44 ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

Convention may be defined as the manner of artistic
presentation, while tradition stands for a historic continuity
in the use of such conventional methods of expression.
Many have thought that convention and tradition are the
foes of art, and deem the epithets i conventional and
traditional' to be in themselves of the nature of destruc-
tive criticism. Convention is conceived of solely as
limitation, not as a language and a means of expression.
But to one realising what tradition really means, a quite
^contrary view presents itself; that of the terrible and almost
hopeless disadvantage from which art suffers when each
artist and each craftsman, or at the best, each little group
and school, has first to create a language, before ideas can
be expressed in it. For tradition is a wonderful, expres-
.sive language, that enables the artist working through
it to speak directly to the heart without the necessity for
explanation. It is a mother-tongue, every phrase of it rich
with the countless shades of meaning read into it by the
simple and the great that have made and used it in the past..

It may be said that these principles hold good only in
relation to decorative art. Let us then enquire into the
place and influence of tradition in tho fine art of India.
The1 written traditions, once orally transmitted, consist
mainly of mercery verses, exactly corresponding to the mne-
monic verses, of early Indian literature. In. both cases,
the artist, imager or story-teller, had also a fuller and more
Hying" tradition, handed down in the schools f'om genera-
tion to generation, enabling him to fill out \he mea,gre
details of the written canon. Sometimes, in addition to
the verses of the canon, books of mnemonic sketches were
in use, and handed down from master to pupil in the same
way. These give us an opportunity of more exactly under-
standing the nature and method of tradition. In Fig. 1