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the emotion of love, Poetics, in its treatment of love came under the influence of Erotics. 209
But when freshness and originality dwindle, convention reigns supreme. During the middle ages the theorists and poets tried to surprise us, instead of please and delight us, by highly conventionalized and stereotyped, though minutely worked out, details of description and illustration of the modes in which the Nāyikās express their erotic feelings. No wonder then that artificiality of scholastic formalism marks both the theory and practice of love-poetry. Thus convention becomes the rule rather than the exception. This is true of the Nāyaka-Nāyikā-Bheda also since though these attempts indicate considerable power of analysis is more of the form than of spirit, based on what we should consider accidents rather than essentials, 210
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