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For the Indians, all nature is divine and, below the great Indra, all the gods are of equal power and can threaten or dethrone the other gods, concrete or abstract—the sun, the jungle, the tiger, and the elephant; the forces which create and those which destroy—war, love, and death. In India everything has been god, everything is god or will be god. The gods change, they evolve, they are born and die, they may or may not leave children, they tighten or loosen their grip on the imagination of men and on the walls of the rocks. What does not die, in India, is faith—the immense faith, frenzied and confused under a thousand names; it changes its form ceaselessly, but always remains the same immeasurable power that urges the masses to action. In India there came to pass this thing: that, driven forth by an invasion, a famine, or a migration of wild beasts, thousands of human beings moved to the north or to the south. There at the shore of the sea, at the base of a mountain, they encountered a great wall of granite. Then they all entered the granite; in its shadows they lived, loved, worked, died, were born, and, three or four centuries afterward, they came out again, leagues away, having traversed the mountain. Behind them they left the emptied rock, its galleries hollowed out in every direction, its sculptured, chiseled walls, its natural or artificial pillars turned into a deep lacework with ten thousand horrible or charming figures, gods without number and without name, men, women, beasts—a tide of animal life moving in the gloom. Sometimes when they found no clearing in their path, they hollowed out an abyss in the center of the mass of rock to shelter a little black stone.
For the Indians, all nature is divine and, below the great Indra, all the gods are of equal power and can threaten or dethrone the other gods, concrete or abstract—the sun, the jungle, the tiger, and the elephant; the forces which create and those which destroy—war, love, and death. In India everything has been god, everything is god or will be god. The gods change, they evolve, they are born and die, they may or may not leave children, they tighten or loosen their grip on the imagination of men and on the walls of the rocks. What does not die, in India, is faith—the immense faith, frenzied and confused under a thousand names; it changes its form ceaselessly, but always remains the same immeasurable power that urges the masses to action. In India there came to pass this thing: that, driven forth by an invasion, a famine, or a migration of wild beasts, thousands of human beings moved to the north or to the south. There at the shore of the sea, at the base of a mountain, they encountered a great wall of granite. Then they all entered the granite; in its shadows they lived, loved, worked, died, were born, and, three or four centuries afterward, they came out again, leagues away, having traversed the mountain. Behind them they left the emptied rock, its galleries hollowed out in every direction, its sculptured, chiseled walls, its natural or artificial pillars turned into a deep lacework with ten thousand horrible or charming figures, gods without number and without name, men, women, beasts—a tide of animal life moving in the gloom. Sometimes when they found no clearing in their path, they hollowed out an abyss in the center of the mass of rock to shelter a little black stone.
[The
illustration on page 15 represents a copy of the fresco of Ajanta—Shiva and
Parvati—which the Indian Society has kindly authorized us to reproduce. This
copy is from the brush of Nanda Lai Bose, a contemporary Indian painter and a
pupil of Abanindra Nath Tagore. The school of Indian painting is being reborn,
or rather, it continues. It has not ceased to take its inspiration from the
Indian myths and legends that it treats notably in the work of the two masters
just cited—with a grave and tender melancholy, and according to the traditional
forms of Hindu and Indo-Persian art. (See No. 200 of L’Art Décoratif, February, 1914.)]
It is
in these monolithic temples, on their dark walls or on their sunburnt façade,
that the true genius of India expends all its terrific force. Here the confused
speech of confused multitudes makes itself heard. Here man confesses
unresistingly his strength and his nothingness. He does not exact the affirmation
of a determined ideal from form. He incloses no system in it. He extracts it in
the rough from formlessness, according to the dictates of the formless. He
utilizes the indentations and the accidents of the rock. It is they that make
the sculpture. If any room is left he adds arms to the monster, or cuts off his
legs if the space is insufficient. If an enormous wall of rock suggests the
broad masses of monsters that he has seen rolling in herds, rearing their heads
on the banks of the rivers or at the edges of the forests, he cuts the wall
into great pure planes to make an elephant of it. Wherever, by chance, the
hollows and the projections occur, breasts swell, haunches tighten and move;
the mating of men or beasts, combat, prayer, violence, and gentleness are born
of matter that seems itself to be suffused with a vague intoxication. The roots
of wild plants may split the forms, the blocks may crumble, the action of sun
and water may gnaw the stone. Yet the elements will not mingle all these lives
with the confusion of the earth more successfully than the sculptor has done.
Sometimes, in India, one finds enormous mushrooms of stone in the depths of the
forests, shining in the green shadow like poisonous plants. Sometimes one finds
heavy elephants, quite alone, as mossy and as rough skinned as if alive; they
mingle with the tangled vines, the grasses reach their bellies. flowers and
leaves cover them, and even when their debris shall have returned to the earth
they will be no more completely absorbed by the intoxication of the forest.
