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The National
Value of Art
THERE is a
tendency in modern times to depreciate the value of the beautiful and overstress
the value of the useful, a tendency curbed in Europe by the imperious insistence of an agelong tradition of culture and generous training of the aesthetic
perceptions; but in India, where we have been cut off by a mercenary and
soulless education from all our ancient roots of culture and tradition, it is
corrected only by the stress of imagination, emotion and spiritual delicacy,
submerged but not yet destroyed in the temperament of the people. The value
attached by the ancients to music, art and poetry has become almost
unintelligible to an age bent on depriving life of its meaning by turning
earth into a sort of glorified ant-heap or beehive and confusing the lowest,
though most primary in necessity, of the means of human progress with the aim of
this great evolutionary process. The first and lowest necessity of the race is
that of self-preservation in the body by a sufficient supply and equable
distribution of food, shelter and raiment. This is a problem which the oldest
communistic human societies solved to perfection, and without communism it
cannot be solved except by a convenient but inequitable arrangement which makes
of the majority slaves provided with these primary wants and necessities and
ministering under compulsion to a few who rise higher and satisfy larger wants.
These are the wants of the vital instincts, called in our philosophy the prānakosa,
which go beyond and dominate the mere animal wants, simple, coarse and
undiscriminating, shared by us with the lower creation. It is these vital
wants, the hunger for wealth, luxury, beautiful women, rich foods and drinks,
which disturbed the first low but perfect economy of society and made the
institution of private property, with its huge train of evils, inequality,
injustice, violence, fraud, civil commotion and hatred, class selfishness,
family selfishness, and personal selfishness, an inevitable necessity of human
progress. The Mother of All works through evil as well as good, and
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through temporary
evil she brings about a better and lasting good. These disturbances were
complicated by the heightening of the primitive animal emotions into more
intense and complex forms. Love, hatred, vindictiveness, anger, attachment,
jealousy and the host of similar passions,
-
the citta or
mindstuff suffused by the vital wants of the prāna, that which the
Europeans call the heart – ceased to be communal in their application and, as
personal wants, clamoured for separate satisfaction. It is for the satisfaction
of the vital and emotional needs of humanity that modern nations and societies
exist, that commerce grows and Science ministers to human luxury and convenience. But for these new wants, the establishment of private
property, first in the clan or family, then in the .individual, the institution
of slavery and other necessary devices, the modem world would never have come
into existence; for the satisfaction of the primary economic wants and bodily
necessities would never have carried us beyond the small commune or tribe. But
these primary wants and necessities have to be satisfied and satisfied
universally, or society becomes diseased and states convulsed with sedition and
revolution.
The old arrangement of a mass of slaves well fed and provided and a select
class or classes enjoying in greater or less quantity the higher wants of
humanity broke down in the mediaeval ages, because the heart began to develop
too powerfully in humanity and, under the influence of philosophy, ethics and
religion, began to spread its claim beyond the person, the class, the family,
the clan to the nation and to humanity or to all creation. A temporary makeshift
was invented to replace slavery, called free labour, by which men were paid and
bribed to accept voluntarily the position of slaves, contenting themselves with
the coarse satisfaction of the animal necessities and in return
providing by their labour the higher wants of their masters now called superiors
or higher classes. This also has become a solution which will no longer serve.
The whole of humanity now demands not merely the satisfaction of the body, the anna,
but the satisfaction also of the prāna and the citta, the
vital and emotional desires. Wealth, luxury, enjoyment for oneself and those
dear to us, participation in the satisfaction
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of national wealth, pride, lordship, rivalry, war, alliance, peace, once the
privilege of the few, the higher classes, of prince, burgess and noble are now
claimed by all humanity. Political, social and economic liberty and equality,
two things difficult to harmonise, must now be conceded to all men and
harmonised as well as the present development of humanity will allow. It is this
claim that arose, red with fury and blinded with blood, in the French
Revolution. This is Democracy, this Socialism, this Anarchism; and, however
fiercely the privileged and propertied classes may rage, curse and denounce
these forerunners of Demogorgon, they can only temporarily resist. Their
interests
may be hoary and venerable with the sanction of the ages, but the future is
mightier than the past and evolution proceeds relentlessly in its course
trampling to pieces all that it no longer needs. Those who fight against her
fight against the will of God, against a decree written from of old, and are
already defeated and slain in the kāranajagat, the world of types and
causes where Nature fixes everything before she works it out in the visible
world. Nihatāh pūrvameva.
