92 ESSAYS IN JUTIONAL IDEALISM.

character. But when we conie hack to the thirteenth
-iind fourteenth centuries, with the .glorious work of
the imagers at Ghartres, the sweet ivory Madonnas, the
-crisp and prickly borders of the manuscripts, and the
Gothic rose bequeathed to later times as the symbol of the
idealism of the Middle Ages, then at last we find an art
that expresses or endeavours to express something of that
which we too desire to say. Nothing is more remarkable
than the " Gothicness " and, in Buskin's sense, the
•" Christianity" of Oriental art. From this point of view,
indeed, I should like to classify Gothic, Egyptian, Indian,
.and Chinese art as Christian, and Greek, Roman, Renais-
sance, and modern European as pagan, or to use more
.general terms, as religious and materialistic respectively.

To speak again of the present day: it is not that there
is 110 art in the West which, from the Indian point of view,
is great; there has been such art; but it has come only
from men fighting desperately against the spirit of the age,
living in another world of theirs and ours. Of these,
Burne-Jones and William Morris are the greatest: the
former in that his work possesses something of that im-
personality and aloofness which we seek for, and because
he uses form" less for its own sake than as a manifestation
of something more changeless and eternal; because, too,
he was made wise by love to paint not the beauty of the
passing hour or the transient emotion, but the changeless
might and glory of the gods and heroes ; and Morris was
.great, because he proved again that all art is one, the
-distinction between art and craft illusory, and that this
•single art is not merely a trivial pastime, but essential to
humanity and civilisation.

In the immediate future we may, both in England
:a*id in India, have less and less art. English art flourishes