34 ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

that these are secularised, and that men concerned with
these vital sides of life must either preserve their life and
their religion apart in separate water-tight compartments,
or let religion go. The Church cannot well complain of
the indifference of men to religion when she herself has cut
off from religion, and delimited as * profane/ the physical
and mental activities and delights of life itself. Passing
through the great galleries of modern art, nothing is more
impressive than the fact that none of it is religious. I do
not merely mean that there are no Madonnas and no
crucifixes ; but that there is no evidence of any union of
the artistic with the religious sense. The same is true of
dancing and music. Such art appears, therefore, let us not
say childish, for children, are wiser, but empty, because of
its lack of a true meta-physic. Of this the cries of realism
and * art for art's sake' are evidence enough. A too
confident appeal to the so-called facts .of nature is to the
Indian mind conclusive evidence of superficiality of thought.
For the artist above all must this be true, for the first
essential of true art is not imitation, but imagination.

What is the ideal of beauty implicit in Indian art ? It
is a beauty of type, impersonal and aloof. It is not an
ideal of varied individual beauty, but of one formalised
and rhythmic. The canons insist again and again upon
the Ideal as the only true beauty:

" An image whose limbs are made in accordance with
the rules laid down in the sftstra/s is beautiful. Some,
however, deem that which pleases the fancy to be beauti-
ful ; but proportions that differ from those given in the
$oŁtras cannot delight the cultured"—(Sukrackcvrya),

The appeal of formalised ideal beauty is for the Indian
mind always stronger than that of beauty associated with
the accidental and unessential. The beauty of art, whether