The mass of humanity has not risen beyond the bodily needs, the vital desires,
the emotions and the current of thought- sensations created by these lower
strata. This current of thought- sensations is called in Hindu philosophy the manas
or mind, it is the highest to which all but a few of the animals can rise,
and it is the highest function that the mass of mankind has thoroughly
perfected. Beyond the manas is the buddhi, or thought proper,
which, when perfected, is independent of the desires, the claims of the body and
the interference of the emotions. But only a minority of men have developed this
organ, much less perfected it. Only great thinkers in their hours of thought are
able to use this organ independently of the lower strata, and even they are
besieged by the latter in their ordinary life and their best thought suffers
continually from these lower intrusions. Only developed Yogins have a viśliddha-buddhi,
a thought-organ cleared of the interference of the lower strata by cittaśuddhi
or purification of the citta, the mind-stuff, from the prāna full
of animal, vital and emotional disturbances. With most men the buddhi is
full of manas and the manas of the lower strata. The majority of
man-
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kind do not think, they have only thought-sensations; a large minority think
confusedly, mixing up desires, predilections, passions, prejudgments, old
associations and prejudices with pure and disinterested thought. Only a few, the
rare aristocrats of the earth, can really and truly think. That is now the true
aristocracy, not the aristocracy of the body and birth, not the aristocracy of
vital superiority, wealth, pride and luxury, not the aristocracy of higher
emotions, courage, energy, successful political instinct and the habit of
mastery and rule,
- though these latter cannot be
neglected, – but the aristocracy of knowledge, undisturbed insight and
intellectual ability. It emerges, though it has not yet
emerged, and in any future arrangement of human society this
natural inequality will play an important part.
Above the buddhi are other faculties which are now broadly included in
the term spirituality. This body of faculties is still rarer and more
imperfectly developed even in the highest than the thought-organ. Most men
mistake intellectuality, imaginative inspiration or emotional fervour for
spirituality, but this is a much higher function, the highest of all, of which
all the others are coverings and veils. Here we get to the fountain, the source
to which we return, the goal of human evolution. But although spirituality has
often entered into humanity in great waves, it has done so merely to create a
temporary impetus and retire into the souls of a few, leaving only its coverings
and shadows behind to compose and inform the thing which is usually called
religion. Meanwhile the thought is the highest man has really attained and it is
by the thought that the old society has been broken down. And the thought is
composed of two separate sides, judgment or reason and imagination, both of
which are necessary to perfect ideation. It is by science, philosophy and
criticism on the one side, by art, poetry and idealism on the other, that the
old state of humanity has been undermined and is now collapsing, and the
foundations have been laid for the new. Of these science, philosophy and
criticism have established their use to the mass of humanity by ministering to
the luxury, comfort and convenience which all men desire and arming them with
justification in the confused struggle of passions, interests, cravings and
aspirations which are now working with solvent and
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corrosive effect throughout the world. The value of the other side, more subtle
and profound, has been clouded to the mass of men by the less visible and
sensational character of its workings.
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2
THE activity
of human thought divides it- self broadly into two groups of functions, those of
the right- hand, contemplation, creation, imagination, the centres that see the
truth, and those of the left-hand, criticism, reasoning, discrimination,
inquiry, the centres that judge the truth when it is seen. In education the
latter are fostered by scientific and manual training, but the only quality of
the right-hand that this education fosters is observation. For this reason a
purely scientific education tends to make thought keen and c1earsighted within
certain limits, but narrow, hard and cold. Even in his own sphere the man
without any training of the right-hand can only progress in a settled groove; he
cannot broaden the base of human culture or enlarge the bounds of science.
