50 ESSAYS IN, NATIONAL IDEALISM.

For these nameless artists, the one great thing was
not so much to express themselves in their-•• work, but to
tell the great thing itself, that meant so much tp' them and
which it was theirs to re-express. ISTot by then- names do
.we remember them. Theirs is an immortality more perfect,
because more impersonal. Art that is altogether original
can never be truly great. How could one man's labour
rival the re.sults of centuries of race-imagining ? The true
material of art must ever be that which has already com-
manded the hearts "of men rather than any fancy of the
passing hour.

Such, then, have been the aims and methods of Indian
Art in the past. Two tendencies are manifested in the
Indian art of to-day, the one inspired by the technical
achievement of the modern West, the other by the spiritual
idealism of the East. The former has swept away both the
beauty and the limitation of the old tradition. The latter
has but newly found expression ; yet if tlie greatest art is
always both National and Keligious (and how empty any
other art must be), it is there alone that we see the,begin-
nings of a new and greater art, that shall fulfil and not
destroy the past. When a living Indian culture arises
out of the wreck of the past and the struggle of the
present, a new tradition will be born, and new vision find
expression in the language of form, and colour no less than
in that of words than rhythm. The people to whom the
great conceptions came are still the Indian people, and,
when life is strong in them again, strong also will be their
art. It may well be that the fruit of a deeper national life,
a wider culture, and a profouncler love, will be an art
greater than any of the past. But this can only be through
.growth and development, not by a sudden rejection of the
past. A particular convention is the characteristic