CHITOR
Decoration is costly nowadays and money scarce. Making a virtue of economic necessity, we have proclaimed the beauty of unadorned simplicity in art. In architecture, for example, we mistrust all “fussy details,” and can admire only the fundamental solid geometry of a building. We like our furniture plain, our silver unchased, our stage scenery flat and unconventional. Our tastes will change, no doubt, when our purses grow longer. Meanwhile, simplicity is regarded as an almost necessary quality of good art.
But the facts are against us. The best art has not been always and necessarily the simplest. Profusion of decorative detail need not obscure the main lines of the composition considered as a whole. Those who require a more convincing proof of these statements than can be found at home, should come to India. They will find in the best specimens of Hindu architecture an unparalleled extravagance of decorative details, entirely subordinated to the main architectural design. It would be difficult to find on the walls of the Chitor temples a single blank square foot. But so far from distracting the attention from the architectural composition, the sculpture and the ornament serve to emphasise the characteristic forms and movements of the strange design. If the sculpture at Chitor is unsatisfactory that is due, not to its elaborateness and profusion, but to its poor intrinsic quality. It is all fairly good, but none of it is first-rate. The innumerable carvings at Chitor are the product of a great anonymous labour. No great original artist stands out from among the craftsmen. It is all nameless, unindividual.
CHITOR
A visit to India makes one realise how fortunate, so far at any rate as the arts are concerned, our Europe has been in its religions. The Olympian religion of antiquity and, except occasionally, the Christianity which took its place, were both favourable to the production of works of art, and the art which they favoured was, on the whole, a singularly reasonable and decent kind of art. Neither paganism nor Christianity imposed restrictions on what the artist might represent; nor did either demand of him that he should try to represent the unrepresentable. The Olympian deities were men made gods; the Saviour of the Christians was God made man. An artist could work to the greater glory of Zeus or of Jesus without ever going beyond the boundaries of real and actual human life.
How different is the state of things in India. Here, one of the two predominant religions forbids absolutely the representation of the human form and even, where Muslim orthodoxy is strict, of any living animal form whatever. It is only occasionally and then in purely secular art and on the smallest of scales that this religious injunction is disobeyed. Mohammedan art tends, in consequence, to be dry, empty, barren, and monotonous.
Hinduism, on the other hand, permits the representation of things human, but adds that the human is not enough. It tells the artist that it is his business to express symbolically the superhuman, the spiritual, the pure metaphysical idea. The best is always the enemy of the good, and by trying to improve on sober human reality, the Hindus have evolved a system of art full of metaphysical monsters and grotesques that are none the less extravagant for being symbolical of the highest of “high” philosophies. (Too high, I may add parenthetically, for my taste. Philosophies, like pheasants, can be hung too long. Most of our highest systems have been pendant for at least two thousand years. I am plebeian enough to prefer my spiritual nourishment fresh. But let us return to Hindu art.)
Readers of the Bhagavad Gita will remember the passage in the Eleventh Discourse, where Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna in a form hitherto unbeheld by mortal eyes:—
“With mouths, eyes, arms, breasts multitudinous . . .
Long-armed, with thighs and feet innumerable,
Vast-bosomed, set with many fearful teeth. . . .”
And further: “With many divine ornaments, with many upraised divine weapons, wearing divine necklaces and vestures, anointed with divine unguents, the God all-marvellous, boundless, with face turned every way.” And so on. The catalogue of Krishna’s members, features and wardrobe covers several pages of Mrs. Besant’s translation of the Gita. We recognise the necessarily inadequate embodiment of the description in innumerable Indian statues and paintings. And what is the significance of these grotesque and repulsive monsters? Krishna himself explains it. “Here to-day,” he says to Arjuna, “behold the whole universe, movable and immovable, standing in one in my body.” These many-limbed monsters are symbolic, then, of the cosmos. They are the One made manifest, the All in a nutshell. Hindu artists are trying to express in terms of form what can only be expressed—and not very clearly at that, for it is difficult to speak lucidly about things of which one knows nothing—in words. The Hindus are too much interested in metaphysics and ultimate Reality to make good artists. Art is not the discovery of Reality—whatever Reality may be, and no human being can possibly know. It is the organisation of chaotic appearance into an orderly and human universe.
UDAIPUR
By some slight error in the original introduction which made us state guests in the various capitals of Rajputana, I found myself credited, during several weeks of my tour, with the title of Professor. It was in vain that I tried to disabuse Guest Officers and Secretaries of State. I was not a professor; there were others of the same name. . . . And so on. My denials were put down to an excessive modesty. Professor I remained to the last. In the end I thought it best to accept the title which had been thrust upon me. My Indian hosts preferred me to be professor; I felt that I could not disoblige them.
Among the Indians of the older generation and in the more old-fashioned parts of the country there is a great respect for learning as such. The scholar is more highly esteemed than the artist. As a professor I found I cut more ice than as a mere writer of fiction.
The position was the same in Europe, three hundred years ago. To their contemporaries, Salmasius seemed a far greater man than Milton. At the time when they came into controversy Milton was a mere minor poet, the author of a few vernacular pieces, such as Lycidas and Comus, and—more important in the eyes of the discerning seventeenth century public—of a number of elegant Latin verses. Salmasius, on the other hand, was the most learned man of his age. His commentary on Orosius was a vast mountain of mixed rubbish raked out of the recesses of innumerable libraries. He had read ten times as many books as any other man of his age; he was therefore ten times as great. Whether he had profited by his reading nobody inquired. Indeed, in an age respectful of authority, it matters not whether a man profits by his reading or remains throughout his life a learned ass. What is important in such an age is the learning as such. In an age of authority originality is not valued so highly as the capacity to repeat, parrot-like, the sayings of the illustrious dead—even of the unillustrious; the important thing is that they should be dead.
India is a country where tradition is strong and authority, at any rate among the men of the older generation, is still profoundly respected. Similar causes produce similar effects, and one can find in India to-day the kind of scholarship that flourished in Europe up to the end of the seventeenth century, together with a complementary scholar-respecting public opinion. I had occasion to meet several extremely learned men, whose attitude towards the ancient Sanskrit literature, which was the object of their studies, was the attitude of a scholastic towards classical and mediæval Latin. For scholars of this type every statement made by the ancients is true and must be accepted without criticism. Galileo’s unequal weights may fall from the Leaning Tower in equal times. Nevertheless bodies must fall with a speed proportional to their weight, because Aristotle says so; and Aristotle must not be criticised or called in question. That was the attitude towards authority in seventeenth century Europe. And that is still the attitude in India. You still meet in India men of culture who accept unquestioningly anything that is written in an ancient book. Thus, in the ancient mythological poems of India there are certain descriptions of flying boats and chariots. Similar references to flying are to be found in almost every mythology or body of fairy tales; but it does not occur to us to take them seriously as accounts of actual fact. We do not claim, for example, that Icarus anticipated Wilbur Wright. But in India, on the other hand, these descriptions are accepted at their face value, and I have met several intelligent and cultured men (one of them was even a scholar of some eminence) who have solemnly assured me that Zeppelins were in common use among the ancient Hindus, and that the Lord Krishna was in the habit of flying by airship to America and back.
It is obvious that, in a society where such worshippers of ancient authority still exist, it is much more respectable to be
