artistic
creation. Its highest greatness subsisted only so long —
and it was not for very long
— as a
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certain satisfying balance was struck and constantly maintained between a fine, but not very subtle, opulent or profound spiritual suggestion and an outward physical harmony of nobility and grace. A later work achieved a brief miracle of vital suggestion and sensuous physical grace with a certain power of expressing the spirit of beauty in the mould of the senses; but this once done, there was no more to see or create. For the curious turn which impels at the present day the modem mind to return to spiritual vision through a fiction of exaggerated realism which is really a pressure upon the form of things to yield the secret of the spirit in life and matter, was not open to the classic temperament and intelligence. And it is surely time for us to see, as is now by many admitted, that an acknowledgment of the greatness of Greek art in its own province ought not to prevent the plain perception of the rather strait and narrow bounds of that province. What Greek sculpture expressed was fine, gracious and noble, but what it did not express and could not by the limitations of its canon hope to attempt, was considerable, was immense in possibility, was that spiritual depth and extension which the human mind needs for its larger and deeper self-experience. And just this is the greatness of Indian sculpture that it expresses in stone and bronze what the Greek aesthetic mind could not conceive or express and embodies it with a profound understanding of its right conditions and a native perfection.
The more ancient sculptural art of India embodies in visible form what the Upanishads threw out into inspired thought and the Mahabharata and Ramayana portrayed by the word in life. This sculpture like the architecture springs from spiritual realisation, and what it creates and expresses at its greatest is the spirit in form, the soul in body, this or that living soul-power in the divine or the human, the universal and cosmic individualised in suggestion but not lost in individuality, the impersonal supporting a not too insistent play of personality, the abiding moments of the eternal, the presence, the idea, the power, the calm or potent delight of the spirit in its actions and creations. And over all the art something of this intention broods and persists and is suggested even where it does not dominate the mind of the sculptor. And therefore as in the architecture so in the sculp-
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ture,
we have
to bring a
different mind to this work, a different
capacity
of
vision and response, we have to go deeper into ourselves
to see than in the more outwardly imaginative art of Europe. The Olympian gods
of Phidias are magnified and uplifted human beings saved from a too human
limitation by a certain divine calm of impersonality or universalised quality,
divine type, guṇa; in other work we see heroes, athletes, feminine
incarnations of beauty, calm and restrained embodiments of idea, action or
emotion in the idealised beauty of the human
figure. The gods of Indian
sculpture are cosmic beings, embodiments of some great
spiritual power, spiritual idea and, action, inmost psychic significance, the human
form a vehicle of this soul meaning, its outward means of self-expression;
everything in the figure, every opportunity it gives, the face, the hands the
posture of the
limbs, the poise and turn of the body, every
accessory,
has
to be made instinct with the inner meaning, help
it
to emerge, carry out the rhythm of the total suggestion, and on the other hand
everything is suppressed which would defeat this end, especially all that would
mean an insistence on the merely vital or physical, outward or obvious
suggestions of the human figure. Not the ideal physical or emotional beauty,
but the
utmost spiritual beauty or significance of
which the human
form is capable, is the aim of this kind of
creation. The divine self in us is its theme, the body made a form of the soul
is its idea and its secret. And. therefore in front of this art it is not
enough to look at it and respond with the aesthetic eye and the imagination,
but we must look also into the form for what it carries and even through and
behind it to pursue the profound suggestion it gives into its own infinite. The
religious or hieratic side of Indian sculpture is intimately connected with the
spiritual
experiences of Indian meditation and adoration, — those deep things of our
self-discovery which our critic calls contemptuously,
Yogic hallucinations,
—
soul
realisation is its method of creation and soul realisation must be the way of
our response and understanding. And even with the figures of human beings or
groups it is still a like inner aim and vision which governs the labour of the
sculptor. The statue of a king or a saint is not meant merely to give the idea
of a king or saint or to portray
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some dramatic
action or to be a character, portrait in stone, but to embody rather a soul-state or experience
or deeper soul-quality, as for instance, not the outward emotion, but the inner
soul-side of rapt ecstasy of adoration and God-vision in the saint or the devotee before the presence of the worshipped
deity. This is the character of the task the Indian sculptor set before his
effort and it is according to his success in that and not by the absence
of something else,
some quality or some intention foreign to his
mind and contrary to
his design, that we have to judge of his
achievement and his labour.