Tennyson describes him as an eye well practised in Nature, a spirit bounded and
poor, and the description is just. But a cultivated eye without a cultivated
spirit makes by no means the highest type of man. It is precisely the
cultivation of the spirit that is the object of what is well called a liberal
education, and the pursuits best calculated to cultivate the growth of the
spirit are language, literature, the Arts, music, painting, sculpture or the
study of these, philosophy, religion, history, the study and understanding of
man through his works and of Nature and man through the interpretative as well
as through the analytic faculties. These are the pursuits which belong to the intellectual activities of the right-hand, and while the importance of most of
these will be acknowledged, there is a tendency to ignore Art and poetry as mere
refinements, luxuries of the rich and leisurely rather than things that are
necessary to the mass of men or useful to life. This is largely due to the
misuse of these great instruments by the luxurious few who held the world and
its good things in their hands in the intermediate period of human progress. But
the aesthetic faculties entering into the enjoyment of the world and the
satisfaction of the vital instincts, the love of the beautiful in men and women,
in food, in things, in articles
of
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use and articles of pleasure, have done more than anything else,
to raise man from the beast, to refine and purge his passions, to ennoble his
emotions and to lead him up through the heart and the imagination to the state
of the intellectual man. That which has helped man upward, must be preserved in
order that he may not sink below the level he has attained. For man
intellectually developed, mighty in scientific knowledge and the mastery of
gross and subtle nature, using the elements as his servants and the world as his
footstool, but undeveloped in heart and spirit, becomes only an inferior kind of
asura using the powers of a dewgod to satisfy the nature of an animal.
According to dim traditions and memories of the old world, of such a nature was
the civilisation of old Atlantis, submerged beneath the Ocean when its greatness
and its wickedness became too heavy a load for the earth to bear, and our own
legends of the asuras represent a similar consciousness of a great but
abortive development in humanity.
The first and lowest use of Art is the purely aesthetic, the second is the
intellectual or educative, the third and highest the spiritual. By speaking of
the aesthetic use as the lowest, we do not wish to imply that it is not of
immense value to humanity, but simply to assign to it its comparative value in
relation to the higher uses. The aesthetic is of immense importance and until it
has done its work, mankind is not really fitted to make full use of Art on the
higher planes of human development. Aristotle assigns a high value to tragedy
because of its purifying force. He describes its effect as katharsis, a
sacramental word of the Greek mysteries, which, in the secret discipline of the
ancient Greek Tantrics, answered precisely to our cittaśuddhi, the purification of the citta
or mass of established ideas, feelings and actional habits in a man either by samnyama, rejection, or by bhoga, satisfaction,
or by both. Aristotle was speaking of the purification of feelings, passions
and emotions in the heart through imaginative treatment in poetry but the truth
the idea contains is of much wider application and constitutes the justification
of the aesthetic side of art. It purifies by beauty. The beautiful and the good
are held by many thinkers to be the same and, though the idea may be wrongly
stated, it is, when put from the
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right standpoint, not only a truth but the fundamental truth of existence.
According to our own philosophy the whole world came out of ānanda and
returns into ānanda, and the triple term in which ānanda may be
stated is Joy, Love, Beauty. To see divine beauty in themhole world, man, life,
nature, to love that which we have seen and to have pure unalloyed bliss in that
love and that beauty is the appointed road by which mankind as a race must climb
to God. That is the reaching to vidyā through avidyā, to the One
Pure and Divine through the manifold manifestation of Him, of which the
Upanishad repeatedly speaks. But the bliss must be pure and unalloyed, unalloyed
by self-regarding emotions, unalloyed by pain and evil. The sense of good and
bad, beautiful and un-beautiful, which afflicts our understanding and our
senses, must be replaced by akha1:u!a rasa, undifferentiated and
unabridged delight in the delightfulness of things, before the highest can be
reached. On the way to this goal full use must be made of the lower and abridged
sense of beauty which seeks to replace the less beautiful by the more, the lower
by the higher, the mean by the noble.
