THE ANCIENT ABBEY OF AJANTA 123
its debt to the Magadhan and Indian Motherland.
When we come to consider their relative dates, the influence of Gandhara on European art through Byzantium is hardly a matter that will be seriously denied. Anyone who looks at a scene in the Lumbini Garden, which is exhibited in the Calcutta Museum, not to mention many of the illustrations in Griinwedel's book, must acknowledge the debt owed to Gandhara by Christian art from the end of the fourth century and onwards. To some of us in Europe to this day, just as the Gregorian is the most devotional of all music, so even the art of Catholicism only seems fully religious in proportion as it returns upon the stiffness and gravity of that early Byzantine which is so obviously the product of the union of Eastern and Western elements in Gandhara.
For the art of Gandhara made a wonderful attempt at blending the epic feeling of European classical art with Eastern wealth of decoration. Such minglings can never be attempted artificially or of set purpose. They cannot be reached because we should like to reach them. They have to be unconscious, organic, a matter of growth round some idea in which the whole heart is engaged. Aristotle lamented the fall of Greek art from epos to pathos, from heroic dignity to human emotion. But even pathos could be made heroic, as the East well knew, by consecration to an ideal ; and that ideal the Gandharan artists found in Buddha.