Once we admit this standard, it is
impossible to speak too highly of the profound intelligence of its conditions
which was developed in Indian sculpture, of the skill with which its task was
treated or of the consummate grandeur and beauty of its masterpieces. Take the
great Buddhas —
not the Gandharan,
but the divine figures or groups in cave-cathedral or temple, the best of the
later southern bronzes of which there is
“a remarkable collection of
plates in Mr. Gangolyʼs book on that subject, the Kalasanhara
image, the Natarajas. No greater or finer work,
whether in
conception or execution, has been done by the human hand and its greatness is
increased by obeying a spiritualised aesthetic vision. The figure of the Buddha
achieves the expression of the infinite in a finite image, and that is surely
no mean or barbaric achievement, to embody the illimitable calm of Nirvana in a
human form and visage. The Kalasanhara Shiva is supreme not only by the
majesty, power, calmly forceful control, dignity and kingship of existence
which the whole spirit and pose of the figure visibly incarnates, — that is
only half or less than half
its achievement, —
but much more by the
concentrated divine passion of the spiritual overcoming of time and existence
which the artist has succeeded in putting into eye and brow and mouth and every
feature and has subtly supported by the contained suggestion, not emotional,
but spiritual, of every part of the body of the godhead and the rhythm of his
meaning which he has poured through the whole unity of this creation. Or what
of the marvellous genius and skill in the treatment of the cosmic movement and
delight of the dance of Shiva, the success with which the posture of every limb
is made to bring out the rhythm
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of the significance, the
rapturous intensity and abandon of the
movement itself and yet the
just restraint in the intensity of motion, the subtle variation of each element
of the single theme in the seizing idea of these master sculptors? Image after
image in the great temples or saved from the wreck of time shows the same grand
traditional art and the genius which worked in that tradition and its many
styles, the profound and firmly grasped spiritual idea, the consistent
expression of it in every curve, line and mass, in hand and limb, in suggestive
pose, in expressive
, rhythm,
—
it is an art which,
understood in its own spirit, need
fear no comparison with any other, ancient or
modern, Hellenic or Egyptian, of the near or the far East or of the West in any
of its creative ages. This sculpture passed through many changes, a more
ancient art of extraordinary grandeur and epic power uplifted by the same
spirit as reigned in the Vedic and Vedantic seers and in the epic poets, a
later Puranic turn towards grace and beauty and rapture and an outburst of
lyric ecstasy and movement, and last a rapid and vacant decadence; but throughout all the second period too the depth and greatness of sculptural motive
supports and vivifies the work and in the very turn towards decadence
something of it often remains to redeem from complete debasement, emptiness or
insignificance.
Let us see then what is the value of the objections made to the spirit and style of Indian sculpture. This is the burden of the objurgations of the devilʼs advocate that his self-bound European mind finds the whole thing barbaric, meaningless, uncouth, strange, bizarre, the work of a distorted imagination labouring mid a nightmare of unlovely unrealities. Now there is in the total of what survives to us work that is less inspired or even work that is bad, exaggerated, forced or clumsy, the production of mechanic artificers mingled with the creation of great nameless artists, and an eye that does not understand the sense, the first conditions of the work, the mind of the race or its type of aesthesis, may well fail to distinguish between good and inferior execution, decadent work and the work of the great hands and the great eras. But applied as a general description the criticism is itself grotesque and distorted and it means only that here are conceptions and a figuring imagination strange to the western
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intelligence. The line and run and turn
demanded by the Indian aesthetic sense are not the same as those demanded by
the European. It would take too long to examine the detail of the difference
which we find not only in sculpture, but in the other plastic arts and in music
and even to a certain extent in literature, but on the whole we may say that
the Indian mind moves on the spur of a spiritual sensitiveness and psychic
curiosity, while the aesthetic curiosity of the European temperament is
intellectual, vital, emotional and imaginative in that sense, and almost the
whole strangeness of the Indian use of line and mass, ornament and proportion
and rhythm arises from this difference. The two minds live almost in different
worlds, are either not looking at the same things or, even where they meet in
the object, see it from a different level or surrounded by a different
atmosphere, and we know what power the point of view or the medium of vision
has to transform the object. And undoubtedly there is very ample ground for Mr.
Archerʼs complaint of the want of naturalism in most Indian sculpture. The
inspiration, the way of seeing is frankly not naturalistic, not, that is to
say, the vivid, convincing and accurate, the graceful, beautiful
or strong, or even
the idealised or imaginative imitation of
surface or terrestrial nature. The Indian sculptor is concerned with embodying
spiritual experiences and impressions, not with recording or glorifying what is
received by the physical senses. He may start with suggestions from earthly and
physical things, but he produces his work only after he has closed his eyes to
the insistence of the physical circumstances, seen them in the psychic memory
and transformed them within himself so as to bring out something other than
their physical reality or their vital and intellectual significance. His eye
sees the psychic line and turn of things and he replaces by them the material
contours. It is not surprising that such a method should produce results which
are strange to the average western mind and eye when these are not liberated by
a broad and sympathetic culture. And what is strange to us is naturally
repugnant to our habitual mind and uncouth to our habitual sense, bizarre to
our imaginative tradition and aesthetic training. We want what is familiar to
the eye and obvious to the imagination and will not readily admit that there
may be here
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another
and perhaps greater beauty than that in the circle
of
which
we are accustomed to live and take pleasure.
It seems to be especially the application
of this psychic vision to the human form which offends these critics of Indian
sculpture. There is the familiar objection to such features as the
multiplication of the arms in the figures of gods and goddesses, the four, six,
eight or ten arms of Shiva, the eighteen arms of Durga, because they are a
monstrosity, a thing not in nature. Now certainly a play of imagination of this
kind would be out of place in the representation of a man or woman, because it
would have no artistic or other meaning, but I cannot see why this freedom
should be denied in the representation of cosmic beings like the Indian
godheads. The whole question is, first, whether it is an appropriate means of
conveying a significance not otherwise to be represented with an equal power
and force and, secondly, whether it is capable of artistic representation, a
rhythm of artistic truth and unity which need not be that of physical
nature.
If not, then it is an ugliness and violence,
but if these, conditions are satisfied, the means are justified and I do not see
that we have any right, faced with the perfection of the work, to
raise
a discordant clamour. Mr. Archer himself is
struck with the perfection of skill and mastery with which these to him superfluous
limbs are disposed in the figures of the dancing Shiva, and indeed it would
need an eye of impossible blindness not to see that much, but what is still
more important is the artistic significance which this skill is used to serve,
and, if that is understood, we can at once see that the spiritual emotion and
suggestions of the cosmic dance are brought out by this device in a way which
would not be as possible with a two-armed figure. The
same truth holds as to the Durga with her eighteen arms
slaying the Asuras or
the Shivas of the great Pallava creations where
the lyrical beauty of the Natarajas is absent, but there is
instead a great
epical rhythm and grandeur. Art justifies its own means and here it does it
with a supreme perfection. And as for “contortedˮ
postures of some figures, the same law holds.
