88 ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

it does not recognize the standards that have moulded our
own ?

There are indeed many difficulties in the way of the
"Western student of Indian art, but they are not insuper-
able. The first perhaps lies in the fact that the Indian
ideal of beauty is not altogether the same as the Greek
ideal which has influenced all "Western art ; and a greater
difficulty lies perhaps in the fact that for India, art, to
be great, need not necessarily be beautiful at all, unless
we give to * beauty,' the deeper meaning of * harmony/
which really belongs to it. In" India the beautiful and the
grotesque are not distinguished as the greater and lesser
kinds of art ; each manifests its own idea, each may be a
harmony. There is something in great ideal art that
transcends the limited conceptions of beauty and ugliness
and makes any criticism founded on such a basis seem
but idle words.

In art, as in life, we pray for deliverance from the
bondage of the pairs of opposites, the "Delusion of the
Pairs."

And even when the representation of physical human
beauty is the immediate aim, we find that the ideal of the
human form is different in East and West. The robust
muscularity and activity of the Greek athletic statue, or
of Michael Angelo's ideal, is repugnant to the lover of the
repose, and the smooth and slender refinement of the
bodies and limbs of Orientals. It is the same with the
features and the colour. For example, the perfect colour
in our eyes, which we call fair, is a light golden brown,
and not at all the snow-white paleness of the European
ideal. But the real division lies deeper still. The absence
of mystery, the altogether limited ideal of Greek art, its
satisfaction with the expression of merely physical beauty