Page:Hindu Art - its Humanism and Modernism.djvu/16

 And you shall be imprisoned in a flower.

Well, he doesn't seem afraid of your dreadful punishment

Will he not go, though I warn him?

(aloud). It is only a picture, man."

(Ryder's version.)

There is no touch of pessimism, idealism, or subjectivism in all these remarks and suggestions. A modern lover examining the photo or oil painting of his darling could not be more realistic.

Does this conversation open up to us a society of ascetics or yogins waiting for Divine illumination to evolve shilpa (art) out of the neo-Platonic meditation or the Hindu dhyana? Or does it make the India of the fifth century a cognate of the modern world in