Machine summary:
Mohammedan decorative art, which is, after all, " the workers' expression of joy in his work,, (the essential of all art recognised by Ruskin and Rodin), in so far as it denies itself exuberance also denies itself certain qualities of spiritual expression; but it finds its compensation in restraint, in contrast with external and unmastered rhythms, in a sanity which reduces thought and feeling to a cool and calm synthesis.
It loses greatly in range of appeal, of course, in refusing to portray gradations of emotional tension in human form ; but in contrast with the extravagance of non-Muslim sculpture in India how striking a foil it offers to the sensa• tional everywhere around it, a riot of excess, wild often as the rocky jungle which the presence of a tomb or a mosque will marvellously subdue.
From a philosophical point of view, to deny spiritual value to a body of art which constitutes some of the salient manifestations of human genius is a proceeding highly irrational, quite apart from the fact that the forms of architecture criticised were erected as tokens of reverence.
But nevertheless it is remarkable that while one type of Gerrnan thinker, the devout Jesuit, can find no spiritual compulsion in the finest examples of Islamic architecture, another type, the master-philosopher, finds exactly in those examples the purest appeal to the spirit-art of a noble cathartic power, no mere illustrations of the human life about us but an appeal to a higher reason, above the disturbing waves of human emotion, such as Ruskin urged as fit.