There
is often a departure in this respect from the anatomical norm of the physical
body or else —
and that is a rather different
thing
— an emphasis more or less
pronounced on an unusual
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pose of limbs or
body, and the question
then without sense or purpose, a. mere clumsiness or
an ugly, exaggeration, or whether it rather serves some
significance and establishes in the place of the normal physical metric of
Nature another purposeful and successful artistic rhythm. Art after all is not
forbidden to deal with the unusual or to alter and overpass Nature, and it
might almost be said that it has been
doing,
little else since it began to serve the human
imagination from its
first grand epic
exaggerations to the violences of modem romanticism
and realism, from the high ages of Valmiki and Homer to the day of Hugo and
Ibsen. The means matter, but less than the
significance and the thing
done and the power and beauty with
which it expresses
the dreams and truths of the human spirit.
The whole question of the Indian artistic
treatment
of the
human figure has to be understood in the light of its aesthetic
purpose. It works with a certain intention and
ideal, a general norm and standard which permits of a good many variations and
from which too there are appropriate
departures. The epithets with which Mr. Archer tries to damn its features are
absurd, captious, exaggerated, the forced phrases of a journalist trying
to depreciate a
perfectly sensible, beautiful and aesthetic
norm
with which he does not sympathise. There are other things
here
than a repetition of hawk faces, wasp waists,
thin legs and the
rest
of the ill-tempered caricature. He doubts Mr. Havellʼs suggestion that
these old Indian artists knew the anatomy of the body well enough, as Indian
science knew it, but chose to depart from it for their own purpose. It does not
seem to me to matter much, since art is not anatomy, nor an artistic
masterpiece necessarily are production of physical fact or a lesson in natural
science. I see no reason to regret the absence of telling studies in muscles,
torsos, etc., for I cannot regard these things as having in themselves any
essential artistic value. The one important point is that the Indian artist had
a perfect idea of proportion and rhythm and used them in certain styles with
nobility and power, in others like the Javan, the Gauda or the southern bronzes
with that or with a perfect grace added and often an intense and a lyrical
sweetness. The dignity and beauty of the human figure in the best Indian
statues cannot be excelled, but what was sought and what was
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achieved was not an outward naturalistic, but a spiritual and a psychic beauty, and to achieve it the sculptor suppressed, and was entirely right in suppressing, the obtrusive material detail and d instead at purity of outline and fineness of feature. And into that outline, into that purity and fineness he was able to work whatever he chose, mass of force or delicacy of grace, a static dignity or a mighty strength or a restrained violence of movement or whatever served or helped his meaning. A divine and subtle body was his ideal; and to a taste and imagination too blunt or realistic to conceive the truth and beauty of his idea, the ideal itself may well be a stumbling-block, a thing of offence. But the triumphs of art are not to be limited by the narrow prejudices of the natural realistic man; that triumphs and endures which appeals to the best, sādhu-sammatam, that is deepest and greatest which satisfies the profoundest souls and the most sensitive psychic imaginations.
Each manner of art has its own ideals,
traditions, agreed conventions; for the ideas and forms of the creative spirit
are many though there is one ultimate basis. The perspective, the psychic
vision of the
Chinese and Japanese painters are not the
same
as those of European artists; but who can ignore the beauty and the wonder of
their work? I dare say Mr. Archer could set a Constable or a Turner above the
whole mass of Far Eastern work, as I myself, if I had to make a choice, would
take a Chinese or Japanese landscape or other magic transmutation of Nature in
preference to all others; but these are matters of individual, national or
continental temperament and preference. The essence of the question lies in the
rendering of the truth and beauty
seized by the spirit. Indian sculpture, Indian
art in general follows its own ideal and traditions and these
are unique in their character and quality. It is the expression, great as a
whole rough many centuries and ages of creation, supreme at its best,
wheather in rare early pre-Asokan, in Asokan or later work of the first
heroic age or in the magnificent statues of the cave-cathedrals and Pallava and
other southern temples or the noble, accomplished or gracious imaginations of
Bengal, Nepal and Java through the after centuries or in the singular skill and
delicacy the bronze work of the southern religions, a self-expression of
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the spirit and ideals
of a great nation and a great culture
which stands apart
in the cast of its mind and qualities among the earthʼs peoples, famed for
its spiritual achievement, its deep philosophies and its religious spirit, its
artistic taste, the richness of its poetic imagination, and not inferior once in
its dealings with life and its social endeavour and political institutions. This
sculpture is a singularly powerful, a seizing and profound interpretation in
stone and bronze of the inner soul of that people. The nation, the culture
failed for a time in life after a long greatness, as others failed before it
and others will yet fail that now flourish; the creations of its mind have been
arrested, this art like others has ceased or fallen into decay, but the thing
from which it rose, the spiritual fire within still burns and in the renascence
that is coming it may be that this great art too will revive, not saddled with
the grave limitations of modem western work in the kind, but vivified by the
nobility of a new impulse and power of the ancient spiritual motive. Let it
recover, not limited by old forms, but undeterred by the cavillings of an alien
mind, the sense of the grandeur and beauty and the inner significance of its
past achievement; for in the continuity of its spiritual endeavour lies its
best hope for the future.
