Vol. XVII.

HE cave-man of the Dordogne who scratched on a stone his lively picture of horse or mastodon was, we may suppose, by no means troubled by the question "What is Art"? For the matter of that his successors, while conscious of the problem, have never concerned themselves seriously with it. The function of the artist is creation. He is an instrument by which God expresses to us the inner wonder and beauty of things; but in so far as he analyses the process of his own mind, so far does he deviate from his true mission and interfere with the quality of his production. Self-criticism there must be, for then the artist judges himself by the God-given standard within his own soul. But logical analysis, tending to refer art to a general standard external to the mind of the poet, painter or musician, deprives him of the basis of his own creative ability.

Nevertheless some kind of definition or circumscription of the term art is necessary to any discussion of art. In the contemplation of a masterpiece, standards are not only superfluous, they are an interference; but in critical discussion the acceptance of a basis is the first essential towards arriving at any kind of understanding.

Let us, then, define art as the expression of the artist's perception of the universal in the accidental, the ideal in the material, and the eternal in the temporal. It would be quite easy to quarrel with this definition-no new one, but at least it covers a great deal of the ground. But we have to remember that there is in every particular some element of the universal. In this sense art has an infinite range of expression, from the highest generalisations down to the meanest and most trivial examples of representation or reproduction. The law of rhythm, for instance, is exemplified not only in the varied yet orderly beauty of an Indian temple, or Beethoven's fifth symphony, but also in the crude decoration round a village shrine or the regular tapping of a drum. The principle exists in all these cases, but in the first two there are other great natural principles involved, as harmony,

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variety, contrast, and repetition. Still, all art, whatever its value or significance, is in some degree art. Like life itself, it is infinite in its range from the highest goodness to the lowest badness, from heavenly exaltation to the vilest despicableness. There is no line which can be drawn at any point to mark off high art from something else which is bad art. We can only apprehend that one kind of art-product is better and finer and nobler than another because we realise instinctively, no doubt that it embodies a greater number of those eternal principles which govern the universe and find their operation within our bodies, minds and souls. Art may and does in its various aspects amuse, interest, elevate, instruct, depress, exalt, incite, but in so far as it does the better of these things to a greater extent it is finer art. That is to say, that the greatest art-for after all we cannot apply a definition to it in the strict sense of the wordis that which exalts, elevates, and ennobles us to the greatest degree, puts us most closely in touch with the perfection of the universe, that universe than which we can know of nothing more perfect. It is at this point that we find art coming into contact with religion. If art be difficult to define, religion is no less so. Yet there is no very wide divergence. Both are evidences of human consciousness of God. Religion carries the matter further than art, into the region of man's relation to the infinite, the state of his soul and his conduct towards his fellow-man. But up to a point they decidedly march together in showing man as a being apprehensive of the universal soul. Considering art in this sense of universal apprehension and expression we find a remarkable divergence between the art of Europe and that of India a divergence which has existed and become more marked through the centuries, While Indian art has remained steadily and solidly religious and traditional, European art has forgotten its traditions as rapidly as it could, leaving its early religious tendency far behind, until to-day it is completely secularised. Yet it

not the

is to be doubted if modern European art had not always within it the seed of its own special evolution towards materialism, for in its early days, when it was strongly religious in its tendencies, when, indeed, it was restricted to the reproduction of Christian ideas, it was still only a medium for the expression of those ideas: it was expression itself. Art Art was captured by the Church and used for religious purposes: it was not an evidence in itself of the religious feeling of the artist. The earthliness of the great days of Greece was never completely forgotten in Europe, and it revived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the fires of the Renaissance were lit by the spark of the re-discovered learning of the ancient world. From the days of the stiff, frigid and gloomy Byzantine art, with its intensity and fervour of expression and its traditional treatment, painting and sculpture were continuously devoted to the exposition of religious principles and ideas; but with the advent of the Renaissance the adherence to religion began to become merely nominal. In the sixteenth century religious subjects were largely a mere excuse for painting, and at last the great severance came and art was completely freed from its age-long association with the Church. Then all tradition was thrown to the winds and change took place with rapidity. The nineteenth century saw a wonderful development of representational painting, that in which the chief aim is accurate delineation of an object in form, tone, and colour, with as much reference to the laws of beauty-beauty in its larger sense-as was necessary to make what might be termed a picture. Towards the end of the century the last word had been said on this subject. Representational art could go no further. The painters had shown us blazing sunlight on canvas with the most amazing fidelity; they could trace tone and colour and form with the most astonishing bravura. The possibilities of pigment, as expounded by the French impressionists and their immediate successors, in rendering externals in form, tone and colour, were exhausted. The artist of the impressionist school was as much scientist as artist with his knowledge of the secrets of colour and light and their actions and interactions. This was the triumph of representative art, and there is no great need to decry its accomplishments too heavily. There is a beauty of a even in the faithful representation of an object on canvas. The ingenuity and deftness of the workmanship alone are sufficient to engage our

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attention favourably and even a slight leavening of aesthetic qualities has a powerful Browning in one of his poems-"Fra Lippo Lippi," I believe-touches a half-truth here when he indicates the fascination of the common every-day scene put down on canvas in colour and tone. In addition to this joy in good workmanship there is another pleasure to be derived from looking at a "representational representational" picture which reproduces beautiful natural forms. As we have observed, every natural object, with all its accidents, has some element of the permanent and universal in it, or what we call beauty, and the simple reproduction of a lovely piece of scenery is sufficient to merit our approbation for the sake of the scenery itself.

