Machine summary:
say that the Taj is beyond criticism is not to say that 1~ has no critics, and one meets people-architects sometunes-who will explain entertainingly how (archi• tecturally) wrong Shah J ehan was to allow the two lateral domes to nestle so close under the central canopy (like three leaves on the pipal tree), how mistaken he was in {I) Constahle and Smith's edition of Bernier; P: 299.
" It is so much simpler to criticise than to create ; and, while the modern world has grasped that comforting truth and broadcasted it " not wisely but too well," the secret of the Moghul's Art sleeps-like Hermann Melville's Bartleby-" with Kings and Counsellors.
" Its like is not among us today; no Architect of this critical Age would dare to write over the lintel of his buildings the vaunt which Shah J ehan blazoned on the walls of his Hall of Audience in the fairest palace in the world,-" If there be a Heaven upon Earth it is this, it is this.
Again Fergusson writes ( and let us not forget that he felt and wrote as one illumined by the Moghul Message of Beauty) : " Though of course not to be compared with the intellectual beauty of Greek ornament, it (i.
Moghul Art on the other hand has survived for us in its entirety ; we behold it, and see that in spite of-shall W€: say, because of its very limitations-there exists no strife of beauty in the component parts.