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4
The
art of painting in ancient and later India, owing to
the comparative scantiness of its surviving creations, does not create quite so
great an impression as her architecture and sculpture and it has even been supposed
that this art flourished only at intervals, finally ceased for a period of
several centuries and was revived later on by the Moghuls and by Hindu artists
who underwent the Moghul influence. This however is a hasty view that does not
outlast a more careful research and consideration of the available evidence. It
appears, on the contrary, that Indian culture was able to arrive at a well
developed and an understanding aesthetic use of colour and line from
very early times and, allowing for the successive fluctuations, periods of
decline and fresh outbursts of originality and vigour, which the collective
human mind undergoes in all countries, used this form of self-expression very
persistently through the long centuries of its growth and greatness. And
especially it is apparent now that there was a persistent tradition, a
fundamental spirit and turn of the aesthetic sense native to the mind of India
which links even the latest Rajput art to the earliest surviving work still
preserved at its highest summit of achievement in the rock-cut retreats of
Ajanta.
The materials of the art of painting are
unfortunately more perishable than those of any other of the greater means of
creative aesthetic self-expression and of the ancient masterpieces only a
little survives, but that little still indicates the immensity of the amount of
work of which it is the fading remnant. It is said that of the twenty-nine
caves at Ajanta almost all once bore signs of decoration by frescoes; only so
long ago as forty years sixteen still contained something of the original
paintings, but now six alone still bear their witness to the greatness of this
ancient art, though rapidly perishing and deprived of something of the original
warmth and beauty and glory of colour. The rest of all that vivid
contemporaneous creation which must at one time have covered the whole country
in the temples and viharas and
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the houses of the cultured and the courts and pleasure-houses of nobles and kings, has perished, and we have only, more or less similar to the work at Ajanta, some crumbling fragments of rich and profuse decoration in the caves of Bagh and a few paintings of female figures in two rock-cut chambers at Sigiriya.1 These remnants represent the work of some six or seven centuries, but they leave gaps, and nothing now remains of any paintings earlier than the first century of the Christian era, except some frescoes, spoilt by unskilful restoration, from the first century before it, while after the seventh there is a blank which might at first sight argue a total decline of the art, a cessation and disappearance. But there are fortunately evidences which carry back the tradition of the art at one end many centuries earlier and other remains more recently discovered and of another kind outside India and in the Himalayan countries carry it forward at the other end as late as the twelfth century and help us to link it on to the later schools of Rajput painting. The history of the self-expression of the Indian mind in painting covers a period of as much as two millenniums of more or less intense artistic creation and stands on a par in this respect with the architecture and sculpture.
The paintings that remain to us from ancient times are the work of Buddhist painters, but the art itself in India was of pre-Buddhistic origin. The Tibetan historian ascribes a remote antiquity to all the crafts, prior to the Buddha, and this is a conclusion increasingly pointed to by a constant accumulation of evidence. Already in the third century before the Christian era we find the theory of the art well founded from previous times, the six essential elements, ṣaḍaṅga, recognized and enumerated, like the more or less corresponding six Chinese canons which are first mentioned nearly a thousand years later, and in a very ancient work on the art pointing back to pre-Buddhistic times a number of careful and very well-defined rules and traditions are laid down which were developed into an elaborate science of technique and traditional rule in the later Shilpasutras. The frequent references in the ancient literature also are of a character which would have been impossible without a widespread practice
1 Since then more paintings of high quality have been found in some southern temples, akin in their spirit and style to the work at Ajanta.
Page-240
17. Dhyani Buddha, Ajanta
Dhyani Buddha with its Supreme,
its unfathomable, its infinite spiritual calm...
18. Buddha, Mathura Museum
The figure of the Buddha
achieves the expression of
the infinite in a finite image,
...the illimitable calm of Nirvana
in a human form and visage.
(P. 232)
19.Durga, Mahishasuramardini, Mahabalipuram
...some calm unfathomable Buddha,
bronze Siva or
eight-armed Durga slaying the Asuras.
(P. 204)
20. Nataraja, Tanjore
and
appreciation of the art by both men and women of the cultured classes, and
these allusions and incidents evidencing a moved delight in the painted form
and beauty of colour and the appeal both to the decorative sense and to the
aesthetic emotion occur not only in the later poetry of Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti
and other classical dramatists, but in the early popular drama of Bhasa and
earlier still in the epics and in the sacred books of the Buddhists. The absence
of any actual creations of this earlier art makes it indeed impossible to say
with absolute certainty what was its fundamental character and intimate source
of inspiration or whether it was religious and hieratic or secular in its
origin. The theory has been advanced rather too positively that it was in the
courts of kings that the art began and with a purely secular motive and
inspiration, and it is true that while the surviving work of Buddhist artists
is mainly religious in subject or at least links on common scenes of life to
Buddhist ceremony and legend, the references in the epic and dramatic
literature are usually to painting of a more purely aesthetic character,
personal, domestic or civic, portrait painting, the representation of scenes
and incidents in the lives of kings and other great personalities or mural
decoration of palaces and private or public buildings. On the other hand, there
are similar elements in Buddhist painting, as, for example, the portraits of
the queens of King Kashyapa at Sigiriya, the historic representation of a
Persian embassy or the landing of Vijaya in Ceylon. And we may fairly assume
that all along Indian painting, both Buddhist and Hindu, covered much the same
kind of ground as the later Rajput work in a more ample fashion and with a more
antique greatness of spirit and was in its ensemble an interpretation of the
whole religion, culture and life of the Indian people. The one important and
significant thing that emerges is the constant oneness and continuity of all Indian
art in its essential spirit and tradition. Thus the earlier work at Ajanta has
been found to be akin to the earlier sculptural work of the Buddhists, while
the later paintings have a similar close kinship to the sculptural reliefs at
Java. And we find that the spirit and tradition which reigns through all
changes of style and manner at Ajanta, is present too at Bagh and Sigiriya, in
the Khotan frescoes, in the illuminations of Buddhist manuscripts of
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a much
later time and in spite of the change of form and manner is still spiritually
the same in the Rajput paintings. This unity and continuity enable us to
distinguish and arrive at a clear understanding of what is the essential aim,
inner turn and motive, spiritual method which differentiate Indian painting
first from occidental work and then from the nearer and more kindred art of
other countries of Asia.