At a certain stage of human development the aesthetic sense
is of infinite value in this direction. It raises and purifies conduct by
instilling a distaste for the coarse desires and passions of the savage, for the
rough, uncouth and excessive in action and manner, and restraining both feeling
and action by a striving after the decent, the beautiful, the fit and seemly
which received its highest expression in the manners of cultivated European
society, the elaborate ceremonious life of the Confucian, the careful
ācāra
and etiquette of Hinduism. At the present stage of progress this element is losing much of its
once all-important value and, when overstressed, tends to hamper a higher
development by the obstruction of soulless ceremony and formalism. Its great use
was to discipline the savage animal instincts of the body, the vital instincts
and the lower feelings in the heart. Its disadvantage to progress is that it
tends to trammel the play both of the higher feelings of the heart and the
workings of originality in thought. Born originally of a seeking after beauty,
it degenerates into an attachment to form, to exterior uniformity, to precedent,
to dead authority. In the future development of humanity it must
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be given a much lower place than in
the past. Its limits must be
recognised and the demands of a higher truth, sincerity and freedom of thought
and feeling must be given priority. Mankind is apt to bind itself by attachment
to the means of its past progress forgetful of the aim. The bondage to formulas
has to be outgrown, and in this again it is the sense of a higher beauty and
fitness which will be most powerful to correct the lower. The art of life must
be understood in more magnificent terms and must subordinate its more formal
elements to the service of the master civilisers, Love and Thought.
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3
THE
work of purifying conduct through outward form and habitual and seemly
regulation of expression, manner and action is the lowest of the many services
which the artistic sense has done to humanity, and yet how wide is the field it
covers and how important and indispensable have its workings been to the
progress of civilisation! A still more important and indispensable activity of
the sense of beauty is the powerful help it has given to the formation of
morality. We do not ordinarily recognise how largely our sense of virtue is a
sense of the beautiful in conduct and our sense of sin a sense of ugliness and
deformity in conduct. It may easily be recognised in the lower and more physical
workings, as for instance in the shuddering recoil from cruelty, blood, torture
as things intolerably hideous to sight and imagination or in the aesthetic
disgust at sensual excesses and the strong sense, awakened by this disgust, of
the charm of purity and the beauty of virginity. This latter feeling was extremely active in the imagination of the Greeks and other nations not
noted for a high standard in conduct, and it was purely aesthetic in its
roots. Pity again is largely a vital instinct in the ordinary man associated
with jugupsā, the loathing for the hideous- ness of its opposite,
ghrnā,
disgust at the sordidness and brutality of cruelty, hardness and selfishness
as well as at the ugliness of their actions, so that a common word for cruel in
the Sanskrit language is nirghrna, the man without disgust or loathing,
and the word ghrnā approximates in use to krpā, the lower or
vital kind of pity. But even on a higher plane the sense of virtue is very
largely aesthetic and, even when it emerges from the aesthetic stage, must
always call the sense of the beautiful to its support if it is to be safe from
the revolt against it of one of the most deep- seated of human instincts. We can
see the largeness of this element if we study the ideas of the Greeks, who
never got beyond the aesthetic stage of morality. There were four gradations in
Greek ethical thought, – the euprepēs, that which is seemly or outwardly decorous; the dikaion, that which is in accordance with
dikē
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or nomos, the law, custom and standard of humanity based on the sense of
fitness and on the codified or uncodified mass of precedents in which that
sense has been expressed in general conduct, – in other words the just or
lawful; thirdly, the agathon, the good, based partly on the seemly and
partly on the just and lawful, and reaching towards the purely beautiful; then
final and supreme, the kalon, that which is purely beautiful, the sup-
reme standard. The most remarkable part of Aristotle’s moral system is that in
which he classifies the parts of conduct not according to our idea of virtue and
sin, pāpa and punya, but by a purely aesthetic standard, the
excess, defect and golden, in other words correct and beautiful, mean of
qualities. The Greeks’ view of life was imperfect even from the standpoint of
beauty, not only because the idea of beauty was not sufficiently catholic and
too much attached to a fastidious purity of form and outline and restraint, but
because they were deficient in love. God as beauty, Sri Krishna in Brindavan,
Śyāmasundara,
is not only Beauty, He is also Love, and without perfect love there cannot
be perfect beauty, and without perfect beauty there cannot be perfect delight.
