"Indian architecture, painting, sculpture are not only intimately one in inspiration with the Central things in Indian philosophy, religion, yoga, culture,-but a specially intense expression of their significance".

"The great artistic work proceeds from an act of intuition, not really an intellectual idea or a splendid imagination,-these are only mental translations,-but a direct intuition of some truth of life or being, some significant form of that truth, some development of it in the mind of man. And so far there is no difference between great European and great Indian work. "

III

"The highest business of art is to disclose something of the self, the Infinite, the Divine to the regard of the soul, the self through its expressions, the infinite through its living finite symbols, the Divine through his powers. "

The first primitive object of art of painting is to illustrate life and Nature and at the lowest this becomes a more or less vigorous and original or conventionally faithful reproduction, but it rises in great hands to a revelation of glory and beauty of the sensuous appeal of life or of the dramatic power and moving interest of character and emotion and action. This is a common form of aesthetic work in Europe; but in Indian art it is never

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the governing motive. The sensuous appeal is there, but it is refined into one and not the chief element of the richness of a soul of psychic grace and beauty which is for the Indian artist the true beauty, - Lavanya: the dramatic motive is subordinated and made only a purely secondary element, only so much is given of character and action as will help to bring out the deeper spiritual or psychic feeling or Bhava.

The life depicted is the life of the soul and not, except as a form and a helping suggestion, the life of the vital being and the body. For the second more elevated aim of art is the interpretation or intuitive revelation of existence through the forms of life and Nature and it is this that is the starting-point of the Indian motive.

The Painter lavishes his soul in colour and there is liquidity in the form, a fluent grace of subtlety in the line he uses which impose on him a more mobile and emotional way of self-expression. The more he gives us of the colour and changing form and emotion of life of the soul, the more his work glows with beauty, masters the inner aesthetic sense and opens it to the thing his art better gives us than any other, the delight of the motion of the self out into spiritually sensuous joy of beautiful shapes and coloured radiances of existence.

Painting is naturally the most sensuous of arts, and highest greatness open to the painter is to spiritualise this sensuous appeal by making the most vivid outward beauty a revelation of subtle spiritual emotion so that the soul and the sense are at harmony in deepest and finest richness of both and united in their satisfied consonant expression of the inner significances of things and life.

VII

There is loss of austerity of Tapasya in his way of working, a less severely restrained expression of eternal things and of the

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fundamental truths behind the forms of things, but there is in compensation a moved wealth of psychic or warmth of vital suggestion, a lavish delight of the beauty of the play of the eternal in the moments of time and there the artist arrests it for us and makes moments of the life of the soul reflected in form of man or creature of incident, or scene or Nature full of permanent and opulent significance to our spiritual vision."

VIII

"It is not that all Indian work realises this ideal; there is plenty no doubt that falls short, is lowered, ineffective or even debased, but it is the best and the most characteristic influence and execution which gives its tone to an art and by which we must judge."

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