It is here, however, that so much European art has gone astray and become cheapened. In an enormously preponderating mass of modern European painting the artist has acted only as translator of beauty and not creator of it. He has seen a beautiful thing—a fine prospect or a handsome woman—and he has been struck by its beauty, and thus moved to put it down on canvas in pigment, believing that those who contemplated the picture would perceive the beauty as keenly as he did. His picture was a window. In other words he relied on his subject to provide the stimulus to the imagination, while what he did was to be a faithful copyist (or perhaps slightly more, for in nearly all pictures there must at least be a modicum of designed and intelligent re-arrangement of matter)-and solve with as much success as he could the very complicated problems of rendering the vast scale of nature's tones and the infinity of her colour with the limited range of pigments between flake white and bone black. Reliance on pure abstract, æsthetic form was conspicuously absent in this type of art and vast quantities of it have been produced during the last century or so since Constable set the fashion for nature-painting. Of course, it would not be fair to say that imaginative painting had ceased to exist or that the older monumental art was completely extinct. Some relics of those ancient fires certainly survived and in the greater painters of the nineteenth century they are undoubtedly to be traced. The general tendency of the century's art in Europe, however, was to rely for effect on things external to the artist's mind-on the exact portrayal of form, or on colour, or on storytelling, historical association, book-illustration. The observer's mental eye was constantly being

referred to the subject of the picture rather than to the aesthetic value of the picture as a thing in itself, as an imaginative perception and creation of the artist's mind.

The re-action-a re-action almost inevitable to those artists who thought and saw clearly-came as the century was drawing to its close. It is still in process and no man can foretell the end. It may be of profound significance and the highest value, or it may fizzle out in a counteraction, we cannot tell. But the movement during these last few years among advanced artists cannot be ignored. Post-impressionism and the cognate movements are a very remarkable return to the methods of the highest antiquity and the greatest art achievement.

And at this point, with the mention of the word "antiquity," we revert to India and Indian art. No current art in the world is of higher antiquity than that of India and nowhere are traditional methods more carefully preserved. In every respect the art of India as it has existed for so many centuries is, of course, profoundly different from the art of modern Europe. Representational art is virtually unknown. There is no such thing as realism in the modern European sense. But wherein exactly does the difference lie? What is the precise point of divergence? It is here. That the art of India is primarily and essentially religious, and the art of Europe is materialistic. Art in India has from the earliest times been not merely an accessory of religion, not merely ancillary to it, but a direct expression of it. So much and so intensely so, indeed, that any cleavage between the two has been impossible. From the earliest times the Indian mind-and especially the Hindu mind—has been concentrated on the problems of God and Eternity and the relation of man to the universal. It has striven to find the typical and cosmic in the particular and accidental and finding it, had to give expression to its conceptions. Art, then, which is common to all peoples as a method of expression, was in the very earliest times in India employed in this sense. The great days of Hinduism saw conceptions of a high order, (and we may concede their majesty and nobility even if we cannot subscribe to their moral significance or influence) being embodied in stone, wood, metal, and pigment, the tangible corollary of deep inward perception and intense religious conviction. Religion was of such overmastering importance to the people of India that no channel of expression

could be neglected in the effort to put religious ideas into concrete and visible form. Art was not captured by religion, it was a phase of religion. The complete absorption and saturation of the soul of the Hindu in those tremendous conceptions rendered it an imperative consequence that all things and all acts must bear witness to man's relation to his Maker.

But it was plain that any means of expressing these conceptions in plastic form must rise to the height of the occasion. It was of no use to portray Siva or Vishnu as an ordinary human being. God-like attitudes must be given to the gods. Here indeed was a problem. The human form must be the basis of expression, and yet in some way it must be invested with cosmic qualities. How was it to be done? The work itself is the answer. If we consider carefully the purer and finer sculptures of Hindu art we are able to grasp in some degree the methods by which the ancient artists made men's figures God-like. It was by ruthless adaptation of form to the idea. As the idea was the higher thing, then the external shapes by which it was to be expressed were to be as clay in the potter's hands. This process of adaptation of form to idea has always been employed, in varying degrees, by the artist.

From time to time the physical culture magazines display photographs of this or that athletemale or female-in the pose of this or that Greek statue, with a picture of the original statue. The comparisons are supposed to challenge approval, but to the eye of the feeblest artistic capacity there is no comparison at all. Not that the living athlete or physically cultured person may not be a very good example, but the modifications of the human figure embodied by the artist in his sculpture with the view of expressing his abstract idea make the comparison impossible. Or if the comparison be possible it can only demonstrate the gulf between nature and art, that is between nature in herself and nature according to, and endowed with, man's own special ideal conceptions.

Now, great as was the Greek modification of the human figure, that observed by the ancient Indian artists was even more profound, because deeper and more remote ideas had to be expressed. The Hindu thinker and artist was not content with a gracious earthliness, with the idealisation of material things, or at best a philosophical deity, as were the old Greeks. He was restlessly seeking for God and in his

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