The spirit and motive of Indian painting
are in their centre conception and shaping force of sight identical with the
inspiring vision of Indian sculpture. All Indian art is a throwing out of a
certain profound self-vision formed by a going within to find out the secret
significance of form and appearance, a discovery of the subject in oneʼs deeper
self, the giving of soul-form to that vision and a remoulding of the material
and natural shape to express the psychic truth of it with the greatest possible
purity and power of outline and the greatest possible concentrated rhythmic
unity of significance in all the parts of an indivisible artistic whole. Take
whatever masterpiece of Indian painting and we shall find these conditions
aimed at and brought out into a triumphant beauty of suggestion and execution.
The only difference from the other arts comes from the turn natural and inevitable
to its own kind of aesthesis, from the moved and indulgent dwelling on what one
might call the mobilities of the soul rather than on its static eternities, on
the casting out of self into the grace and movement of psychic and vital life
(subject always to the reserve and restraint necessary to all art) rather than
on the holding back of life in the stabilities of the self and its eternal
qualities and principles, guṇa and tattva. This distinction is of
the very essence of the difference between the work given to the sculptor and
the painter, a difference imposed on them by the natural scope, turn,
possibility of their instrument and medium. The sculptor must express always in
static form; the idea of the spirit is cut out for him in mass and line, significant
in the stability of its insistence, and he can lighten the weight of this
insistence but not get rid of it or away from it; for him eternity seizes hold
of time in its shapes and arrests it in the monumental spirit of stone or
bronze. The painter on the contrary lavishes his soul in colour and there is a
liquidity in the form, a fluent grace of subtlety in the line
he
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uses
which imposes on him a more mobile and emotional way of self-expression. The
more he gives us of the colour and changing form and emotion of the life of the
soul, the more his work glows with beauty, masters the inner aesthetic sense
and opens it to the thing his art better gives us than any other, the delight
of the motion of the self out into a spiritually sensuous joy of beautiful
shapes and the coloured radiances of existence. Painting is naturally the most
sensuous of the arts, and the highest greatness open to the painter is to
spiritualise this sensuous appeal by making the most vivid outward beauty a
revelation of subtle spiritual emotion so that the soul and the sense are at
harmony in the deepest and finest richness of both and united in their
satisfied consonant expression of the inner significances of things and life.
There is less of the austerity of Tapasya in his way of working, a less
severely restrained expression of eternal things and of the fundamental truths
behind the forms of things, but there is in compensation a moved wealth of
psychic or warmth of vital suggestion, a lavish delight of the beauty of the
play of the
eternal in the moments of
time and there the artist arrests it for
us and makes moments of the
life of the soul reflected in form of man or creature or incident or scene or
Nature full of a permanent and opulent significance to our spiritual vision.
The art of the painter justifies visually to the spirit the search of the sense
for delight by making it its own search for the pure intensities of meaning of
the universal beauty it has revealed or hidden in creation; the indulgence of
the eyeʼs desire in perfection of form and colour becomes an enlightenment of
the inner being through the power of a certain spiritually aesthetic Ananda.
The Indian artist lived in the light of an
inspiration which imposed this greater aim on his art and his method sprang
from its fountains and served it to the exclusion of any more earthly sensuous
or outwardly imaginative aesthetic impulse. The six limbs of his art, the ṣaḍaṅga
are common to all work in line and colour: they are the necessary elements
and in their elements the great arts are the same everywhere; the distinction
of forms, rūpabheda, proportion, arrangement of line and mass, design,
harmony, perspective, pramāṇa, the emotion or aesthetic feeling
expressed by the form, bhāva, the seeking for beauty and charm for
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the satisfaction of the aesthetic spirit, lāvaṇya, truth of the form and its suggestion, sādṛśya, the turn, combination, harmony of colours, varṇikābhaṅga, are the first constituents to which every successful work of art reduces itself in analysis. But it is the turn given to each of the constituents which makes all the difference in the aim and effect of the technique and the source and character of the inner vision guiding the creative hand in their combination which makes all the difference in the spiritual value of the achievement, and the unique character of Indian painting, the peculiar appeal of the art of Ajanta springs from the remarkably inward, spiritual and psychic turn which was given to the artistic conception and method by the pervading genius of Indian culture. Indian painting no more than Indian architecture and sculpture could escape from its absorbing motive, its transmuting atmosphere, the direct or subtle obsession of the mind that has been subtly and strangely changed, the eye that has been trained to see, not as others with only the external eye but by a constant communing of the mental parts and the inner vision with the self beyond mind and the spirit to which forms are only a transparent veil or a slight index of its own greater splendour. The outward beauty and power, the grandeur of drawing, the richness of colour, the aesthetic grace of this painting is too obvious and insistent to be denied, the psychical appeal usually carries something in it to which there is a response in every cultivated and sensitive human mind and the departures from the outward physical norm are less vehement and intense, less disdainful of the more external beauty and grace, — as is only right in the nature of this art, — than in the sculpture: therefore we find it more easily appreciated up to a certain point by the western critical mind, and even when not well appreciated, it is exposed to milder objections. There is not the same blank incomprehension or violence of misunderstanding and repulsion. And yet we find at the same time that there is something which seems to escape the appreciation or is only imperfectly understood, and this something is precisely that profounder spiritual intention of which the things the eye and esthetic sense immediately seize are only the intermediaries. This explains the remark often made about Indian work of the less visibly potent and quieter kind that
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it lacks inspiration or imagination or is a conventional art: the spirit is missed
where it does not strongly impose itself, and is not fully caught even where
the power which is put into the expression is too great and direct to allow of
denial. Indian painting like Indian architecture and sculpture appeals through
the physical and psychical to another spiritual vision from which the artist
worked and it is only when this is no less awakened in us than the aesthetic
sense that it can be appreciated in all the depth of its significance.
