Empire affords. His labours have been lost on Indian departmentalism, and it seems likely that the Germans again will be the first European nation to profit by his life-work.

Indian departmentalism consistently shuts its eyes to the fact that India still has a national art. England had one two centuries ago, and is now seriously attempting to revive it, but the national culture which was the product of centuries cannot be restored in a day. Mr. Edward S. Prior, in a monograph on the Cathedral Builders of England,* which should be a text-book for all who wish to understand Indian art, has described the process by which the classicism of the Italian Renaissance and that peculiar product of modern times, archaeological art, have destroyed the traditional, national art of Europe, just in the same way as the national art of India is now being destroyed by departmentalism. He has shown how in every country and every epoch before the eighteenth century a national architecture was created by trained bodies of craftsmen, organised like the artisan castes of India, so that every building was a school of painting, sculpture and engineering-of art and of craft; every cathedral, church, palace, or mansion, a human document in which was written the life of the nation; every public building in its stability, durability, and beauty, a symbol of the power and dignity of the State. Then came the era of paper architects, of archaeologists and rabid commercialism. So instead of a national art which was a joyous worship of the Creator in the daily work of the people-for the cottager as well as for the King-we have now an art for best parlours' and 'at homes'; an art for museums and exhibitions; an art for the scholar, too absorbed in the dust-heaps of the past to concern himself with the beauty of the present; an art for the merchant, too busy with his money-bags to worship God on week-days.

In India we have now an exactly similar process leading to exactly similar results, only carried on with greater ruthlessness and less artistic understanding, for we have in India no Christopher Wren or Inigo Jones to give us brilliant essays in archaeological architecture. India still possesses a large body of trained craftsmen who practise the art of building on similar principles and produce similar results to those of the great medieval builders of Europe. They enter no University, for Indian Universities were founded for supplying material for the official machinery, and make no provision for either art or religion. But their ancestors built the Taj, the shrines of Mount Abu, and countless other masterpieces; they constructed the Mogul palaces, public offices, irrigation works, and everything of practical utility that the art of building could provide.

How does our departmentalism provide for these needs to-day? A certain number of young men, with no training either in art or in craft, learn by heart certain formularies for calculating the maximum

2 The Portfolio, No. 46, November 1905.

weight which an iron girder will bear, the smallest dimensions to which a wall can be reduced without collapsing, the cheapest rate at which a building can be constructed so as to bring it within the annual departmental budget. When a department has settled on paper the plan of the building it wants, one of these engineers with an archaeological turn of mind puts on to it a 'Gothic' or 'Classic' front, according to departmental taste, and provides a certain scale of departmental decoration according to departmental rank and dignity. Then the hereditary Indian craftsman whose family has practised the art of building for untold centuries is brought in to learn the wisdom of the West by copying the departmental paper patterns. How bad the art becomes is, perhaps, difficult to be understood by those to whom an archaeological solecism is more offensive than an artistic eyesore; but it is easy to explain how wasteful and extravagant the system really is. To build one of the latest and perhaps the best of these archaeological structures in Calcutta, a large number of Indian castebuilders were employed. Many of them were both artists and craftsmen-they could design, build, and carve. The structural design had been settled for them departmentally, so they had no concern with that. There was also a considerable amount of ornament to be carved, but that also had been designed for them in proper departmental style, which happened to be Italian Renaissance, so they were not allowed to attempt that. Other men who had been trained in the European archaeological style in Bombay were brought over to copy mechanically the paper patterns prepared for them. These men were paid two rupees a day each. Now there are at the present time in the Orissa district, not far from Calcutta, and famous for its splendid native architecture, a considerable number of masons and builders who, within the last twenty years, have designed and carried out architectural decoration comparable with that of our finest medieval buildings in Europe, and infinitely more beautiful than the imitation Renaissance ornament of the building I have referred to. The average earnings of these men is four annas a day, or one-eighth of the wages paid for executing the departmental decoration. They and their fellow-artists all over India are constantly in want of work, for departmentalism has no need of their services. Indian art cries out for bread; we give it museums, exhibitions, and archaeology.

The departmental plea of economy will not bear a moment's careful examination. Departmental economy at best is the economy of the limited liability company which keeps up an appearance of prosperity by paying dividends out of capital; for the imitation of a dead classicism which we hold up to the natives of India as the best product of Western civilisation is sapping the foundations of Indian art in the same way as it has destroyed the national art of Europe. In so doing we recklessly use up a part of the resources of our Indian Empire, infinitely more valuable than all its gold mines or coal mines

resources which, properly utilised, might bring to the revenues of the country as much as any department of the State. Anglo-Indian architectural works are rarely even relatively economical; for the native builders under our inartistic system are rapidly losing the sentiment of good craftsmanship, which always accompanies the artistic sentiment. In the same way the decay of national sentiment in European art has produced the modern school of jerry-builders. The process of alterations, patchwork, and repairs which Indian public buildings now require, is not entered against the capital account, so that does not trouble the departmental budgets. But when Macaulay's New Zealander, who in some far-off time will continue the dilettante propensities of our race, turns his attention from the ruins of London to the sites of great Anglo-Indian cities, he will sketch and wonder what rude barbarians left mud-heaps for memorials among the stately relics of native imperial rule. Swadeshi builds for posterity -we for ourselves. Are we right and all the centuries wrong?