The aesthetic motive in conduct limits and must be exceeded in order that
humanity may rise. Therefore it was that the Greek mould had to be broken and
humanity even revolted for a time against beauty. The agathon, the good,
had to be released for a time from the bondage of the kalon, the
aesthetic sense of beauty, just as it is now struggling to deliver itself from
the bondage of the euprepēs and the dikaion, mere decorousness,
mere custom, mere social law and rule. The excess of this anti- aesthetic
tendency is visible in Puritanism and the baser forms of asceticism. The
progress of ethics in Europe has been largely a struggle between the Greek sense
of aesthetic beauty and the Christian sense of a higher good marred on the one
side by formalism, on the other by an unlovely asceticism. The association of
the latter with virtue has largely driven the sense of beauty to the side of
vice. The good must not be subordinated to the aesthetic sense, but it must be
beautiful and delightful, or to that extent it ceases to be good. The object of
existence is not the practice of virtue for its own sake but
ānanda,
delight, and progress consists not in rejecting beauty and delight, but in
rising
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from the lower to the higher, the
less complete to the more complete beauty
and to delight.
The third activity of the aesthetic faculty, higher than the two already
described, the highest activity of the artistic sense before it rises to the
plane of the intellect, is the direct purifying of the emotions. This is the katharsis
of which Aristotle spoke. The sense of pleasure and delight in the emotional
aspects of life and action, this is the poetry of life, just as the regulating
and beautiful arrangement of character and action is the art of life. We have
seen how the latter purifies, but the purifying force of the former is still
more potent for good. Our life is largely made up of the eight rasas. The
movements of the heart in its enjoyment of action, its own and that of others,
may either be directed down- wards, as is the case with the animals and animal
men, to the mere satisfaction of the ten sense-organs and the vital desires
which make instruments of the senses in the average sensual man, or they may
work for the satisfaction of the heart itself in a predominatingly emotional
enjoyment of life, or they may be directed upwards through the medium of the
intellect, rational and intuitional, to attainment of delight through the
seizing on the source of all delight, the Spirit, the sat yam, sundaram,
ānandam who is beyond and around, the source and the basis of all this
world-wide activity, evolution and progress. When the heart works for itself,
then it enjoys the poetry of life, the delight of emotions, the wonder, pathos,
beauty, enjoyableness, lovableness, calm, serenity, clarity and also the
grandeur, heroism, passion, fury, terror and horror of life, of man, of
Nature, of the phenomenal manifestation of God. This is not the highest, but it
is higher than the animal, vital and ‘externally aesthetic developments. The
large part it plays in life is obvious, but in life it is hampered by the
demands of body and the vital passions. Here comes in the first mighty utility,
the triumphant activity of the most energetic forms of art and poetry. They
provide a field in which these pressing claims of the animal can be excluded and
the emotions, working disinterestedly for the satisfaction of the heart and the
imagination alone, can do the work of katharsis, emotional
purification, of which Aristotle spoke. Cittaśuddhi, the purification
of the heart, is the appointed road by
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which man arrives at his higher fulfilment, and, if it can be shown that poetry
and art are powerful agents towards that end, their supreme importance is
established. They are that, and more than that. It is only one of the great uses
of these things which men nowadays are inclined to regard as mere ornaments of
life and therefore of secondary importance.
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4
WE
now come to the kernel of the
subject, the place of art in the evolution of the race and its value in the
education and actual life of a nation. The first question is whether the sense
of the beautiful has any effect on the life of a nation. It is obvious, from
what we have already written, that the manners, the social culture and the
restraint in action and expression which are so large a part of national
prestige and dignity and make a nation admired like the French, loved like the
Irish or respected like the higher-class English, are based essentially on the
sense of form and beauty, of what is correct, symmetrical, well-adjusted, fair
to the eye and pleasing to the imagination. The absence of these qualities is a
source of national weakness. The rudeness, coarseness and vulgar violence of the
less cultured Englishman, the over-bearing brusqueness and selfishness of the
Prussian have greatly hampered those powerful nations in their dealings with
foreigners, dependencies and even their own friends, allies, colonies. We all
know what a large share the manner and ordinary conduct of the average and of
the vulgar Anglo-Indian has had in bringing about the revolt of the Indian,
accustomed through ages to courtesy, dignity and the amenities of an equal
intercourse, against the mastery of an obviously coarse and selfish community.
