After concluding his explanation of the impressions that are sustained in objects and places, Hazrat Inayat Khan now turns his attention to works of art.

In works of art that have been made – independently of the skill that has been put into them and the ideas they convey to us – there is a feeling that is in them and behind them. When I was visiting Berlin, I saw statuary set around the Kaiser’s palace. Everywhere around it was some work of art suggestive of horror, terror or destruction. As soon as I saw it I thought, ‘No wonder things happened as they did, for this statuary was produced beforehand.’

A work of art may be beautiful to look at, it may have great skill in it, but with it the mind of the artist is working. The effect that the picture will have is not what it suggests outwardly, but what it speaks aloud of as the voice of its heart. In every picture, in every statue, in every artistic construction, one can see this. There is a voice hidden in it, continually telling for what purpose the work of art was created.

Sometimes an artist is unaware of what he is creating; he is following his imagination. He may be working against his own work of art, or he may be bringing about an effect that he had not desired for himself nor for the person to whom the work of art was to be given.

Once I went to see a temple. I could not call that temple beautiful, but it was wonderful, unique in its kind. No sooner did my eyes fall on the color scheme and the pictures that stood there as its prominent features than I was surprised, thinking, ‘How could such a temple have existed for so long!’ Not long afterwards, I heard that the temple had been destroyed. The idea is that the constructor of the temple was so absorbed in his scheme that he forgot the harmony of the spirit which had to make its plan, and so it resulted in failure.

A friend once took me to see the pictures made by her husband. I no sooner saw them than they brought to me the whole history of that person, how his soul had repeated throughout his life the agonies he had undergone. The whole thing was expressed in those pictures. What was the condition of the possessor of those pictures? Nothing but sorrow and depression.

To be continued…