The orthodox western artist works
by a severely conscientious reproduction of the forms of outward Nature; the
external world is his model, and he has to keep it before his eye and repress
any tendency towards a substantial departure from it or any motion to yield his
first allegiance to a subtler spirit. His imagination submits itself to
physical Nature even when he brings in conceptions which are more properly of
another kingdom, the stress of the physical world is always with him, and the
Seer of the subtle, the creator of mental forms, the inner Artist, the wide
eyed voyager in the vaster psychical realms, is obliged to subdue his
inspirations to the law of the Seer of the outward, the spirit,
that has embodied itself in the creations of the terrestrial life, the material
universe. An idealised imaginative realism is as far as he can ordinarily go in
the method of his work when he would fill the outward with the subtler inner
seeing. And when, dissatisfied with this confining law, he would break quite
out of the circle, he is exposed to a temptation to stray into intellectual or
imaginative extravagances which violate the universal rule of the right
distinction of forms, rūpabheda, and belong to the vision of some
intermediate world of sheer fantasia. His art has discovered the rule of
proportion, arrangement and perspective which preserves the illusion of
physical Nature and he relates his whole design to her design in a spirit of
conscientious obedience and faithful dependence. His imagination is a servant
or interpreter of her imaginations, he finds in the observation of her
universal law of beauty his secret of unity and harmony, and his subjectivity
tries to discover itself in hers by a close dwelling on the objective shapes
she has given to her creative spirit. The farthest he has got in the direction
of a more intimately subjective spirit is an
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impressionism which still waits upon her models but seeks to get at some first inward or original effect of them on the inner sense, and through that he arrives at some more strongly psychical rendering, but he does not work altogether from within outward in the freer manner of the oriental artist. His emotion and artistic feeling move in this form and are limited by this artistic convention and are not a pure spiritual or psychic emotion but usually an imaginative exaltation derived from the suggestions of life and outward things with a psychic element or an evocation of spiritual feeling initiated and dominated by the touch of the outward. The charm that he gives is a sublimation of the beauty that appeals to the outward senses by the power of the idea and the imagination working on the outward sense-appeal and other beauty is only brought in by association into that frame. The truth of correspondence he depends upon is a likeness to the creations of physical Nature and their intellectual, emotional and aesthetic significances, and his work of line and wave of colour are meant to embody the flow of this vision. The method of this art is always a transcript from the visible world with such necessary transmutation as the aesthetic mind imposes on its materials. At the lowest to illustrate, at the highest to interpret life and Nature to the mind by identifying it with deeper things through some derivative touch of the spirit that has entered into and subdued itself to their shapes, praviśya yaḥ pratirūpo babhūva, is the governing principle.1
The Indian artist sets out from the
other end of the scale of values of experience which connect life and the
spirit. The whole creative force comes here from a spiritual and psychic
vision, the emphasis of the physical is secondary and always deliberately
lightened so as to give an overwhelmingly spiritual and psychic impression and
everything is suppressed which does not serve this purpose or would distract
the mind from the purity of this intention. This painting expresses the soul
through life, but life is only a means of the spiritual self-expression, and
its outward representation is not the first object or the direct motive. There
is a real and a very vivid and vital representation, but it is more
1 All this is no longer true of European art in much of its more prominent recent developments.
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of an inner psychical than of the outward physical life. A critic of high repute speaking of the Indian influence in a famous Japanese painting fixes on the grand strongly outlined figures and the feeling for life and character recalling the Ajanta frescoes as the signs of its Indian character: but we have to mark carefully the nature of this feeling for life and the origin and intention of this strong outlining of the figures. The feeling for life and character here is a very different thing from the splendid and abundant vitality and the power and force of character which we find in an Italian painting, a fresco from Michael Angeloʼs hand or a portrait by Titian or Tintoretto. The first primitive object of the art of painting is to illustrate life and Nature and at the lowest this becomes a more or less vigorous and original or conventionally faithful reproduction, but it rises in great hands to a revelation of the glory and beauty of the sensuous appeal of life or of the dramatic power and moving interest of character and emotion and action. That is a common form of aesthetic work in Europe; but in Indian art it is never the governing motive. The sensuous appeal is there, but it is refined into only one and not the chief element of the richness of a soul of psychic grace and beauty which is for the Indian artist the true beauty, lāvaṇya: the dramatic motive is subordinated and made only a purely secondary element, only so much is given of character and action as will help to bring out the deeper spiritual or psychic feeling, bhāva, and all insistence or too prominent force of these more outwardly dynamic things is shunned, because that would externalise too much the spiritual emotion and take away from its intense purity by the interference of the grosser intensity which emotion puts on in the stress of the active outward nature. The life depicted is the life of the soul and not, except as a form and a helping suggestion, the life of the vital being and the body. For the second more elevated aim of art is the interpretation or intuitive revelation of existence through the form of life and Nature and it is this that is the starting-point of the Indian motive. But the interpretation may proceed on the basis of the forms already given us by physical Nature and try to evoke by the form an idea, a truth of the spirit which starts from it as a suggestion and returns upon it for support, and the effort is then
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to correlate the form as it is to the physical eye with the truth which it
evokes without overpassing the limits imposed by the appearance. This is the
common method of occidental art always zealous for the immediate fidelity to
Nature which is its idea of true correspondence, sādṛśya, but it is
rejected by the Indian artist. He begins from within, sees in his soul the
thing he wishes to express or interpret and tries to discover the right line,
colour and design of his intuition which, when it appears on the physical
ground, is not a just and reminding reproduction of the line, colour and design
of physical nature, but much rather what seems to us a psychical transmutation
of the natural figure. In reality the shapes he paints are the forms of things
as he has seen them in the psychical plane of experience: these are the
soul-figures of which physical things are a gross representation and their
purity and subtlety reveals at once what the physical masks by the thickness of
its casings. The lines and colours sought here are the psychic lines and the
psychic hues proper to the vision which
the artist has gone into himself to discover.