The third vital matter of Indian administration which I have mentioned above is national education. From this, Indian Universities, like their European models, are unanimous in excluding art. It is a common saying that an artist who wishes to know his faults should give his work to be copied by his pupils. Indian Universities, with the unerring shortsightedness of the copyist, have exaggerated the defects of the older English Universities to the point of caricature. The many excellences of English college-culture are too well advertised by its votaries to need mention. Indian Universities have only recognised its faults-the aloofness from the national life and want of breadth. Inversely, Oxford has attempted to reproduce Greek culture by composing Greek odes and essays-ignoring the fact that it was based on the cultivation of the aesthetic faculties and a profound study of human nature-while Japan has caught the true spirit of it in not attempting an imitation.

Lord Curzon has given Indian Universities a new machinery. They have now to work out their own salvation with it, and are apparently about to restore Indian culture on a basis of modern science. The idea that teaching Indian schoolboys a smattering of modern experimental science will be a revelation to a culture and civilisation which constructed a theory of the Universe, based on what we call modern scientific principles, five thousand years ago must make Swadeshi laugh in its sleeves; but the difficulty of applying Western ideas to the East is shown even in metaphors-for Swadeshi generally has no sleeves. The Greeks believed that by teaching their children to love God's beauty in Nature they would help them to bring beauty into their daily lives. They thus found what modern educationists are always looking for—a religion without dogma. Every national art since the world began expresses the same sentiment. In Europe we still believe in beauty to a certain extent, provided that it is

archaeologically correct. In India we only believe in unadulterated ugliness and moral text-books. The Greeks understood that by the study of nature and of art they were developing the powers of observation and the powers of original thought, as art represents the creative faculties developed through the observation of nature. Greek education was, therefore, a system of national culture based on national life and art. The present Indian University system is a system of pedagogics based on narrow utilitarianism.

The artistic sense is the essence of real culture. Homer, Shakespeare, and the Mahâbhârata, products of national life and art, will live when most of our college-made culture is lost in the limbo of time. But art as the vitalising influence in national culture is as little understood by Indian Universities as it is by departmentalism. The art faculty only exists as part of the University machinery. Swadeshi in Bengal has raised a cry for a national University. Though there may be sedition in the cry there is none in the idea itself; it is the ideal for which all Indian educationists must aim. A real national University would solve the greatest difficulty of Indian education-the question of religion. However suitable it may be for the Western social and political system to exclude religion from State education, the idea is and always will be utterly incomprehensible and abhorrent to the East. By transplanting this system to India we make Indian colleges hot-beds of irreligion and disloyalty, and only create a Frankenstein to curse and hate us. Akbar solved the difficulty by inventing a religion for the State, and at the same time allowing all his subjects to practise theirs. We could do the same by founding a Christian University and giving State aid to all other creeds in founding their own. Swadeshi would then be wholly on our side. We should hoist sedition with its own petard and convert an armed camp into a loyal and contented Empire.

It may be that art is merely a matter of sentiment; but sentiment has brought Japan where she is to-day, and if the centuries can be trusted, sentiment rules the world. The bigotry of Aurangzebe destroyed the art of the Moguls and broke up the empire which the sword of Babar and the statesmanship of Akbar founded. Is there not a danger to the Empire which Warren Hastings, Clive, Wellesley, and Dalhousie won for us in the short-sighted departmentalism which crushes out the spirituality of the people? That is not the white man's mission.

E B. HAVELL.

THE KING OF SIAM AND HIS COUNTRY

THE King of Siam has come to Europe and intends shortly to pay a second visit to England. It is ten years since His Majesty was last here. The first King of Siam of the present dynasty was a successful soldier, who in the eighteenth century repelled a formidable Burmese invasion, and restored his country's freedom and independence after a long and severe struggle. But the ability of various members of the Royal Family of Siam has shown itself quite as conspicuously in peace as in war. One of the King's immediate predecessors was a remarkably successful student in languages ancient and modern, Eastern and Western. Another was a well-known mathematician, and the reigning King has a knowledge of English literature and a conver sational fluency in English which astonish most Englishmen who have come in contact with him. The King is widely recognised as the Representative of the purest form of the Buddhist religion in the Far East, a religion which in its moral doctrines and rules of life offers many striking analogies to Christianity. Those admitted to the King's friendship speak with enthusiasm of a personal charm not easy to define, but which has its roots in a rare combination of keen perceptions, subtle humour, wide knowledge, and broad sympathies.

Siam is a country full of interest for those who care to study the Far East; and for Englishmen, more than any other Europeans, there are abundant reasons why such a study has special attractions. From the political, the industrial, and, we may add, the personal side, there are few countries in the world more worth visiting than Siam, and few so seldom visited. Geographically, Siam is off the main track from East to West and from West to East. This is why the stream of tourists and travellers usually pass it by. They are most of them in a hurry to get from the place they are at to the place they are going to, and Siam is not a country to visit in a hurry. Everything there is suggestive of a contemplative rather than a transitive mood.

Before the French annexation of 1893 Siam had an estimated area of about 280,000 square miles, that is more than double the area of Great Britain and Ireland, and although a large slice has been taken off on her eastern and northern boundaries, and, by a recent agreement with France, still more has gone from her Cambodian tributary provinces, there remains a large territory whose frontier marches' for hundreds of miles with that under British rule.