worthy but that which exhausts itself in pouring out all in a flood at once. The Indian mind seems unable to avoid this tendency; it seeks to impress by fabulous dimensions and impossible feats; it has not learnt the power of understatement. It multiplies the limbs of divinities, to ensure that they shall not seem as feeble men; but the images of these divinities, however beautifully treated, create a sense rather of impaired than of superhuman power. The Indian artists are not content that the beauty of men and women should be merely human beauty; it is part of their traditional canon that the shoulders should have the form of an elephant's head, the waist should be like a lion's, the thigh like the trunk of a plantain tree, the eyes like a fish in shape, and so on for all the parts and features of the body. An artist will be quick to note the similarities of form in all the world of life; but, after all, the ideal of any form of living thing is something that belongs to its own nature, and the beauty of man is intimately his own.

These tendencies manifest the ingrained idealism, the preference for type over individual variety, which is characteristic of Indian art. Along with this we find at times a curious naturalism. This is notable especially in the sculpture of animals, above all of the elephant. There is a relief of swarming human figures at Mamallapuram, with two colossal elephants beneath, which, in a photograph, give almost the illusion of actual living animals moving across the base of the relief. The magnificent bull at the same place is of a nobler naturalism. In some of the great contemplative Buddha statues, again, we find the flaccid tissue of disused limbs portrayed with a literalism which obtrudes itself incongruously where a deeper sense of style would have compelled us to forget the disablements of the flesh, and created a convention adequate to the conception of a spirit absorbed in thought and still as a windless flame.

Indian sculpture, like Indian art in general, is anonymous. If there were great masters, we do not know their names. We have not, as we have in Greece, and in Europe since the Renaissance, the landmarks provided by the grouped works of a single genius, radiating the energy

of a personal force. Rather we have an art comparable to the medieval sculpture of Europe. It is an art of the people, with an immense power of tradition supporting it; the art of a race rather than of individuals. It knows no sterilising divorce between art and craft; and even to-day, in architecture, this power of tradition is a living force in India; it can still create. To us, who have utterly lost this continuity in art, there is something both interesting and attractive in such conditions. Unfortunately, as Dr Coomaraswamy says, 'there is one fatal weakness of the later phases of a traditional art; it has no power to resist the corruption from without. It is beautiful by habit rather than intention.' And a traditional art has other sources of weakness too, which Indian sculpture seems to betray even in early times. The craftsman tends to usurp the function of the designer. We seem to miss the influence of controlling master-minds, jealous of the unity of their creations.

A pas

Till lately it was a generally accepted notion that the Indian painting of modern times, from the 16th century onwards, was a mere continuation of the Persian style introduced with the Mogul conquerors. The miniature painters of Persia, whose masterpieces are all in the manuscripts they illustrated, created an art which is unique in the world. Their themes were steeped in the spirit of romance. It was an art of sensuous beauty, informed by the genius for decoration and the love of colour which belong to the Persian race. sionate delight in the beauty of things, the delicacy of single flowers, the grace of animals, the glory of the sunlight, the charm of youth, the fine texture of woven stuffs and their gorgeous dyes, the luxury of gardens with their tanks of cool water and their whispering trees-all this inspires pages of a dream-like intoxication. Nowhere, moreover, have artists revelled more in the possibilities of the materials they employed-the ivorylike paper, the choice, pure richness of the pigments, the sensitive outlines of the brush. The sumptuous pages of Bihzad and Mirak, so immensely prized now by European collectors, were the classics of art for the painters of the Court of Akbar and his successors. the golden period of the late 15th and early 16th centuries Vol. 223.-No. 443.

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had passed away; and by the opening of the 17th century a rapid decay seems to have set in.

In India the Mogul conquerors found a native art flourishing. Abul Fazl, the minister and biographer of the great Akbar, has a passage of great interest on the painters of his day, which has been often quoted. The Emperor, he tells us, had from his youth taken great interest in art, and was wont to reprove bigoted followers of the letter of the Mohammedan law. It appears to me,' he is quoted as saying, 'as if a painter had quite peculiar means of recognising God, for a painter in sketching anything that has life, and in devising the limbs one after another, must come to feel that he cannot bestow personality upon his work, and is thus forced to thank God, the giver of life, and will thus increase his knowledge.' Abul Fazl goes on to describe the encouragement given to artists by Akbar and the flourishing state of art which this encouragement produced; and he asserts that the painters of his time produced masterpieces worthy of a Bihzad,' which may be placed at the side of the wonderful works of the European painters who have attained world-wide fame.' Then comes a sentence about the Hindu painters which has been seized on as a significant admission. Their pictures,' he says, surpass our conception of things. Few indeed in the whole world are found equal to them.'

