The Two Paths | Page 5

reasons for our work,
and proceed to it hereafter, as all good workmen should do, with clear
heads, and calm consciences.
To return, then, to the first point of difficulty, the relations between art

and mental disposition in India and Scotland. It is quite true that the art
of India is delicate and refined. But it has one curious character
distinguishing it from all other art of equal merit in design--it never
represents a natural fact. It either forms its compositions out of
meaningless fragments of colour and flowings of line; or if it represents
any living creature, it represents that creature under some distorted and
monstrous form. To all the facts and forms of nature it wilfully and
resolutely opposes itself; it will not draw a man, but an eight-armed
monster; it will not draw a flower, but only a spiral or a zigzag.
It thus indicates that the people who practise it are cut off from all
possible sources of healthy knowledge or natural delight; that they have
wilfully sealed up and put aside the entire volume of the world, and
have got nothing to read, nothing to dwell upon, but that imagination of
the thoughts of their hearts, of which we are told that "it is only evil
continually." Over the whole spectacle of creation they have thrown a
veil in which there is no rent. For them no star peeps through the
blanket of the dark--for them neither their heaven shines nor their
mountains rise--for them the flowers do not blossom-- for them the
creatures of field and forest do not live. They lie bound in the dungeon
of their own corruption, encompassed only by doleful phantoms, or by
spectral vacancy.
Need I remind you what an exact reverse of this condition of mind, as
respects the observance of nature, is presented by the people whom we
have just been led to contemplate in contrast with the Indian race? You
will find upon reflection, that all the highest points of the Scottish
character are connected with impressions derived straight from the
natural scenery of their country. No nation has ever before shown, in
the general tone of its language--in the general current of its
literature--so constant a habit of hallowing its passions and confirming
its principles by direct association with the charm, or power, of nature.
The writings of Scott and Burns--and yet more, of the far greater poets
than Burns who gave Scotland her traditional ballads,--furnish you in
every stanza--almost in every line--with examples of this association of
natural scenery with the passions; [Footnote: The great poets of
Scotland, like the great poets of all other countries, never write
dissolutely, either in matter or method; but with stern and measured
meaning in every syllable. Here's a bit of first-rate work for example:

"Tweed said to Till, 'What gars ye rin sae still?' Till said to Tweed,
'Though ye rin wi' speed, And I rin slaw, Whar ye droon ae man, I
droon twa.'"]
but an instance of its farther connection with moral principle struck me
forcibly just at the time when I was most lamenting the absence of art
among the people. In one of the loneliest districts of Scotland, where
the peat cottages are darkest, just at the western foot of that great mass
of the Grampians which encircles the sources of the Spey and the Dee,
the main road which traverses the chain winds round the foot of a
broken rock called Crag, or Craig Ellachie. There is nothing remarkable
in either its height or form; it is darkened with a few scattered pines,
and touched along its summit with a flush of heather; but it constitutes
a kind of headland, or leading promontory, in the group of hills to
which it belongs--a sort of initial letter of the mountains; and thus
stands in the mind of the inhabitants of the district, the Clan Grant, for
a type of their country, and of the influence of that country upon
themselves. Their sense of this is beautifully indicated in the war-cry of
the clan, "Stand fast, Craig Ellachie." You may think long over those
few words without exhausting the deep wells of feeling and thought
contained in them--the love of the native land, the assurance of their
faithfulness to it; the subdued and gentle assertion of indomitable
courage--I may need to be told to stand, but, if I do, Craig Ellachie does.
You could not but have felt, had you passed beneath it at the time when
so many of England's dearest children were being defended by the
strength of heart of men born at its foot, how often among the delicate
Indian palaces, whose marble was pallid with horror, and whose
vermilion was darkened with blood, the remembrance of its rough grey
rocks and purple