This is the whole governing principle of the art which gives its stamp to every detail of an Indian painting and transforms the artistʼs use of the six limbs of the canon. The distinction of forms is faithfully observed, but not in the sense of an exact naturalistic fidelity to the physical appearance with the object of a faithful reproduction of the outward shapes of the world in which we live. To recall with fidelity something our eyes have seen or could have seen on the spot, a scene, an interior, a living and breathing person, and give the aesthetic sense and emotion of it to the mind is not the motive. There is here an extraordinary vividness, naturalness, reality, but it is a more than physical reality, a reality which the soul at once recognises as of its own sphere, a vivid naturalness of psychic truth, the convincing spirit of the form to which the soul, not the outward naturalness of the form to which the physical eye bears witness. The truth, the exact likeness is there, the correspondence, sādṛśya, but it is the truth of the essence of the form, it is the likeness of the soul to itself, the reproduction of the subtle embodiment which is the basis of the physical embodiment, the purer and finer subtle body of an object which is the very expression of its own essential na-
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ture, svabhāva. The means by which this effect is produced is characteristic of the inward vision of the Indian mind. It is done by a bold and firm insistence on the pure and strong outline and a total suppression of everything that would interfere with its boldness, strength and purity or would blur over and dilute the intense significance of the line. In the treatment of the human figure all corporeal filling in of the outline by insistence on the flesh, the muscle, the anatomical detail is minimised or disregarded: the strong subtle lines and pure shapes which make the humanity of the human form are alone brought into relief; the whole essential human being is there, the divinity that has taken this garb of the spirit to the eye, but not the superfluous physicality which he carries with him as his burden. It is the ideal psychical figure and body of man and woman that is before us in its charm and beauty. The filling in of the line is done in another way; it is effected by a disposition of pure masses, a design and coloured wave-flow of the body, bhaṅga, a simplicity of content that enables the artist to flood the whole with the significance of the one spiritual emotion, feeling, suggestion which he intends to convey, his intuition of the moment of the soul, its living self-experience. All is disposed so as to express that and that alone. The almost miraculously subtle and meaningful use of the hands to express the psychic suggestion is a common and well-marked feature of Indian paintings and the way in which the suggestion of the face and the eyes is subtly repeated or supplemented by this expression of the hands is always one of the first things that strikes the regard, but as we continue to look, we see that every turn of the body, the pose of each limb, the relation and design of all the masses are filled with the same psychical feeling. The more important accessories help it by a kindred suggestion or bring it out by a support or variation or extension or relief of the motive. The same law of significant line and suppression of distracting detail is applied to animal forms, buildings, trees, objects. There is in all the art an inspired harmony of conception, method and expression. Colour too is used as a means for the spiritual and psychic intention, and we can see this well enough if we study the suggestive significance of the hues in a Buddhist miniature. This power of line and subtlety of psychic suggestion in the
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filling in of the expressive outlines is the
source of that remarkable
union of greatness and
moving grace which is the stamp of the
whole work of Ajanta and
continues in Rajput painting, though there the grandeur of the earlier work is
lost in the grace and replaced by a delicately intense but still bold and
decisive power of vivid and suggestive line. It is this common spirit and
tradition which is the mark of all the truly indigenous work of India.
These things have to be carefully understood and held in mind when we look at an Indian painting and the real spirit of it first grasped before we condemn or praise. To dwell on that in it which is common to an art is well enough, but it is what is peculiar to India that is its real essence. And there again to appreciate the technique and the fervour of religious feeling is not sufficient; the spiritual intention served by the technique, the psychic significance of line and colour, the greater thing of which the religious emotion is the result has to be felt if we would identify ourself with the whole purpose of the artist. If we look long, for an example, at the adoration group of the mother and child before the Buddha, one of the most profound, tender and noble of the Ajanta masterpieces, we shall find that the impression of intense religious feeling of adoration there is only the most outward general touch in the ensemble of the emotion. That which it deepens to is the turning of the soul of humanity in love to the benignant and calm Ineffable which has made itself sensible and human to us in the universal compassion of the Buddha, and the motive of the soul-moment the painting interprets is the dedication of the awakening mind of the child, the coming younger humanity, to that in which already the soul of the mother had learned to find and fix its spiritual joy. The eyes, brows, lips, face, poise of the head of the woman are filled with this spiritual emotion which is a continued memory and possession of the psychical release, the steady settled calm of the heartʼs experience filled with an ineffable tenderness, the familiar depths which are yet moved with the wonder and always farther appeal of something that is infinite, the body and other limbs are grave masses of this emotion and in their poise a basic embodiment of it, while the hands prolong it in the dedicative putting forward of her child to meet the Eternal. This contact of the human and eternal is
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repeated in the smaller figure with a subtly and strongly indicated variation, the glad and childlike smile of awakening which promises but not yet possesses the depths that are to come, the hands disposed to receive and keep, the body in its looser curves and waves harmonising with that significance. The two have forgotten themselves and, seem almost to forget or confound each other in that which they adore and contemplate, and yet the dedicating hands unite mother and child in the common act and feeling by their simultaneous gesture of maternal possession and spiritual giving. The two figures have at each point the same rhythm, but with a significant difference. The simplicity in the greatness and power, the fullness of expression gained by reserve and suppression and concentration which we find here is the perfect method of the classical art of India. And by this perfection Buddhist art became not merely an illustration of the religion and an expression of its thought and its religious feeling, history and legend, but a revealing interpretation of the spiritual sense of Buddhism and its profounder meaning to the soul of India.
