-M tr /
Fig. ]
Ma iim o o d A d il S h a h .
Fig. 96.
M o l l a h R u k h a .
disown his Arab descent; the cunning She-
mitic features are unmistakeable. M ú sa
K h a n , [96] the Affghán General-in-Chief of
Golconda, is stamped with the peculiar character
of his race. We see in this remarkable
assemblage of the statesmen of Golconda,
under the reign of Sultan Ahd-Allah
Kobcha, (about the middle of theXVUth
century,) all the elements of Mohammedan
conquest in Hindostán. Whoever has lived
for a while in India will recognise in them
the most characteristic types of Islamite
aristocracy in the Dekhán, as it is still seen
at the Court of the Mzám.
The European conquest of India has not improved art among the
natives. Trying to imitate their European lords,, and struck with the
peculiar effect of light in our drawings- and paintings, the Hindoo
painters have lost the traditions of their own art, and are lapsing
into barbarism, wherever the contact with Europeans is great—for
instance, in Bengal: whilst the painters of the Dekhán are somewhat
better, though not equal to the masters who produced those miniature-
likeuesses, &c., of the greater time of the Grand Moguls.
The preliminary remark, that we do not know sufficiently the monuments
of Hindostán to characterize the different schools and epochs
of art, applies with still stronger force to the peninsula east of the
Ganges. We know, however, the monotonous statues of Buddha,
carved and cast by the artists of Birma, well enough to see that Bir-
mese art is clumsier than Indian; whilst the features of the statues
are altogether different from the Hindoo cast. As to Siam and
Cochin-China, concerning their art, we were unable to get any tacts
whatever. ■ These countries are visited only by a few merchants and
missionaries, who ignore art. China is by far better known, in this
respect, than the Malay peninsula and its adjacent countries ; and
deserves the attention of the ethnologist and philosopher, since it is
the country where the Yellow-race has developed itself on foundations
entirely peculiar and entirely indigenous. In China all the citizens
are politically equal: legally there are neither patricians, nor
slaves, nor sèrfs ; neither privileged nor unprotected classes in the
country. The priests form no hierarchy, the officials are not chosen
from among an aristocracy of birth. The Yellow-race has not been
trained by theocracy, nor ennobled by chivalry. From the very
earliest times, we find with the Chinese a thorough centralization; a
well-organized bureaucracy, open to competition ; a paternal despotism,
carefully superintending, regulating, repressing and suppressing
the moral exertions of the people, and providing that nobody should
aspire to a position to which he has not become entitled by his training,
and his degrees taken at the regular examination. The emperor
sits on the throne as the incarnation of sober common sense ; the priest
is the servant of the state ; the church and school are police-establishments,
by which the Chinese is taught blindly to respect authority,
officials, “ law and order,” and to which every child is sent to learn
practical sciences. In fact, it is the system of patriarchal, enlightened,
absolutism,—so much praised by the statesmen of continental
Europe, and many self-called “ radicals ” of England; the system of
a nobility of merit and office ; of centralized functionarism ; of select
committees and boards of inquiry; of orders in council, and voluminous
instructions for the people how to behave so as to become happy ;
of checks and counter-checks; of spies and denunciations; of police
regulations and vexations. In short, China is the country of enlightenment,
of equality, and of the bamboo,—paternally applied to everybody,
from the prime minister to the humblest tiller of the ground.
These institutions show clearly that the Chinese is endowed with
a sober and dry imagination, that cold reason predominates, and that
the creative power is scarcely developed in him. Accordingly, we
find that reverie, depth of feeling, and philosophical research, are
unknown to his literature. His artists never attempted to create an
ideal: they are materialists and flat imitators of nature, struck
rather by the difference than the affinity of forms ; their aim is therefore
always the characteristical, not the beautiful. This tendency
leads them to exaggeration and caricature. Imitating nature in a
servile manner, the picturesque is much more in their way than the
sculptural ; the naked form remained altogether misunderstood by
them. They do not see and copy the principal outlines, but the
accidental details: the wrinkles, the hair, or the swelling of the
muscles. As to drapery, they imitate principally its folds, and seem
to forget that they cover a body.