Now the sense of form and beauty, the correct, symmetrical, well-adjusted, fair
and pleasing is an artistic sense and can best be fostered in a nation by
artistic culture of the perceptions and sensibilities. It is noteworthy that the
two great nations who are most hampered by the defect of these qualities in
action are also the least imaginative, poetic and artistic in Europe. It is the
South German who contributes the art, poetry and music of Germany, the Celt and
Norman who produce great poets and a few great artists in England without
altering the characteristics of the dominant Saxon. Music is even more powerful
in this direction than Art and by the perfect expression of harmony insensibly
steeps the man in it. And it is noticeable that England has hardly produced a
single musician
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worth the name. Plato in his
Republic has dwelt with extraordinary
emphasis on the importance of music in education; as is the music to which a
people is accustomed, so, he says in effect, is the character of that people.
The importance of painting and sculpture is hardly less. The mind is profoundly
influenced by what it sees and, if the eye is trained from the days of childhood
to the contemplation and understanding of beauty, harmony and just arrangement
in line and colour, the tastes, habits and charac- ter will be insensibly
trained to follow a similar law of beauty, harmony and just arrangement in the
life of the adult man. This was the great importance of the universal
proficiency in the arts and crafts or the appreciation of them which was
prevalent in ancient Greece, in certain European ages, in Japan and in the
better days of our own history. Art galleries cannot be brought into every home,
but, if all the appointments of our life and furniture of our homes are things
of taste and beauty, it is inevitable that the habits, thoughts and feelings of
the people should be raised, ennobled, harmonised, made more sweet and
dignified.
A similar result is produced on the emotions by the study of beautiful or noble
art. We have spoken of the purification of the heart, the cittaśuddhi, which
Aristotle assigned as the essential office of poetry, and have pointed out that
it is done in
poetry by the
detached and disinterested enjoyment of the eight
rasas
or forms of
emotional aestheticism which make up life unalloyed
by the disturbance of the lower self-regarding passions. Painting and sculpture
work in the same direction by different means. Art sometimes uses the same means
as poetry but can- not do it to the same extent because it has not the movement
of poetry; it is fixed, still, it expresses only a given moment, a given point
in space and cannot move freely through time and region. But it is precisely
this stillness, this calm, this fixity which gives its separate value to Art.
Poetry raises the emotions and gives each its separate delight. Art stills the
emotions and teaches them
the delight of a restrained and limited satisfaction,
-
this
indeed was
the characteristic that the Greeks, a nation of artists far more artistic than
poetic, tried to bring into their poetry. Music deepens the emotions and
harmonises them with each
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other. Between them music, art and poetry are a perfect education for the
soul; they make and keep its movements purified, self-controlled, deep and
harmonious. These, therefore, are agents which cannot profitably be neglected by
humanity on its onward march or degraded to the mere satisfaction of sensuous
pleasure which will disintegrate rather than build the character. They are, when
properly used, great educating, edifying and civilising forces.
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5
THE value of
art in the training of intellectual faculty is also an important part of its
utility. We have already indicated the double character of intellectual
activity, divided between the imaginative, creative and sympathetic or
comprehensive intellectual centres on the one side and the critical, analytic
and penetrative on the other. The latter are best trained by science, criticism
and observation, the former by art, poetry, music, literature and the
sympathetic study of man and his creations. These make the mind quick to grasp
at a glance, subtle to distinguish shades, deep to reject shallow selfsufficiency, mobile, delicate, swift, intuitive. Art assists in this training
by raising images in the mind which it has to understand not by analysis, but
by self-identification with other minds; it is a powerful stimulator of
sympathetic insight. Art is subtle and delicate, and it makes the mind also in
its movements subtle and
delicate. It is suggestive, and the intellect habituated to the appreciation of
art is quick to catch suggestions, mastering not only, as the scientific mind
does, that which is positive and on the surface, but that which leads to ever
fresh widening and subtilising of knowledge and opens a door into the deeper
secrets of inner nature where the positive instruments of science cannot take
the depth or measure. This supreme intellectual value of Art has never been
sufficiently recognised. Men have made language, poetry, his- tory, philosophy
agents for the training of this side of intellectuality, necessary parts of a
liberal education, but the immense educative force of music, painting and
sculpture has not been duly recognised. They have been thought to be by-paths of
the human mind, beautiful and interesting, but not necessary, there- fore
intended for the few. Yet the universal impulse to enjoy the beauty and
attractiveness of sound, to look at and live among pictures, colours, forms
ought to have warned mankind of the superficiality and ignorance of such a view
of these eternal and important occupations of human mind. The impulse, denied
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proper training and self-purification, has spent itself on the tri- vial, gaudy,
sensuous, cheap or vulgar instead of helping man upward by its powerful aid in
the evocation of what is best and highest in intellect as well as in character,
emotion and the aesthetic enjoyment and regulation of life and manners. It is
difficult to appreciate the waste and detriment involved in the low and debased
level of enjoyment to which the artistic impulses are condemned in the majority
of mankind.
