HINDU ART
may be superior to another in Europe, and vice versa. But this superiority is not necessarily a superiority in art-ideal or race-genius. It has to be credited to the individual gifts of the master in workmanship, or perhaps to the group psychology of a creative epoch. There is but one standard for all art (shilpa), but one world-measure for all human energy (shakti). And since neither the Eastern nor the Western evolution can be summed up in single shibboleths, types, or schools, it would be absurd to try to appraise Indian experience solely in terms of the æsthetics that found one of its most powerful expressions in the art-theory of the Young Germany represented by Cornelius, Overbeck, Schiller and others (cf. Schiller's Use of the Chorus).
34