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Now it is notoriously unsafe to build on literary references to art, unless we can control these by actual examples. Abul Fazl's account points to the existence of an eclectic school, hampered probably by court patronage as much as it was encouraged by it. The evidence of surviving work does not at all countenance a rivalry with the masterpieces of Bihzad and his contemporaries, so far as the Persians are concerned.

But what of the Hindus? Their pictures surpass our conception of things.' In that phrase Abul Fazl expressed more than perhaps he understood himself. It was not in technical qualities, as such, that the Hindus surpassed the Persians. But Persian art, with all its enchantment for the eye, lacked a soul. It was not nourished by ideas; and it is by the pressure of ideas, of spiritual emotion and imaginative thought, on the instinct for design in form and colour, that art grows and keeps

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alive. Lacking this pressure, this craving for expression and expansion, Persian art, having reached a climax of superb decoration, suddenly fails and ebbs away into lifeless repetition. The Indians, whatever their defects, belonged to a world of which the very life-current was religious and philosophic thought and emotion. And one cannot but think that it was this superior depth and intensity of mind which impressed the minister of Akbar, this superior 'conception of things.' Certainly the work of the Indian painters of the Mogul Court, while far inferior in richness of pattern and splendour of colour to the classic painting of Persia, shows always the trace of an underlying spirituality. It is by no means an enfeebled and imitative continuation of the Persian style. At the same time we must not fall into the error of considering the Mogul school as typically Indian. The painters of the Court of Delhi were greatly influenced by Persian models; and they worked to please an emperor who had ideas of his own and to whose wishes they conformed. The remarks quoted by Abul Fazl indicate Akbar's attitude to art. A scrupulous fidelity in drawing God's creatures was the quality most to be prized. And portraiture, in a wide sense, is the main field and the main excellence of the Mogul school. Hardly any period of the world's history is richer in portraiture of individuals than the period of Akbar and his successors on the throne of Delhi. These portraits were endlessly copied, and it is important for the true appreciation of the school that they should be seen in fine and original examples. The British Museum Library possesses (among others) a precious album, once seen by Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose special admiration of certain examples has been recorded; and we may recall the similar admiration of a still greater master, Rembrandt, attested not by words but by the actual copies from Mogul drawings which he made in some numbers. Another fine album made for the ill-fated prince Dara Shikoh has recently been acquired by the Library of the India Office.

But, though of fascinating interest from the human and historical point of view, these Mogul paintings represent, after all, a hybrid art. Exquisite in delicate truth of feature and detail, they are small in style and lacking in vitality of design. The painters confine

themselves to a narrow range of repeated poses; and the relation of the figure to the framing space is little considered. Their studies from nature, animals, flowers, and birds, admirable as they often are, are inferior to Persian work of the best period. We feel that the true Indian spirit is not deeply engaged, or employed with real congeniality. The difference is at once felt when, deserting courtly subjects, the painters take a theme from native life. Mr Havell reproduces in Indian Sculpture and Painting' (pl. lxiii) a 'Scene in a Courtyard,' from the Calcutta Gallery, where bricklayers are busy at work, and an old man prostrates himself before another, begging for mercy or for pardon. Here the Indian feeling finds beautiful expression even in a scene of daily life; still more is it apparent in the drawings where groups of holy men are seen in meditation, or scholars listen to a mullah's reading, while the placid work of the Indian fields goes on about them. We have only to place one of these paintings beside a classic Persian page, steeped in the joy of the senses, to realise at once the immense difference of spirit and atmosphere.

But the difference is still more apparent and arresting when we contrast the Persian work, not with the drawings of the Mogul school, but with the pure pictorial art of India. For, apart from the Mogul school, there exists a whole body of Indian painting which is entirely independent of Persian influence. This is an incontestable fact, though till recently it was not suspected, and is even now little realised. Even Mr Havell, when he wrote in 1908, did not clearly bring out the distinction. Depreciating the classic Persian art, as that of a degenerate school, governed by 'conventionalism' and mechanical formality,' he is unable to find any merit in it till the true spirit of Indian art began to assert itself in the Muhammadan world.' The art of the Moguls quickly grafted itself on to the older Buddhist and Hindu schools, and thus became truly Indian.' Such a view, with its attempt to represent Persian art as insignificant and merely preparatory to Mogul art, leads to confusion. Only when we appreciate the native excellence and unique quality of genuinely Persian painting, do we appreciate the contrasted excellence of the genuinely Indian style which existed side by side with