But beyond and above this intellectual utility of Art, there is a higher use,
the noblest of all, its service to the growth of spirituality in the race.
European critics have dwelt on the close connection of the highest
developments of art with religion, and it is undoubtedly true that in Greece, in
Italy, in India, the greatest efflorescence of a national Art has been
associated with the employment of the artistic genius to illustrate or adorn the
thoughts and fancies or the temples and instruments of the national religion.
This was not because Art is necessarlly associated with the outward forms of
religion, but because it was in the religion that men’s spiritual aspirations
centred themselves. Spirituality is a wider thing than formal religion and it
is in the service of spirituality that Art reaches its highest
self-expression. Spirituality is a single word expressive of three lines of
human aspiration towards divine knowledge, divine love and joy, divine strength,
and that will be the highest and most perfect Art which, while satisfying the
physical requirements of the aesthetic sense, the laws of formal beauty, the
emotional demand of humanity, the portrayal of life and outward reality, as the
best European’ Art satisfies these requirements, reaches beyond them and expresses inner spiritual truth, the deeper not obvious reality of things, the joy
of God in the world and its beauty and desirableness and the manifestation of
divine force and energy in phenomenal creation. This is what Indian Art alone
attempted thoroughly and in the effort it often dispensed, either deliberately
or from impatience, with the lower, yet not negligible perfections which the
more material European demanded. Therefore Art has flowed in two separate
streams in Europe and Asia, so diverse that it is only now that the European
aesthetic sense has so far trained, itself as to begin to appreciate the
artistic conven-
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tions, aims and traditions of Asia. Asia’s future development, will unite these
two streams in one deep and grandiose flood of artistic self-expression
perfecting the aesthetic evolution of humanity.
But if Art is to reach towards the highest, the Indian tendency
must dominate. The spirit is that in which all the rest of the human being
reposes, towards which it returns and the final self-revelation of which is the
goal of humanity. Man becomes God, and all human activity reaches its highest
and noblest when it succeeds in bringing body, heart and mind into touch with
spirit. Art can express eternal truth, it is not limited to the expression of form and
appearance. So wonderfully has God made the world that a man using a simple
combination of lines, an unpretentious harmony of colours, can raise this
apparently in- significant medium to suggest absolute and profound truths with a
perfection which language labours with difficulty to reach. What Nature is, what
God is, what man is can be triumphantly revealed in stone or on canvas.
Behind a few figures, a few trees and rocks the supreme Intelligence, the
supreme Imagination, the supreme Energy lurks, acts, feels, is, and, if the
artist has the spiritual vision, he can see it and suggest perfectly the great
mysterious Life in its manifestations brooding in action, active in thought,
energetic in stillness, creative in repose, full of a mastering intention in
that which appears blind and unconscious. The great truths of religion, science,
metaphysics, life, development, become concrete,
emotional, universally intelligible and convincing in the hands of the master of
plastic Art, and the soul of man, in the stage when it is rising from emotion to
intellect, looks, receives the suggestion and is uplifted towards a higher
development, a diviner knowledge.
