THE AIMS AND METHODS OF INDIAN ART. 4$

he can do is to use them, and to let them grow. The
artist is not one who makes, bxit one who finds.

Every real pattern has a long ancestry and a story to
tell. For those .that can read its langxxage, even the most
strictly decorative art has complex and symbolical associa-
tions that enhance a thousandfold the significance of its-
expression, as the complex associations that belong to-
words, enrich the measxxred web of spoken verse. This is
not, of course, to sxxggest that sxxch art has a didactic
character, bxit only that it has some meaning and some-
thing to say ; but if you do not want to listen, it is still as
a piece of decoration far better than some new thing that
has c broken with tradition' and is c original/

May Heaven preserve x\s from the decorative art of
to-day, that professes to be new and original. The trxith
is expressed by Buskin in the following words ;—

" That virtue of oiiginality that men so strain after
is not newness (as they vainly think), it is only genuineness ;
it all depends on this single glorious faculty of getting to-
the spring of things and working oxit from that.75

Observe that here we have come back to the essentially
Indian point of vie^v, getting to the spring of things, and
working out fronylhat. Yoxx will get all the freshness
and individxialit/ you want if yoxi do that. This is to be
seen in the vigour and vitality of the design o£ William
Morris, compfirecl with the work of designers who have
deliberately Striven to be original. Morris tried to do no
more than .recover the thread of a lost tradition and carry
it on ; and yet no one coxxld mistake the work of Morris for
that of any other man or any other century or country—
and is^not that originality enough ? The one thing essential
is imaginative intensity; and with novelty of form, this-
intensity 'lias little or no connection.