In the same symbolical way, the Goddess of Beauty and Pleasure
is the Goddess of Nature; for, Nature is always beautiful, and the
beautiful always natural. She is the wife of Shiva the God of
Destruction, and holds a flower in one hand, with a snake coiled
around it: - since pleasure is blended with danger, as life and beauty
with death.
I cannot enter here upon Hindoo Architecture, nor give any
details of the wonders of the cave-temples, some of them resembling
our churches by their nave and aisles. Space forbids me to speak of
the colossal tanks in the south surrounded by huge buildings, and
adorned by grand flights of steps; or of the deep wells in the west,
cut into the rock and surmounted by a series of galleries, to afford
cool shade in that hot climate. I must not here enumerate their
triumphal monuments, their columns decorated with reliefs, their
grand arches surmounted by statues. Suffice it to mention the fact,
that Hindoo art, through all the epochs of its history, was entirely
indigenous and peculiar to the peninsula. The great palaces,
temples, and tombs of the Mohammedan princes hear not the
slightest resemblance to the native architecture, being themselves
analogous to the mosques of Cairo, and the seraglios of Constantinople
or of Moorish Spain.
The character of Hindoo sculpture is similar to Hindoo poetry:
it is eminently feminine. We find with their artists always a delicate
feeling for the pleasant, and graceful, as well as for the pompous
and adorned, whilst they fail in their attempts at grandeur, — being
either crushed by the exuberance of the decorative element, or losing
themselves in tasteless and adventurous exaggeration. In general,
their statues and reliefs are true in the principal Jorms, and soft and
elaborate in execution.
The sculptors are peculiarly successful in rendering the expression
of deep contemplation, or of religious devotion. The representar
tions of domestic life are of the greatest sweetness; the feminine
passive character of the Hindoos being admirably portrayed in their
pleasant simplicity. But when a God is to be drawn in action, and
his power to be symbolized, the artist failed in his task: unahle to
reproduce superhuman power by idealizing the human form, he
betook himself to unartistic and symbolical methods, as by multiplying
head and hands. Such symbolical personifications of Godhead
are not at all exclusively Hindoo; they were not unknown to the
mythology, and earlier poets of Greece. The Giants, with their
hundred arms; Geiyon, with three bodies; and Polyphemus, with his
eye on the forehead; are subjects of art as unplastic as any creatures
of Hindoo imagination. But the Greek sculptors avoided to represent
such myths, whereas the Indian artists had often to deal with them;
and we must confess, that sometimes they succeeded in conciliating
them with good taste, by giving prominence to the principal pure
forms, and treating the monstrous appendages as decorative accessories.
Monstrosity is, on the whole, not the principal character of
Hindoo art; but monstrous idols excite the curiosity of the European
visitor of India more than artistically-carved statues; he buys them
and carries them to the West, on account of their very oddity.
Hence, our public collections and curiosity-shops are swamped with
four-handed and three-headed monsters, which ought not to be taken
for fair specimens of Hindoo art, though they have given rise to
the general belief that Hindostán has no art worthy to be noticed.
We can scarcely wonder that such is the case, since the public at
large—-let us boldly avow it, — cares little for art: how then should
it take an interest 'in an art founded on myths, institutions, and a
culture which has scarcely any affinity with our own civilization ?
The few scholars, on the other hand, who devote their time to the
literature of Hindostán, are but too often philologists, without any
artistic education. We have, therefore, no publications on Hindoo
art, such as those of Champollion, Rosellini, and Lepsius, on Egypt,
or of Texier, Elan din, Botta, and Bayard, on Persia and A.ssyria.
The most important sculptures of India have not yet been copied;
and the collections brought to the West have not been made with
the view of giving a correct idea of the peculiar style of Hindoo art
in its different schools and epochs. The confusion becomes still
greater, by the fact that the old mythology of Brahmanism has, with
a few slight alterations, remained,the religion of the population down
to our days. Idols are cast and carved continually, and their barba-
rous style throws discredit on the better specimens of former ages.
Our knowledge of Indian art is only fragmentary, and scarcely authorizes
us to assign its proper position to every monument, either
artistically or chronologically. Still, a few facts are sufficiently ascertained,
to serve as a clue in the labyrinth of Hindoo art.
The rock-caves, with their fantastic, exuberant, and somewhat
exaggerated reliefs, are all of Buddhist origin. They are more chaste
in style than the idols of the present worshippers of Shiva; and
belong to a period of Indian history, classical for art and poetry,
from 500 b . c., to about 300 a . d . By a strange coincidence, it is the
same period in which Phidias and Praxiteles and Lysippus, and the
Roman artists of Augustus and Trajan, flourished in Europe.
Still more graceful, and more serene, are the Hindoo sculptures of
the isle of Java, which we meet in the ruins of the temples of Boro-
Bodo and Barandanum. The great Sir Stamford Raffles, and the
Bombay Asiatic Society, have published a few specimens of those