The Gentleman in the Parlour – XXXVIII

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In case the reader is a trifle perplexed by all this commotion of the elements I will set down now for his edification a few facts of general interest. Angkor was a city of great extent, the capital of a powerful empire, and for ten miles around the jungle is dotted with the remains of the temples that adorned it. Angkor Wat is but one of these and has claimed more than the rest the attentions of the archæologist, the restorer and the traveller, only because when discovered by the West it was in a less ruined state. No one knows why the city was abandoned so suddenly that they have found blocks of stones in the quarries ready to take their place in an unfinished temple, and the experts have in vain sought for a plausible explanation.

Some of the temples look as though they had been in great part wantonly destroyed; and the notion has been hazarded that when the rulers after some unfortunate battle fled the country, the wretched slaves who had spent their lives through so many generations to erect these massive buildings in vengeance overthrew what they had been obliged with blood and sweat to construct. This is conjecture. The only thing certain is that here was a city thriving and populous and now there remains nothing but a few ruined temples and the teeming forest. The houses were of wood, surrounded by their little compounds, like the houses I had so lately seen at Keng-Tung, and it would not have taken long for them to decay; the jungle, held in check for a while by the business of man, flowed back, an irresistible green sea, upon the scene of his futile activity. At the end of the thirteenth century it was one of the great cities of the East; two hundred years later it was the resort of wild beasts.

Angkor Wat is placed due east and west and the sun rises directly behind the five towers that surmount it. It is surrounded by a broad moat, which you cross by a great causeway paved with flagstones, and the trees are delicately reflected in the still water.

It is an impressive rather than a beautiful building and it needs the glow of sunset of the white brilliance of the moon to give it a loveliness that touches the heart. It is grey veiled by a faint green, which is the colour of the moss and the mould of all the rainy seasons it has seen, but at sunset it is buff, pale and warm. At dawn when the country is bathed in a silver mist the towers have an aspect that is strangely unsubstantial; they have then an airy lightness which they lack in the hard white light of noon. Twice a day, when the sun rises and when it sets, a miracle is performed and they gain a beauty not their own. They are the mystic towers of the spirit's high citadel. The temple and its dependencies are built on a strictly formal plan. This part balances that and one side repeats the other. The architect exercised no great power of invention, but built on the pattern dictated to them by the rites of their religion. They had neither wanton fancy nor vivid imagination. They yielded to no sudden inspiration. They were deliberate. They gained their effects by regularity and by vastness. The modern eye, of course, has been distorted by the huge buildings that are now so easily constructed, mammoth hotel and enormous apartment house, so that the great size of Angkor Wat must be realised by an effort of the imagination; but to those for whom it was built it must have seemed stupendous. The very steep steps that lead from one storey to another give it a singular effect of height. They are not the broad and noble stairs of the West, fit for the pageantry of processions, but an arduous and hurried means of ascent to the presence of a secret and mysterious god. They render the divinity remote and enigmatic. On each storey, four to each are large sunken basins in which was water for purification, and the water at those strange heights must have added strangely to the silence and the awe. It is a religion of which the temples are empty and the god lives alone except at stated periods when the devout bring gifts to appease him. It is the home now of innumerable bats and the air is fetid with them; in each dark passage and sombre chamber you hear their twitterings.

This plainness of construction gave the sculptors ample occasion for decoration. Capitals, pilasters, pediments, doorways, windows are enriched with carving of an unimaginable variety. The themes are few, but on them they embroidered many beautiful inventions. Here they had a free hand and with a fury of creation crammed into these narrow limits all the adventures of their impetuous souls. It is interesting to note, as you go from temple to temple, how in the course of centuries these unknown craftsmen passed from rude strength to consummate grace; and how at first, regardless of the whole they made their decoration an end in itself, but at long last learnt to submit themselves to the general plan. What they lost in power they gained in taste; it is for each one to say which he prefers.

The galleries are adorned with bas-reliefs; they are interminable; they are world-famous; but to attempt to describe them would be as foolish as to attempt to describe the jungle. Here you have princes on elephants with the state umbrellas open over their heads making a progress among graceful trees; they form a pleasing pattern which is repeated along the length of a wall like the pattern of a paper. There you have long lines of soldiers marching into battle, and the gestures of their arms and the movements of their legs follow the same formal design as that of the dancers in a Cambodian dance. But they join battle and break into frenzied movement; even the dying and the dead are contorted into violent attitudes. Above them the chieftains advance on their elephants and in their chariots, brandishing swords and lances. And you get a feeling of unbridled action, of the turmoil and stress of battle, a breathlessness, an agitation and a disorder, which is infinitely curious. Every inch of the space is covered with figures, horses, elephants and chariots, you can discern neither plan nor pattern, and only the chariot-wheels rest the eye in this chaos. You cannot discover a rhythm. For it was not beauty that the artists sought, but action; they cared little for elegance of gesture or purity of line; theirs was no emotion recollected in tranquillity, but a living passion that brooked no limits. Here is nothing of the harmony of the Greeks, but the rush of a torrential stream and the terrible, vehement life of the jungle. Yet there are not a few that are withal as lovely as the Elgin Marbles and when you look at them you would be dull indeed if you were not caught by the rapture that pure beauty affords. But alas, this excellence was produced only for a brief period; for the rest the drawing for the most part is poor and the patterns tedious. The sculptors seem to have been content to go on from generation to generation slavishly copying one another and you wonder that sheer boredom did not induce them now and again to break into a new design. The draughtsmen who make laborious drawings of them discern in the sameness many differences, but they are only such as you might find in a piece of prose copied by a hundred hands. The writing is different, but the sense remains the same. And as I wandered about looking disconsolately at so much that was dull I wished that I had by my side a philosopher who could explain to me why it is that man can never remain in one stay. Why is it, I wanted to ask him, that having known the best he should content himself so comfortably with the mediocre? Is it that circumstance–or is it genius, the genius of the individual?–raise him for a while to heights at which he cannot breathe easily so that he is content to make his way down again to the homely plain? Is man like water that can be forced to an artificial altitude, but that reverts as soon as the force is removed to its own level? It looks as though his normal condition were the lowest state of civilisation compatible with his environment and in this he can remain unchanged from age to age. Perhaps my philosopher would have told me that only a few races are capable of raising themselves above the dust, and then only for a little while; and even they are conscious that their state is extraordinary, and they fall back with relief to the condition that is only a little better than the beasts. But if he had, then I would have asked him if man were not perfectible. But I should have accepted it with humility if he had said: come along, don't stay there talking a lot of nonsense, let's go and have tiffin. I should have said to myself that perhaps he had varicose veins and to stand so long made his legs ache.

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