A comparison of Indian Muslims and Hindus suggests that the former are more warlike and robust, the latter more intellectual and ingenious.
The fact that some Muslims belong to hardy tribes of invaders must be taken into account but Islam deserves the credit of having introduced a simple and fairly healthy rule of life which does not allow every caste to make its own observances into a divine law.
Hinduism certainly has proved marvellously stimulating to the intellect or-shall we put it the other way?--is the product of profound, acute, and restless minds.
It cannot be justly accused of being enervating or melancholy, for many Hindu states were vigorous and warlike and the accounts of early travellers indicate that in pre-mohammedan days the people were humane, civilized and contented.
It created an original and spiritual art, for Indian art, more than any other, is the direct product of religion and not merely inspired by it.
In ages when original talent is rare this close relation has disadvantages for it tends to make all art symbolic and conventional.
An artist must not represent a deity in the way that he thinks most effective: the proportions, attitude and ornaments are all prescribed, not because they suit a picture or statue but because they mean something.
Indian poetry, even when nominally secular, is perhaps too much under religious influence to suit our taste and the long didactic and philosophic harangues which interrupt the action of the Mahabharata seem to us inartistic, yet to those who take the pains to familiarize themselves with what at first is strange, the Mahabharata is, I think, a greater poem than the Iliad.
It should not be regarded as an epic distended and interrupted by interpolated sermons but as the scripture of the warrior caste, which sees in the soldier's life a form of religion.