The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 8/Epistles - Fourth Series/LXXXVIII Mary
LXXXVIII
To Miss Mary Hale
DAMPFER, "PRINZ-REGENT LEOPOLD"
3rd January, 1897.
DEAR MARY,
I received your letter forwarded from London in Rome. It was very very kind
of you to write such a beautiful letter, and I enjoyed every bit of it. I do
not know anything about the evolution of the orchestra in Europe. We are
nearing Port Said after four days of frightfully bad sailing from Naples.
The ship is rolling as hard as she can, and you must pardon my scrawls under
such circumstances.
From Suez begins Asia. Once more Asia. What am I? Asiatic, European, or
American? I feel a curious medley of personalities in me. You didn't write
anything about Dharmapala, his goings and doings. I am much more interested
in him than in Gandhi.
I land in a few days at Colombo and mean to "do" Ceylon a bit. There was a time when Ceylon had more than 20 million inhabitants and a huge capital of which the ruins cover nearly a hundred square miles!
The Ceylonese are not Dravidians but pure Aryans. It was colonised from Bengal about 800 B.C., and they have kept a very clear history of their country from that time. It was the greatest trade centre of the ancient world, and Anuradhapuram was the London of the ancients.
I enjoyed Rome more than anything in the West, and after seeing Pompeii I have lost all regard for the so-called "Modern Civilisation". With the exception of steam and electricity they had everything else and infinitely more art conceptions and executions than the Moderns.
Please tell Miss Locke that I was mistaken when I told her that sculpturing of the human figure was not developed in India as among the Greeks. I am reading in Fergusson and other authorities that in Orissa or Jagannath, which I did not visit, there are among the ruins human figures which for beauty and anatomical skill would compare with any production of the Greeks. There is a colossal figure of Death, a huge female skeleton covered with a shrivelled skin — the awful fidelity to anatomical details are frightening and disgusting. Says my author, one of the female figures in the niche is exactly like the Venus de Medici and so on. But you must remember that everything almost has been destroyed by the iconoclastic Mohammedan, yet the remnants are more than all European debris put together! I have travelled eight years and not seen many of the masterpieces.
Tell sister Locke also that there is a ruined temple in a forest in India
which and the Parthenon of Greece Fergusson considers as the climax of
architectural art — each of its type — the one of conception, the other of
conception and detail. The later Mogul buildings etc., the Indo-Saracenic
architecture, does not compare a bit with the best types of the ancients. .
. .
With all my love,
VIVEKANANDA.
PS. Just by chance saw Mother Church and Father Pope at Florence. You know
of it already.
V.