So it is with the divine love and joy which pulsates throughout existence and
is far superior to alloyed earthly pleasure. Catholic, perfect, unmixed with
repulsion, radiating through all things, the common no less than the high, the
mean and shabby no less than the lofty and splendid, the terrible and the
repulsive no less than the charming and attractive, it uplifts all, purifies
all, turns all to love and delight and beauty. A little of
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this immortal nectar poured into a man’s heart transfigures life and action. The
whole flood of it pouring in would lift mankind to God. This too Art can seize
on and suggest to the human soul, aiding it in its stormy and toilsome
pilgrimage. In that pilgrimage it is the divine strength that supports.
Śakli,
Force, pouring through the universe supports its boundless activities, the
frail and tremulous life of the rose no less than the flaming motions of sun and
star. To suggest the strength and virile unconquerable force of the divine
Nature in man and in the outside world, its energy, its calm, its powerful
inspiration, its august enthusiasm, its wildness, greatness, attractiveness, to
breathe that into man’s soul and gradually mould the finite into the image of
the Infinite is another spiritual utility of Art. This is its loftiest function,
its fullest consummation, its most perfect privilege.
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6
THE enormous
value of Art to human evolution has been made sufficiently apparent from the
analysis, incomplete in itself, which we have attempted. We have also
incidentally pointed out its value as a factor in education. It is obvious that
no nation can afford to neglect an element of such high importance to the
culture of its people or the training of some of the higher intellectual, moral
and aesthetic faculties in the young. The system of education which, instead of
keeping artistic training apart as a privilege for a few specialists, frankly
introduces it as a part of culture no less necessary than literature or science,
will have taken a great step forward in the perfection of national education and
the general diffusion of a broad-based human culture. It is not necessary that
every man should be an artist. It is necessary that every man should have his
artistic faculty developed, his taste trained, his sense of beauty and insight
into form and colour and that which is expressed in form and colour, made
habitually active, correct and sensitive. It is necessary that those who create,
whether in great things or small, whether in the unusual masterpieces of art
and genius or in the small common things of use that surround a man’s daily
life, should be habituated to produce and the nation habituated to expect the
beautiful in preference to the ugly, the noble in preference to the vulgar, the
fine in preference to the crude, the harmonious in preference to the gaudy. A
nation surrounded daily by the beautiful, noble, fine and harmonious becomes
that which it is habituated to contemplate and realises the fullness of the
expanding Spirit in itself.
In the system of National education that was inaugurated in Bengal, a beginning
was made by the importance attached to drawing and clay-modelling as elements of
manual training. But the absence of an artistic ideal, the misconception of the
true aim of manual training, the imperative financial needs of these struggling
institutions making for a predominant commercial aim in the education given, the
mastery of English ideas, English
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methods and English predilections in the so-called national education
rendered nugatory the initial advantage. The students had faculty, but the
teaching given them would waste and misuse the faculty. The nation and the
individual can gain nothing by turning out figures in clay which faithfully copy the vulgarity and
ugliness of English commercial production or by multiplying mere copies of men
or things. A free and active imaging of form and hue within oneself, a free and
self-trained hand reproducing with instinctive success not the form and
measurement of things seen outside, for that is a smaller capacity easily
mastered, but the inward vision of the relation and truth of things, an eye
quick to note and distinguish, sensitive to design and to harmony in colour, these are
the faculties that have to be evoked and the formal
and mechanical English method is useless for this purpose.
In India the revival of a truly national Art is already an accomplished
fact and the masterpieces of the school can already challenge comparison with
the best work of other countries. Under such circumstances it is unpardonable
that the crude formal teaching of English schools and the vulgar commercial aims
and methods of the West should subsist in our midst. The country has yet to
evolve a system of education which shall be really national. The taint of
Occidental ideals and alien and un- suitable methods has to be purged out of our
minds, and nowhere more than in the teaching which should be the foundation of
intellectual and aesthetic renovation. The spirit of old Indian Art must be
revived, the inspiration and directness of vision which even now subsists among
the possessors of the ancient traditions, the inborn skill and taste of the
race, the dexterity of the Indian hand and the intuitive gaze of the Indian eye
must be recovered and the whole nation lifted again to the high level of the
ancient culture
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and higher.
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