The
whole of Indian genius lies in this never-satisfied need for setting matter in
motion, in this acceptance of the elements offered by matter, in this
indifference to the fate of the forms that it has drawn from matter. Before the
art that reveals to us this genius, one must not look for the expression which
the Egyptian gave to his metaphysical system, an expression that was imposed,
perhaps, upon the sculptor, but was none the less real; we must not look for
the free expression of a social philosophy, as among the Greeks. What we have
here is the dark and troubled expression—anonymous and profound, but
immeasurably strong for that very reason—of the intuitive pantheism of the
Indian. Man is no longer at the center of life. He is no longer that flower of
the whole world, which has slowly set itself to form and mature him. He is
mingled with all things, he is on the same plane with all things, he is a
particle of the infinite, neither more nor less important than the other particles
of the infinite. The earth passes into the trees, the trees into the fruits,
the fruits into man or the animal, man and the animal into the earth; the
circulation of life sweeps along and propagates a confused universe wherein
forms arise for a second, only to be engulfed and then to reappear, overlapping
one another, palpitating, penetrating one another as they surge like the waves.
Man does not know whether yesterday he was not the very tool with which he
himself will force matter to release the form that he may have tomorrow.
Everything is merely an appearance, and under the diversity of appearances
Brahma, the spirit of the world, is a unity. To be sure, man has the mystical
intuition of universal transformism. Through transmigrations, by passing from
one appearance to another, and by raising within himself, through suffering and
combat, the moving level of life, he will doubtless be pure enough one day to
annihilate himself in Brahma. But, lost as he is in the ocean of mingled forms
and energies, does he know whether he is still a form or a spirit? Is that
thing before us a thinking being, a living being even, a planet, or a being cut
in stone? Germination and putrefaction are engendered unceasingly. Everything
has its heavy movement, expanded matter beats like a heart. Does not wisdom
consist in submerging oneself in it, in order to taste the intoxication of the
unconscious as one gains possession of the force that stirs in matter?
In the
virgin forests of the south, between the heat of the sun and the fever of the
soil, faith caused the temples to spring two hundred feet into the air,
multiplied them from generation to generation, and surrounded them with
ever-growing inclosures, whose position was constantly changed. Such an
architecture could not issue from a source less powerful and less dim than the
grottos hollowed out of the depths of the rocks. Artificial mountains were
raised up, graded pyramids, wherein the thicket of forms moves as if alive. One
is tempted to say that there was no plan for the construction of these forests
of gods, as they bristle like cactus and evil plants, as they present profiles
like the backs of primitive monsters. They seem to have been thrust up from the
crust of the earth as if by the force of lava. It must have required ten
thousand laborers, working together and by their own inspiration, but united by
their fanaticism and their desires, to build these carve them from top to
bottom, titanic platforms, cover them with statues as dense as the lives of the
jungle, and support them in space on the aërial festoon of the lacelike
ogives and the inextricable scaffolding of the columns. Here are statues upon
statues, colonnades upon colonnades; thirty styles are mingled, juxtaposed,
superimposed. The columns may be round or square or polygonal, in sections or
monolithic, smooth or fluted or covered with carving that has an appearance of
danger, like masses of reptiles moving in oily circles, like pustules that
throb and rise, like bubbles bursting under leaves spread over a heavy water.
There, as everywhere in India, the infinitely little touches the infinitely
big. Whatever the power of these temples, they seem to have sprung from the
earth through the power of the seasons, and at the same time to have been
carved out minutely like an ivory sculpture.
Forms
are everywhere, tufted bas-reliefs are everywhere, from the surroundings of the
temples to their summit, on the inner walls, and often on the top of the
columns where the whole of humanity, mingled with the whole of animal life,
supports the burden of the entablatures and the roofs. Everything may serve to
carry a statue, everything may swell into a figure—the capitals, the pediments,
the columns, the upper stages of the pyramids, the steps, the balustrades, the
banisters of stairways. Formidable groups rise and fall—rearing horses,
warriors, human beings in clusters like grapes, eruptions of bodies piled one
over the other, trunks and branches that are alive, crowds sculptured by a
single movement as if spouting from one matrix. One has the impression that the
old monolithic temple has been violently twirled and shot out of the earth.
Save in the more recent epochs when he modeled bronzes of astonishing
tenderness, firmness, and elegance, the Indian has never conceived sculpture as
being able to live independent of the construction that it decorates. It seems
a confused mass of buds on the body of a heavy plant.
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