Indian Civilization
The Civilizations of the East : India. By Rene Grousset. (Hamish Hamilton. 25s.) Le neant, says the witty Voltaire, se laisse pas d'avoir du bon : even the times we live in arc not without their compensations. Years ago, when we pored over the pages of Mouhot, whose deplorably illustrated volumes first revealed to Frenchmen, in 1864, the wonders of Angkor—Angkor, which Edmund Candler, that Ulysses of the East, who had been everywhere and seen everything, extols above all other earthly shrines— we longed to see the thing, whose mere description seemed so tantalisingly inadequate. Nowadays, should any reader of Le Roi Lepreux, of Pierre Benoit, feel a similar desire, he can gratify it, almost, without leaving his armchair, by the aid of such books as this India, whose author's name is alone sufficient to guarantee the excellence of his book. Here, aided by photography, the far-off things come up before us : la princesse lointaine, in all her strange variety, is presented to our eyes. M. Grousset takes a wide view of India, embrac- ing not only India proper, but Further India, with Indo- China, and the Isles : a comprehensive scheme, enabling every reader to take his bearings in such a vast aesthetic sea : pro- viding a veritable banquet to all interested in Oriental art, who are many ; since the time has long gone by when Indian art and sculpture could be cavalierly condemned in the lump, as they were by Ruskin, who had never seen any, and whose aesthetic canons were, moreover, singularly lacking in the larger understanding. Keep, by all means, Greek art upon its pedestal : yet none can study M. Grousset's pages without realising, that here we have something beautiful exceedingly, different in kind from anything the West can show. In farm, indeed, less exact, perhaps less human ; but with an ethical spirit incomparably deeper ; just as the great Daihatsu of Kamakura, like the Sphinx of Egypt, breathes an emotional infinite far above and beyond the reach of the intensely definite Hellenic mind. Ample evidence and illustration are furnished by M. Grousset's book : which we would advise the curious to supplement by consulting the Indische Plastik of William Cohn, published in Berlin in 1922: a wonderfully artistic volume. But one thing should be noted, as inevitable, that stone and sculpture lose far less, by photographic repro- duction, than does painting. And consequently, the latter part of M. Grousset's book does not achieve its aim so well as its beginning : since colour is a very large element in the beauty of Mogul and Indo-Moslem pictures ; which in losing it, lose in one way all ; and it is necessarily absent in a photo- graph. Where colour is the essence, as in some marvellous old Oriental carpet, only a painter of no mean order could catch and reproduce its glory. And finally, what a pity that it should not have occurred to M. Grousset to equip his volume with a map, indicating, say, by red spots, the exact position of the places. How shall the uninitiated reader know where all these outlandish places are ?—no atlas will help him, for they are not marked on any map : he will look for them in vain : yet their geographical position is essential to understanding, Why, for example, and how, should Karli show Greek influence, or how account for the enigma of Angkor? Without a map, the enquirer is lost, desoriente, abandoned without a compass in an impenetrable jungle.
The style of the translation, though the original is not beside us for comparison, leaves us convinced of the fidelity arid skill of the translator.
F. W. BAIN.
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