seen of
the painting--and only ill-lighted fragments remain--is full of
tenderness, refinement, and grace; no touch of drama; no hint of
passion. The sculpture, stripped of its stucco surface, is rude but
often impressive. But what impresses most is not the art but the
religion of the place. In this terrible country, where the great forces
of nature, drought and famine and pestilence, the intolerable sun, the
intolerable rain, and the exuberance of life and death, have made of
mankind a mere passive horde cowering before inscrutable Powers--here,
more than anywhere, men were bound under a yoke of observance and ritual
to the gods they had fashioned and the priests who interpreted their
will. Then came the Deliverer to set them free not _for_ but _from_
life, teaching them how to escape from that worst of all evils, rebirth
again and again into a world of infinite suffering, unguided by any
reason to any good end. "There is no god," said this strange master,
"there is no soul; but there is life after death, life here in this
hell, unless you will learn to deliver yourselves by annihilating
desire." They listened; they built monasteries; they meditated; and now
and again, here, perhaps, in these caves, one or other attained
enlightenment. But the cloud of Hinduism, lifted for a moment, rolled
back heavier than ever. The older gods were seated too firmly on their
thrones. Shiva--creator, preserver, destroyer--expelled the Buddha. And
that passive figure, sublime in its power of mind, sits for ever alone
in the land of his birth, exiled from light, in a cloud of clinging
bats.

But outside proceeds the great pageant of day and night, and the
patient, beautiful people labour without hope, while universal nature,
symbolised by Shiva's foot, presses heavily on their heads and forbids
them the stature of man. Only the white man here, bustling, ungainly,
aggressive, retains his freedom and acts rather than suffers. One
understands at last the full meaning of the word "environment." Because
of this sun, because of this soil, because of their vast numbers, these
people are passive, religious, fatalistic. Because of our cold and rain
in the north, our fresh springs and summers, we are men of action, of
science, of no reflection. The seed is the same, but according to the
soil it brings forth differently. Here the patience, the beauty, the
abjection before the Devilish-Divine; there the defiance, the cult of
the proud self. And th