TBE AIMS AND METHODS OF INDIAN AKT. 47

'but so subjective is appreciation of art, so. dependent on
•qualities belonging entirely to the beholder, and transferred
by him into the object before him, that the symbolic and
religious aim is still attained. Such is one of the func-
tions of tradition, making it possible for ordinary craftsmen
•to work acceptably within its limits, and avoiding all danger
>of the great and sacred subjects being treated with loss of
•dignity or reverence. But tradition has another aspect,
.as enabling the great artist, the man of genius, to say, in
the language understancled of the people, all that there is
in him to express.

A bronze figure of Nataraja, is shown in Plate I.; it re-
presents a figure in the Madras Museum, perhaps of the seven-
teenth century, probably older. It would be superfluous to
.praise in detail this beautiful figure ; it is so alive, and yet so
-balanced, so powerful and yet so effortless. There is -here
realism for the realist, but realism that is due to keenness of
memory for familiar things, not to their imitation. The
imager grew up under the shadow of a Sivan temple in one of
the great cathedral cities of the South; perhaps Tan jore ; he
had worked with his f ather at the columns of the Thousand
Pillared Hall at Madura,, and later at the Choultry, when
-all the craftsmen of Southern India, flocked to carry out
the great buildings of Tirumala Nayaka; himself a Saivite,
he knew all its familiar ritual, and day after day had seen
the dancing of the devadasis before the shrine, perhaps in his
youth had been the lover of one, more skilled and graceful
than the rest; and all his memories of rhythmic dance, and
mingled devotion for devadasi and for Deity, he expressed in
the grace and beauty of this dancing Siva. For so are
religion and culture, life and art, bound up together in the
web of Indian life. Is the tradition that links that art to
ilif e of little value, or less than none, to the great genius ?