Eber Rligious Asceticism After Warning Agains Judging

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Source: Introduction to Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works, by Arthur W. Ryder (London: J.M. Paring, 1920).

INTRODUCTION . KALIDASA—HIS LIFE AND WRITINGS

Kalidasa probably lived in the fifth century of the Christian era. This date, approximate as it is, must yet be given with considerable hesitation, and is by no ways certain. No truly biographical data are preserved near the author, who nevertheless enjoyed a great popularity during his life, and whom the Hindus have ever regarded as the greatest of Sanskrit poets. We are thus confronted with i of the remarkable problems of literary history. For our ignorance is not due to fail of Kalidasa'due south writings on the part of his countrymen, simply to their strange blindness in regard to the interest and importance of historic fact. No European nation tin compare with India in critical devotion to its ain literature. During a menstruation to be reckoned not by centuries but by millenniums, there has been in India an unbroken line of savants unselfishly defended to the perpetuation and exegesis of the native masterpieces. Editions, recensions, commentaries abound; poets have sought the exact phrase of appreciation for their predecessors: yet when we seek to reconstruct the life of their greatest poet, nosotros have no materials except certain tantalising legends, and such data equally we can gather from the writings of a human who hardly mentions himself.

One of these legends deserves to be recounted for its intrinsic interest, although it contains, and then far as we tin see, no grain of historic truth, and although information technology places Kalidasa in Benares, five hundred miles distant from the but city in which we certainly know that he spent a role of his life. According to this account, Kalidasa was a Brahman's child. At the age of six months he was left an orphan and was adopted by an ox-commuter. He grew to manhood without formal education, yet with remarkable beauty and grace of mode. At present it happened that the Princess of Benares was a blueish-stocking, who rejected i suitor after another, among them her father's counsellor, because they failed to attain her standard as scholars and poets. The rejected counsellor planned a brutal revenge. He took the handsome ox-commuter from the street, gave him the garments of a savant and a retinue of learned doctors, then introduced him to the princess, after warning him that he was under no circumstances to open his lips. The princess was struck with his beauty and smitten to the depths of her pedantic soul past his obstinate silence, which seemed to her, as indeed it was, an show of profound wisdom. She desired to marry Kalidasa, and together they went to the temple. But no sooner was the ceremony performed than Kalidasa perceived an prototype of a balderdash. His early preparation was too much for him; the secret came out, and the bride was furious. Only she relented in response to Kalidasa'south entreaties, and advised him to pray for learning and poetry to the goddess Kali. The prayer was granted; education and poetical power descended miraculously to dwell with the young ox-driver, who in gratitude assumed the name Kalidasa, servant of Kali. Feeling that he owed this happy modify in his very nature to his princess, he swore that he would ever treat her as his instructor, with profound respect but without familiarity. This was more than than the lady had bargained for; her anger flare-up forth anew, and she cursed Kalidasa to meet his death at the hands of a woman. At a afterwards appointment, the story continues, this curse was fulfilled. A certain male monarch had written a one-half-stanza of poesy, and had offered a large reward to any poet who could worthily consummate it. Kalidasa completed the stanza without difficulty; just a woman whom he loved discovered his lines, and greedy of the advantage herself, killed him.

Some other fable represents Kalidasa equally engaging in a pilgrimage to a shrine of Vishnu in Southern India, in company with two other famous writers, Bhavabhuti and Dandin. Nonetheless another pictures Bhavabhuti as a contemporary of Kalidasa, and jealous of the less austere poet's reputation. These stories must be untrue, for it is sure that the 3 authors were not contemporary, yet they show a truthful instinct in the belief that genius seeks genius, and is rarely isolated.

This instinctive belief has been at work with the stories which connect Kalidasa with King Vikramaditya and the literary figures of his court. It has doubtless enlarged, mayhap partly falsified the facts; all the same nosotros cannot doubt that at that place is truth in this tradition, late though it be, and impossible though it may always be to separate the bodily from the fanciful. Here then we are on firmer ground.

King Vikramaditya ruled in the city of Ujjain, in West-fundamental Republic of india. He was mighty both in war and in peace, winning especial glory by a decisive victory over the barbarians who pressed into India through the northern passes. Though it has not proved possible to identify this monarch with any of the known rulers, there can be no doubt that he existed and had the character attributed to him. The proper noun Vikramaditya—Sun of Valour—is probably not a proper proper name, merely a championship like Pharaoh or Tsar. No doubt Kalidasa intended to pay a tribute to his patron, the Dominicus of Valour, in the very championship of his play, Urvashi won by Valour.

