No. 57.— 1906.J 



SINHALESE ART. 



73 



is still true even of the craftsman castes. The sight of many 

 men working together in the fields or chenas and chanting over 

 their labour recalls the " Faire feldeful of folke " of Piers Plow- 

 man, There was not much foreign trade, and that little was 

 in the hands of Moorish tavalam merchants who brought their 

 goods on pack bulls. The Sinhalese, though in part a nation of 

 skilful craftsmen, have never been a " nation of shopkeepers," 

 and, like other Eastern nations, regarded it as a degradation to 

 work for hire; wherein they did well, inasmuch as the hired 

 labourer — whether an English farm labourer or a Civil Ser- 

 vant in India — can never have the absolute independence of 

 a perfectly free man. Books existed only in manuscript form ; 

 even now a strange feeling of remoteness is felt when one hears 

 that such and such a man owns some rare unprinted book of 

 which perhaps few or no other copies remain. Then, too, here- 

 ditary craftsmen in many a prosperous village produced the 

 beautiful and straightforward work of which no more than the 

 wreckage now survives. So I was delighted by this revivified 

 image of the mediaeval England that was known and dear 

 to me. 



But after a time I began to see behind these obvious survi- 

 vals and analogies of mediaeval times the traces of still earlier 

 days — survivals from a remoter period — habits of thought and 

 tricks of craftsmanship that must have been handed down 

 from early Aryan times, and can be traced back to early work 

 in Northern India, whence history tells us the " Lion race " of 

 Ceylon actually came ; and patterns whose history is even more 

 ancient. 



We shall find that a study of the decorative forms surviving 

 in Sinhalese art tends to support the historical account of the 

 Sinhalese as a North Indian race, and of the subsequent inter- 

 course between North India and Ceylon in the time of As oka. 

 We may remark also that the Kandyan village economy 

 differed very little in principle from the village economy of 

 Northern India two thousand years ago (see Rhys Davids, 

 " Buddhist India," ch. 3, and Sir John Budd Phear, "Aryan 



