THE ATMS: AND METHODS OF INDIAN ART. 23

ideal qualities apparent. In purely Hindu and religious
art, however, even portraits are felt to be lesser art than
the purely ideal and abstract representations; and such
realism as we find, for example, in the Ajanta paintings,,
is due to the keenness of the artist's memory of familiar
things, not to absorption in the imitation of appearances.
For realism that thus represents keenness of memory
picture, strength of imagination, there is room in all art;
duly restrained, it is so much added power. But realism
which is of the nature of imitation of an object actually
seen at the time of painting is quite antipathetic to-
imagination, and finds no place in the ideal of Indian art. -

Much of the criticism applied to works of art in
modern times is based xipon the idea of 4 truth to natxire.
The first thing for which many people look in a work of
art, is for something to recognize ; and if the representa-
tion is of something they have not seen, or symbolizes
some unfamilia,r abstract idea, it is, for them, thereby self-
condemned as untrue to nature.

What, after all, is reality and what is truth ? The
Indian mind answers that nature, the phenomenal world
that is, is known to it only through sensation, and that we
have no warrant for supposing the sensations convey to
us any adeqxiate conception of the intrinsic reality of
things in themselves ; nay, they have no such reality
apart from itself. At most, natural forms are but incar-
nations of ideas, and each is but an incomplete expression.

The conception that the object of art is the reprodxic-
tion of the external forms of nature, as in. modern Europe,
is the natural product of a life divorced from beauty.
Pictorial imitations of nature are the substitute in which
men seek for compensation for the ~ unloveliness of an
artificial life. We are nowhere able to observe that