THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

VIII. 4. Indian Art and an Old Classic427compare with the great epic of Tulsidas, that mine of poetry,strong and beautiful thought and description and deep spiritualforce and sweetness. But it must have been greater in its originalform than in its modern dress.The great value of the edition lies however in the illustrations.All the pictures are not excellent; indeed we must sayquite frankly that some of them are an offence to the artisticperceptions and an affliction to the eye and the soul. Othersare masterpieces of the first rank. But in this collection of pictures,most of them now well-known, we have a sort of handyrecord of the progress of Art in India in recent times. Turningover the pages we are struck first by the numerous reproductionsof Ravivarma's pictures which were only recently so prominentin Indian houses and, even now, are painfully common,and we recall with wonder the time when we could gaze uponthese crude failures without an immediate revolt of all that wasartistic within us. Could anything be more gross, earthy, un-Indian and addressed purely to the eye than his “Descent ofGanges”, or more vulgar and unbeautiful than the figure of Ajain the “Death of Indumati”, or more soulless and commonplacethan the Ahalya, a picture on a level with the ruck of the mostordinary European paintings for the market by obscure hands?Some of these efforts are absolutely laughable in the crudenessof their conception and the inefficiency of their execution;take for instance the fight between Ravan and Jatayu. RajaRukmangad's Ekadashi is one of the few successes, but spiritedas the work undoubtedly is, it is so wholly an imitationof European workmanship that it establishes no claim to realartistic faculty. All that can be said for this painter is that heturned the Indian mind to our own mythology and history forthe subject of art, and, that he manifests a certain strugglingtowards outward beauty and charm which is occasionally successfulin his women and children. But he had neither the powerto develop original conceptions, nor the skill to reproduce finelythat which he tried to learn from Europe. He represents inArt that dark period when, in subjection to foreign teachingand ideals, we did everything badly because we did everythingslavishly. It is fortunate that the representative of