Male monarch Vikramaditya was a great patron of learning and of poesy. Ujjain during his reign was the well-nigh brilliant capital in the globe, nor has information technology to this day lost all the lustre shed upon information technology by that first-class court. Among the eminent men gathered there, nine were specially distinguished, and these ix are known equally the "nine gems." Some of the nine gems were poets, others represented scientific discipline—astronomy, medicine, lexicography. It is quite true that the details of this belatedly tradition concerning the ix gems are open up to suspicion, yet the fundamental fact is not doubtful: that there was at this time and place a nifty quickening of the homo heed, an creative impulse creating works that cannot perish. Ujjain in the days of Vikramaditya stands worthily beside Athens, Rome, Florence, and London in their nifty centuries. Here is the substantial fact behind Max Müller'due south ofttimes ridiculed theory of the renaissance of Sanskrit literature. It is quite false to suppose, every bit some announced to practise, that this theory has been invalidated past the discovery of certain literary products which antedate Kalidasa. It might even be said that those rare and happy centuries that see a man equally bully as Homer or Vergil or Kalidasa or Shakespeare partake in that one man of a renaissance.

It is interesting to observe that the centuries of intellectual darkness in Europe accept sometimes coincided with centuries of lite in India. The Vedas were composed for the most part earlier Homer; Kalidasa and his contemporaries lived while Rome was tottering under barbarian assail.

To the scanty and uncertain information of belatedly traditions may be added some information nearly Kalidasa's life gathered from his own writings. He mentions his ain name simply in the prologues to his iii plays, and here with a modesty that is charming indeed, yet tantalising. One wishes for a portion of the communicativeness that characterises some of the Indian poets. He speaks in the starting time person only once, in the verses introductory to his epic poem The Dynasty of Raghu.1 Here also we experience his modesty, and hither once more we are balked of details every bit to his life.

We know from Kalidasa's writings that he spent at least a part of his life in the city of Ujjain. He refers to Ujjain more than once, and in a fashion inappreciably possible to one who did not know and love the urban center. Specially in his poem The Deject-Messenger does he dwell upon the city'due south charms, and fifty-fifty bids the cloud make a détour in his long journey lest he should miss making its acquaintance.2

Nosotros learn further that Kalidasa travelled widely in India. The fourth canto of The Dynasty of Raghu describes a tour virtually the whole of Bharat and fifty-fifty into regions which are across the borders of a narrowly measured India. Information technology is difficult to believe that Kalidasa had not himself fabricated such a "chiliad tour"; and then much of truth there may exist in the tradition which sends him on a pilgrimage to Southern India. The thirteenth canto of the same epic and The Cloud-Messenger also draw long journeys over Republic of india, for the virtually office through regions far from Ujjain. Information technology is the mountains which print him well-nigh deeply. His works are full of the Himalayas. Apart from his earliest drama and the slight poem called The Seasons, there is not one of them which is not fairly redolent of mountains. I, The Nascence of the War-god, might be said to be all mountains. Nor was it only Himalayan grandeur and sublimity which attracted him; for, every bit a Hindu critic has acutely observed, he is the only Sanskrit poet who has described a certain flower that grows in Kashmir. The sea interested him less. To him, every bit to most Hindus, the ocean was a beautiful, terrible barrier, non a highway to hazard. The "sea-belted globe" of which Kalidasa speaks means to him the mainland of India.

Some other conclusion that may be certainly fatigued from Kalidasa'due south writing is this, that he was a man of audio and rather all-encompassing education. He was not indeed a prodigy of learning, similar Bhavabhuti in his own country or Milton in England, withal no man could write as he did without hard and intelligent study. To begin with, he had a minutely accurate knowledge of the Sanskrit language, at a fourth dimension when Sanskrit was to some extent an bogus natural language. Somewhat likewise much stress is often laid upon this point, every bit if the writers of the classical catamenia in India were composing in a foreign language. Every writer, especially every poet, composing in any language, writes in what may be chosen a strange idiom; that is, he does not write as he talks. Yet it is true that the gap between written language and colloquial was wider in Kalidasa's day than it has frequently been. The Hindus themselves regard twelve years' study as requisite for the mastery of the "chief of all sciences, the science of grammer." That Kalidasa had mastered this scientific discipline his works bear abundant witness.

He also mastered the works on rhetoric and dramatic theory—subjects which Hindu savants have treated with bully, if sometimes hair-splitting, ingenuity. The profound and subtle systems of philosophy were as well possessed by Kalidasa, and he had some knowledge of astronomy and police force.

Just it was not merely in written books that Kalidasa was deeply read. Rarely has a man walked our globe who observed the phenomena of living nature equally accurately as he, though his accurateness was of form that of the poet, not that of the scientist. Much is lost to us who grow up amidst other animals and plants; yet we tin appreciate his "bec-blackness hair," his ashoka-tree that "sheds his blossoms in a rain of tears," his river wearing a sombre veil of mist:

• Although her reeds seem hands that clutch the clothes
• To hide her charms;

his picture of the twenty-four hours-blooming water-lily at sunset:

• The water-lily closes, but
• With wonderful reluctancy;
• As if it troubled her to shut
• Her door of welcome to the bee.

