62 ESSAYS IJS aSATIOTUL IDEALISM.

Such then are some aspects of the relation between
art and yoga in India. It has been said that when a new
inspiration comes into Western art, it will come again from
the East. This I believe. It is the lack of a metaphysic
that makes so much of modern art uninteresting and
monotonous. Art which has no concern with the subjec-
tive life, with things unseen that are more real
than those that are called real, is little more than science.
It may be that the influence of the East will restore to the
world some measure of the romance and beauty that com-
merce and materialism have taken away. This is, indeed,
the only hope ; for it is of little use to be more ingenious
than our forefathers if our real life is smaller. The great-
ness of men lies in their beliefs, not in the multiplicity of
things they disbelieve. Religion, for India, is personal
•experience of the supersensual within one's own conscious*
ness—Thou art That; Thou art the Buddha; The
Kingdom of hea,ven is within you. It is part of the mess-
age of the East that this inward vision, this divine imagin*
•atioii, is essential to all real art; that the impersonal beauty
of a type is greater far than the representation, of the
transitory and individual.

And if we desire to understand why this ideal art is
.greater than any imitation of the beauty of nature as we
•see it with physical eyes, we shall find that it is because
this ideal art, by reason of the element of timelessness and
universality in its presentation, frees us most from self,
raising us for a, time to the plane of aesthetic contemplation,
which the artist himself attained when he first saw the
picture itself. To understand a poem or a picture, you
must, however dimly, enter into the spiritual atmosphere
£11 which it was conceived ; "to read poetry, you must be
A poet; to see a picture, you must be a,n artist." It is