Page:Bulandshahr- Or, Sketches of an Indian District- Social, Historical and Architectural.djvu/84

 desuetude. He is thus content to repeat the archaic rudeness of his temple-gods, in which the discouragement of Muhammadan rule has so long forbidden improvement, that the eye has at last learnt to acquiesce in their familiar uncouthness.

If the mercantile classes of native society are distinguished by their conservative adherence to ancestral usage, the landed gentry, who are on visiting terms with European officials, cherish equally strong aspirations in the opposite direction. To relieve the monotony of their eventless life, many of them spend large sums of money every year in building, and keep a native architect as a regular member of their domestic establishment. But he is warned that nothing in Hindustani style can be tolerated; some Government office, in the civil station, or the last new barracks in the nearest military cantonments, are the palatial edifices which he is expected to emulate. To give an example: On the top of the Bulandshahr hill is a school, erected twenty years ago, with a small bell-turret which apears to have been designed by the engineer of the period as an exact copy of the Bethesda, or Little Zoar, that forms such a familiar sight in the back lanes of an English manufacturing town. The idea has been so successfully accomplished, that every European visitor at once concludes it to be a methodist place of worship, and enquires to what particular denomination it belongs. The style of architecture may be readily imagined without further illustration. But, as it is a Government building, it sets the fashion, and, not long ago, the native gentleman of highest rank in the district, intimated to me that he wished to add a clock-tower to his country house, and that he proposed to make it a fac simile of this delightful structure at Bulandshahr.

This little incident shows how important it is that the public taste should be correctly guided, not only by direct educational institutions, such as schools of art, museums and exhibitions, but still more by the persistent stimulus of practical example. So long as the necessity for the latter is ignored, the former tend rather to the isolation of the artist and the restriction of art influences to the connoisseur, instead of bringing them to bear upon society at large. In the words of the resolution, which prefaces the Indian Art Journal, "there can be no reasonable doubt that the upper classes of the native community would gladly follow the example of the Government, and cherish all that is best in indigenous art;" but in architec-