40 ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

shoulders, his back is plump like a sheep's, his body is
that of a blooded horse, his gait is stately, and his tail
long ".—(Satriputra).

For comparison I quote another description, from an
old Chinese canon :

" With a form like that of a tiger, and with a colour
tawny or sometimes blue, the lion is like the
MukurinW) a shaggy dog. He has a huge head, hard as
"bronze, a long tail, forehead firm as iron, hooked fangs,
eyes like bended bows, and raised ears ; his eyes flash like
lightning, and his roar is like thunder."*

Sucji descriptions throw light on the representation
oŁ animals in Oriental decorative art. The artist's lion
need be like 110 *lion on earth or in any zoological
garden;, for he ia- not illustrating a work on natural
history. 'Kijeed* Jpbm such a limitation, he is able to
express through his lion the whole theory of his national
existence and individual idiosyncracy. Thus has'Oriental art
been preserved from such paltry and emasculated realism
as that of the lions of Trafalgar Hquare. Contrast
the absence of imagination in this handiwork of the
English painter of domestic pets, with the vitality
of the heraldic lions of Medieval England, or the lions
of Hokusai's iDaily Exorcisms.' The sculptured lions
pf Egypt, Assyria, or India (see Plate IV.) are true works
of art, for in them we see, not any lion that could to-day
be shot or photographed in a desert, but the lion as he
existed in the minds of a people, a lion that tells us some
thing of the people who represented him. In such artistic
subjectivity lies the significance of Ancient and Eastern de-
corative art: it is this which gives so much dignity and
yalue to the lesser arts of India., and separates them so

~~ *Quoted in c The Kokka? No. 198, 1906^ '