Symbolism and mysticism were used by the priests of all ancient nations for thousands of years in preparing intoxicating draughts of superstition for the people, and proving the necessity for making sacrifices. At first depraved passions only were to be sacrificed, but by degrees they tried to typify those passions by animals, with analogous propensities. Goats became the representatives of licentiousness; bulls, types of indomitable fury and insubordination; and these animal types were offered to the gods. As soon as the priests had convinced the people that the blood of animals, the smoke from their burning bodies, the odour of roasting sheep, might appease the anger of S’iva, fanaticism went a step further, and drew human beings into the awful vortex of prejudice, and thousands of men and women were crushed, joyfully screaming, under the heavy wheels of Jugurnaut’s, S’iva’s, or Harris’s cars. Men and women were burned alive; intellectual progress stopped, asceticism and blind submission to priestly despotism were enforced, and the possibility of a progressive art was crushed for thousands of years.
This desolate state of society required reform, and Manû stepped forward. He divided society into four distinct layers: the Brahmans, Kshattryas, Vaisyas, and S’udras, of which the two first were Aryans, the third caste Turanians, and the fourth Negroes; consequently, in spite of the excellence of his laws, which were assumed to have been dictated by Brahma himself, no real art was possible.
The Indians have two great national epic poems, containing nearly the whole substance of all the epic poems of the other Aryan races, and the many scenes from the Ramâyâna and Mahâbhârata in carvings and sculptures stand in the same relation to Greek art, as these poems to the Iliad and Odyssee. In both, scenes of heroism are displayed; but, whilst symmetry and proportion rule in the Greek poems, fantastic irregularity, wild incongruities, exaggerations and impossibilities are heaped up in the Indian. The beauty of some thought is effaced by overburdened metaphors, gushing forth in an endless stream like the waters of the Ganges. There are passages in the 28,000 double verses of the Ramâyâna surpassing anything written.
As an indisputable proof I will quote a few lines from the opening passages of the Ramâyâna. The gods are assembled before the first, incomprehensible cause, and address it in the following words:—
O Thou, whom threefold might and splendour veil,
Maker, Preserver, and Transformer, hail!
Thy gaze surveys this world from clime to clime,
Thyself immeasurable in space and time:
To no corrupt desires, no passions prone:
Unconquered conqueror, infinite, unknown;
Though in one form Thou veil’st Thy might divine,
Still, at thy pleasure, every form is Thine.
Pure crystals thus prismatic hues assume,
As varying lights and varying tints illume;
Men think Thee absent, Thou art ever near;
Pitying those sorrows which Thou ne’er canst fear.
Unsordid penance Thou alone canst pay;
Unchanged, unchanging—old without decay:
Thou knowest all things—who Thy praise can state?
Createdst all things—Thyself uncreate!
The endeavour to give forms to such sublime abstractions made the Indians lose their regulating power in pictorial and plastic art. A god was to be made powerful, and he was provided with four or twenty arms, and three heads. The miraculous and symbolic were the greatest enemies of Indian art.
In the Mahâbhârata, exceeding Homer’s combined poems seven times in quantity, having not less than 110,000 double verses, we read of sentiments, feelings, and deeds which are our own—but nothing is within the pale of the credible. The birth of all the heroes is miraculous. Their deeds surpass the standard of human acts. They constantly associate with the gods, talk, argue, and dispute with them; their palaces are of immeasurable grandeur and splendour: ivory gates inlaid with jewels, golden pillars, diamond thrones, glittering with the splendour of a thousand suns; their armies are reckoned by millions; their heroes uproot trees, and kill hundreds of thousands at one blow; time and space have no meaning with them. Kings reign 27,000 years; Prathama-Raja reigned 6,300,000 and lived 8,400,000 years.[1] How could art in a higher sense exist under such conditions?
[1] By striking off the zeros, which are put on by the Brahmans out of respect, the figures may be reduced to some natural compass of possibility.
Art in a more comprehensible form appeared in India only when Buddha came to attempt a second regeneration of the people. He abolished castes, preached equality and freedom, and succeeded in awakening a high force of artistic activity in the dreamy Indians. But their art was altogether confined to the construction of rock-hewn temples, of stupas, topes, and religious buildings—architectural constructions in comparison with which even our greatest cathedrals dwindle into mere child’s play. Their works of art are tinged with the same exaggerations as their great heroic poems, and when Buddhism was stamped out in its birth-place about the seventh century A.D., the Brahmans constructed their temples, vying with those of the Buddhist artists in architectural grandeur. They went back to their monstrosities, but they could no longer check the artistic power of the Aryan spirit.
The rock-hewn and isolated temples of India have details in stucco, of ornamentation, foliage, and general decoration, which, like their mythology, their heroic poems, and their abstruse philosophy, went through all the artistic metamorphoses of pliable, plastic, elastic and solid substances. In all we observe an unbounded play of imagination, uncontrolled by any law of symmetry. The walls are decorated with the most exquisite shawl and lace patterns, either in stucco or hewn in stone; a proof that before the application of those delicate forms to wall decorations they must have existed as textile fabrics of high finish. The rock-hewn temples exhibit clear imitations of rafters and cross-beams; wood had, therefore, been long in use before they attempted to imitate it in stone. Their sculptures are wood-carvings, terra-cotta or plaster-of-Paris works, turned into stone. The pliability of the softer materials visibly predominates. The gateways before the Sanchi Tope (see the masterly cast of one of these in the South Kensington Museum), though hewn in stone, are a close imitation of wooden posts and cross-beams joined together. This imitation is so faithful that even the rough and crooked outlines of the badly-cut posts and beams are preserved. The richness and variety of their decorative patterns, as also the minuteness of the details, prove that such patterns must have been carved in wood or fashioned in clay long before they were executed in the harder material—stone. Stucco must have served as a means of transition from wood-carving to sculpture. In the Ramâyâna the town of Agodhyá, built by Manû (the father and lawgiver of mankind), is thus described: ‘It was adorned with beautiful palaces, high as mountains, and with houses of many stories; everything shining as in Indra’s heaven. Its aspect had a charming effect. The town was enlivened by ever-changing colours; regular bowers and sweetly-blooming trees delighted the eyes. It was full of precious stones. Its walls were covered with variegated-coloured fields resembling a chess board,’ &c.; the latter allusion giving a description of tesselated or mosaic work with which the walls must have been decorated. In a description of a palace in the Sakuntalâ, by Kalidâsa, who lived a century B.C., we read: ‘Over the gate rises an arch of ivory; above it float flags of a deep yellow hue, the tassels of which appear to beckon and to call to you: Step in—step in. The panels of the door are of gold and stucco, glittering like the diamond breast of a god. Look here! there is a row of palaces shining like the moon, like shells, like the stem of a water-lily. The stucco is laid on as thick as a hand. Golden steps adorned with different stones lead to the higher rooms, from which crystal windows surrounded with pearls look down, glittering like the bright eyes of a beautiful maiden.’ The passage that the stucco was laid on as thick as a hand can only mean that the ornament was worked in relief. Richly-painted ornamentation in stucco with mosaic and other patterns must therefore have existed. These undoubtedly originated, like the Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian wall-decorations, in textile fabrics, which, having been found to perish too quickly, were made of a stronger, more durable material, preserving, however, all the character of the original patterns and material.