THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

The Revival of Indian ArtTHE MAIN DIFFERENCETHE greatness of Indian art is the greatnessof all Indian thought and achievement. It lies in the recognitionof the persistent within the transient, of the domination ofmatter by spirit, the subordination of the insistent appearancesof Prakriti to the inner reality which, in a thousand ways, theMighty Mother veils even while she suggests. The European artist,cabined within the narrow confines of the external, is dominatedin imagination by the body of things and the claims of the phenomenon.Western painting starts from the eye or the imagination;its master word is either beauty or reality, and, accordingas he is the slave of his eye or the playfellow of his imagination,the painter produces a photograph or a poem. But, in painting,the European imagination seldom travels beyond an imaginativeinterpretation or variation of what the physical eye has seen.Imitation is the key-word of creation, according to Aristotle;Shakespeare advises the artist to hold up the mirror to Nature;and the Greek scientist and the English poet reflect accuratelythe mind of Europe.But the Indian artist has been taught by his philosophy andthe spiritual discipline of his forefathers that the imagination isonly a channel and an instrument of some source of knowledgeand inspiration that is greater and higher; by meditation or byYoga he seeks within himself that ultimate centre of knowledgewhere there is direct and utter vision of the thing that lies hiddenin the forms of man, animal, tree, river, mountain. It is thissamyag jÜÀna, this sÀkØÀd darÙana, the utter, revealing andapocalyptic vision, that he seeks, and when he has found it, whetherby patient receptivity or sudden inspiration, his whole aim is toexpress it utterly and revealingly in line and colour. Form is onlya means of expressing the spirit, and the one thought of the artistshould be how best to render the spiritual vision. He is not boundby the forms that compose the world of gross matter, though he