To
understand that — we must always seek first and foremost this kind of deeper
intention —
is to understand
the reason of the differences between the occidental and the Indian treatment
of the life motives. Thus a portrait by a great European painter will express
with sovereign power the soul through character, through the active qualities,
the ruling powers and passions, the master feeling and temperament, the active
mental and vital man: the Indian artist tones down the outward-going dynamic
indices and gives only so much of them as will serve to bring out or to
modulate something that is more of the grain of the subtle soul, something more
static and impersonal of which our personality is at once the mask and the index.
A moment of the spirit expressing with purity the permanence of a very subtle
soul quality is the highest type of the Indian portrait. And more generally the
feeling for character which has been noted as a feature of the Ajanta work is of a similar kind. An Indian painting
expressing, let us say, a religious feeling centred on some significant
incident will show the expression in each figure varied in such a way as to
bring out the universal spiritual essence of the emotion modified by the
essential soul type, different waves
of
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the one sea, all complexity of dramatic insistence is avoided, and so much stress only is laid on character in the individual feeling as to give the variation without diminishing the unity of the fundamental emotion. The vividness of life in these paintings must not obscure for us the more profound purpose for which it is the setting, and this has especially to be kept in mind in our view of the later art which has not the greatness of the classic work and runs to a less grave and highly sustained kind, to lyric emotion, minute vividness of life movement, the more naive feelings of the people. One sometimes finds inspiration, decisive power of thought and feeling, originality of creative imagination denied to this later art; but its real difference from that of Ajanta is only that the intermediate psychic transmission between the life movement and the inmost motive has been given with less power and distinctness: the psychic thought and feeling are there more thrown outward in movement, less contained in the soul, but still the soul-motive is not only present but makes the true atmosphere and if we miss it, we miss the real sense of the picture. This is more evident where the inspiration is religious, but it is not absent from the secular subject. Here too spiritual intention or psychic suggestion are the things of the first importance. In Ajanta work they are all-important and to ignore them at all is to open the way to serious errors of interpretation. Thus a highly competent and very sympathetic critic speaking of the painting of the Great Renunciation says truly that this great work excels in its expression of sorrow and feeling of profound pity, but then, looking for what a western imagination would naturally put into such a subject, he goes on to speak of the weight of a tragic decision, the bitterness of renouncing a life of bliss blended with a yearning sense of hope in the happiness of the future, and that is singularly to misunderstand the spirit in which the Indian mind turns from the transient to the eternal, to mistake the Indian art motive and to put a vital into the place of a spiritual emotion. It is not at all his own personal sorrow but the sorrow of all others, not an emotional self-pity but a poignant pity for the world, not the regret for a life of domestic bliss but the afilicting sense of the unreality of human happiness that is concentrated in the eyes and lips of the Buddha, and the yearning there is not, certainly, for earthly
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happiness in the future but for the spiritual way out, the anguished seeking
which found its release, already foreseen by the spirit behind and hence the
immense calm and restraint that support the sorrow, in the true bliss of
Nirvana. There is illustrated the whole difference between two kinds of
imagination, the mental, vital and physical stress of the art of Europe and the
subtle, less forcefully tangible spiritual stress of the art of India.
It is the indigenous art of which this is the constant spirit and tradition, and it has been doubted whether the Moghul paintings deserve that name, have anything to do with that tradition and are not rather an exotic importation from Persia. Almost all oriental art is akin in this respect that the psychic enters into and for the most part lays its subtler law on the physical vision and the psychic line and significance give the characteristic turn, are the secret of the decorative skill, direct the higher art in its principal motive. But there is a difference between the Persian psychicality which is redolent of the magic of the middle worlds and the Indian which is only a means of transmission of the spiritual vision. And obviously the Indo-Persian style of the former kind and not indigenous to India. But the Moghul school is not an exotic; there is rather a blending of two mentalities: on the one side there is a leaning to some kind of externalism which is not the same thing as western naturalism, a secular spirit and certain prominent elements that are more strongly illustrative than interpretative, but the central thing is still the domination of a transforming touch which shows that there as in the architecture the Indian mind has taken hold of another invading mentality and made it a help to a more outward-going self-expression that comes in as a new side-strain in the spiritual continuity of achievement which began in prehistoric times and ended only with the general decline of Indian culture. Painting, the last of the arts in that decline to touch the bottom, has also been the first to rise again and lift the dawn fires of an era of new creation.
It is not necessary to dilate on the decorative arts and crafts of India, for their excellence has always been beyond dispute. The generalised sense of beauty which they imply is one of the greatest proofs that there can be of the value and soundness of a national culture. Indian culture in this respect need not fear any
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comparison: if it is less predominantly artistic than that of Japan, it is because it has put first the spiritual need and made all other things subservient to and a means for the spiritual growth of the people. Its civilisation, standing in the first rank in the three great arts as in all things of the mind, has proved that the spiritual urge is not, as has been vainly supposed, sterilising to the other activities, but a most powerful force for the many-sided development of the human whole.
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