THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

Two PicturesTHE Modern Review and Prabasi aredoing monthly a service to the country the importance of whichcannot be exaggerated. The former review is at present the bestconducted and the most full of valuable matter of any in India.But good as are the articles which fill the magazine from monthto month, the whole sum of them is outweighed in value by thesingle page which gives us the reproduction of some work of artby a contemporary Indian painter. To the lover of beauty andthe lover of his country every one of these delicately executedblocks is an event of importance in his life within. The Reviewsby bringing these masterpieces to the thousands who have noopportunity of seeing the originals are restoring the sense of beautyand artistic emotion inborn in our race but almost blotted out bythe long reign in our lives of the influence of Anglo-Saxon vulgarityand crude tasteless commercialism. The pictures belongusually to the new school of Bengali art, the only living and originalschool now developing among us and the last issues have eachcontained a picture especially important not only by the intrinsicexcellence of the work but by the perfect emergence of that soulof India which we attempted to characterise in an article in oursecond issue.The picture in the July number is by Mahomed Hakim Khan,a student of the Government School of Art, Calcutta, and representsNadir Shah ordering a general massacre. It is not one ofthose pictures salient and imposing which leap at once at theeye and hold it. A first glance only shows three figures almostconventionally Indian in poses which also seem conventional. Butas one looks again and again the soul of the picture begins suddenlyto emerge, and one realises with a start of surprise thatone is in the presence of a work of genius. The reason for thislies in the extraordinary restraint and simplicity which concealsthe artist's strength and subtility. The whole spirit and conceptionis Indian and it would be difficult to detect in the composi-