ed an original and
spiritual art, for Indian art, more than any other, is the direct
product of religion and not merely inspired by it. In ages when original
talent is rare this close relation has disadvantages for it tends to
make all art symbolic and conventional. An artist must not represent a
deity in the way that he thinks most effective: the proportions,
attitude and ornaments are all prescribed, not because they suit a
picture or statue but because they mean something.

Indian literature is also directly related to religion. Its extent is
well-nigh immeasurable. I will not alarm the reader with statistics of
the theological and metaphysical treatises which it contains. A little
of such goes a long way even when they are first-rate, but India may at
least boast of having more theological works which, if considered as
intellectual productions, must be placed in the first class than Europe.
Nor are religious writings of a more human type absent--the language of
heart to heart and of the heart to God. The Ramayana of Tulsi Das and
the Tiruvwcagam are extolled by Groase, Grierson and Pope (all of them
Christians, I believe) as not only masterpieces of literature but as
noble expressions of pure devotion, and the poems of Kabir and Tukaram,
if less considerable as literary efforts, show the same spiritual
quality. Indian poetry, even when nominally secular, is perhaps too much
under religious influence to suit our taste and the long didactic and
philosophic harangues which interrupt the action of the Mahabharata seem
to us inartistic, yet to those who take the pains to familiarize
themselves with what at first is strange, the Mahabharata is, I think, a
greater poem than the _Iliad_. It should not be regarded as an epic
distended and interrupted by interpolated sermons but as the scripture
of the warrior caste, which sees in the soldier's life a form of
religion.

I have touched in several places on the defects of Hinduism. They are
due partly to its sanction of customs which have no necessary connection
with it and partly to its extravagance, which in the service of the gods
sees no barriers of morality or humanity. But suttee, human sacrifices
and orgies strike the imagination and assume an importance which they
have not and never had for Hinduism as a whole. If Hinduism were really
bad, so many great thoughts, so many good lives could not have grown up
in its atmosphere. More than any other religion it is a quest of