There is a tendency in modern times to
depreciate the value of the beautiful and over stress
the value of the useful...
There is a tendency in modern times to depreciate
the value of the beautiful and over stress the value of
the useful, a tendency curbed in Europe by the
imperious insistence of an age long 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 pranakosa, which go beyond and
dominate the mere animal 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 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 prana, 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 modern 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 prana and the
citta, the vital and emotional desires. Wealth,
luxury, enjoyment for oneself and those dear to us,
participation in the satisfaction 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 karanajagat, the world
of types and causes where Nature fixes everything
before she works it out in the visible world. Nihatah
purvameva.
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 Yogis have a visuddha -buddhi, a
thought-organ cleared of the interference of the lower
strata by cittasuddhi or purification of the citta, the
mind-stuff, from the prana 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 mankind do
not think, they have only thought-sensations; a large
minority think confusedly, mixing up desires,
predilections, passions, pre judgements, 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, judgement 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 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.
Thought divides itself broadly into
two groups of functions..
The activity of human thought divides itself 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 clear-sighted 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 use and
articles of pleasure, have done more than anything else
to raise man from the beast, to refine and purge his
passions, to enable 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 demigod 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 cittasuddhi, the
purification of the citta or mass of established ideas,
feelings and actional habits in a man either by
samyama, rejection, or by bhogy, satisfaction, or by
both.
Aristotle was speaking of the purification of
feeling, 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 right standpoint, not
only a truth but the fundamental truth of
existence.
According to our own philosophy the whole world came
out of ananda and returns into ananda, and the triple
term in which ananda may be stated is Joy, Love,
Beauty.
To see divine beauty in the whole 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 vidya through avidya, 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 akhanda 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 acara 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 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 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.
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...
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 jugupsa, the loathing for
the hideousness of its opposite, ghrna, 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 ghrna approximates in use to
krpa, 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 this 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 euprepes, that which is seemly or outwardly
decorous; the dikaion, that which is in accordance with
dike 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 supreme 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, papa 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,
Syamasundara, 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 euprepes 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 ananda, delight, and
progress consists not in rejecting beauty and
delight, but in rising 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 for 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
downwards, 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 predominantly
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
satyam, sundaram, anandam 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.
Cittasuddhi, the purification of the heart, is the
appointed road by 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.
The place of art in the evolution of the
race and its value in the education and actual life
of a nation...
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 age 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 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 character 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, harmonized, 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
cittasuddhi, 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 cannot 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 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.
Value of art in the training
of intellectual faculty...
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 self-sufficiency, 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 subtilisin 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, history, 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,
therefore 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 proper training and
self-purification, has spent itself on the trivial,
gaudy, sensuous, cheap or vulgar instead of helping man
upward by its powerful aids 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 necessarily 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 desirability
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 convention, 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 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. Sakti, 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 the image of the Infinite is
another spiritual utility of art. This is its loftiest
function, its fullest consummation, its most perfect
privilege.
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 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 a part 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 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 ideals, English 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 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 unsuitable 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 -
and higher.