The religion of any bang-up poet is always a thing of interest, specially the faith of a Hindu poet; for the Hindus have always been a deeply and creatively religious people. Then far as nosotros tin can guess. Kalidasa moved among the jarring sects with sympathy for all, fanaticism for none. The dedicatory prayers that innovate his dramas are addressed to Shiva. This is inappreciably more than a convention, for Shiva is the patron of literature. If one of his epics, The Nascence of the War-god, is distinctively Shivaistic, the other, The Dynasty of Raghu, is no less Vishnuite in trend. If the hymn to Vishnu in The Dynasty of Raghu is an expression of Vedantic monism, the hymn to Brahma in The Birth of the State of war-god gives as articulate expression to the rival dualism of the Sankhya arrangement. Nor are the Yoga doctrine and Buddhism left without sympathetic mention. We are therefore justified in concluding that Kalidasa was, in matters of religion, what William James would phone call "healthy-minded," emphatically not a "ill soul."

There are certain other impressions of Kalidasa'southward life and personality which gradually become convictions in the mind of one who reads and re-reads his verse, though they are less hands susceptible of exact proof. 1 feels certain that he was physically handsome, and the handsome Hindu is a wonderfully fine type of manhood. One knows that he possessed a fascination for women, as they in plough fascinated him. Ane knows that children loved him. One becomes convinced that he never suffered whatever morbid, soul-shaking experience such as besetting religious incertitude brings with it, or the pangs of despised love; that on the contrary he moved among men and women with a serene and godlike tread, neither self-indulgent nor ascetic, with mind and senses ever alert to every form of beauty. We know that his poetry was pop while he lived, and we cannot doubt that his personality was equally attractive, though it is probable that no contemporary knew the full measure out of his greatness. For his nature was 1 of singular balance, every bit at dwelling in a fantabulous court and on a lonely mountain, with men of high and of low caste. Such men are never fully appreciated during life. They continue to grow after they are dead.

II

Kalidasa left seven works which accept come down to us: iii dramas, 2 epics, one elegiac verse form, and ane descriptive poem. Many other works, including fifty-fifty an astronomical treatise, have been attributed to him; they are certainly not his. Possibly in that location was more than one writer who bore the proper noun Kalidasa: perhaps certain later writers were more than concerned for their work than for personal fame. On the other hand, there is no reason to doubt that the seven recognised works are in truth from Kalidasa'south hand. The only one concerning which at that place is reasonable room for suspicion is the short poem descriptive of the seasons, and this is fortunately the least of import of the seven. Nor is there evidence to show that whatever considerable poem has been lost, unless information technology exist true that the last cantos of i of the epics have perished. We are thus in a fortunate position in reading Kalidasa: we have substantially all that he wrote, and run no gamble of ascribing to him any considerable work from some other hand.

Of these 7 works, four are verse throughout; the 3 dramas, like all Sanskrit dramas, are written in prose, with a generous mingling of lyric and descriptive stanzas. The poetry, even in the epics, is stanzaic; no role of it can fairly be compared to English language blank verse. Classical Sanskrit verse, so far as construction is concerned, has much in common with familiar Greek and Latin forms: it makes no systematic use of rhyme; it depends for its rhythm not upon accent, merely upon quantity. The natural medium of translation into English seems to me to be the rhymed stanza;1 in the present work the rhymed stanza has been used, with a consistency perhaps also rigid, wherever the original is in verse.

Kalidasa'due south 3 dramas bear the names: Malavika and Agnimitra, Urvashi, and Shakuntala. The two epics are The Dynasty of Raghu and The Nascence of the War-god. The elegiac verse form is called The Cloud-Messenger, and the descriptive poem is entitled The Seasons. It may exist well to state briefly the more salient features of the Sanskrit genres to which these works belong.

The drama proved in Republic of india, as in other countries, a congenial form to many of the virtually eminent poets. The Indian drama has a marked individuality, but stands nearer to the modern European theatre than to that of ancient Greece; for the plays, with a very few exceptions, have no religious significance, and bargain with love between human and adult female. Although tragic elements may be nowadays, a tragic ending is forbidden. Indeed, naught regarded as disagreeable, such as fighting or fifty-fifty kissing, is permitted on the stage; here Europe may perchance learn a lesson in taste. Stage properties were few and simple, while particular care was lavished on the music. The female parts were played by women. The plays very rarely have long monologues, even the inevitable prologue beingness divided between two speakers, just a Hindu audience was tolerant of lyrical digression.

It may be said, though the argument needs qualification in both directions, that the Indian dramas take less activeness and less individuality in the characters, but more poetical charm than the dramas of mod Europe.

On the whole, Kalidasa was remarkably faithful to the ingenious but somewhat over-elaborate conventions of Indian dramaturgy. His starting time play, the Malavika and Agnimitra, is entirely conventional in plot. The Shakuntala is transfigured past the character of the heroine. The Urvashi, in spite of detail beauty, marks a distinct decline.

The Dynasty of Raghu and The Nascence of the State of war-god belong to a species of composition which it is non easy to name accurately. The Hindu proper noun kavya has been rendered by artificial epic, épopée savante, Kunstgedicht. It is best perhaps to use the term epic, and to qualify the term by caption.

The kavyas differ widely from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, epics which resemble the Iliad and Odyssey less in outward form than in their grapheme as truly national poems. The kavya is a narrative poem written in a sophisticated age by a learned poet, who possesses all the resources of an elaborate rhetoric and metric. The discipline is drawn from time-honoured mythology. The poem is divided into cantos, written non in blank verse only in stanzas. Several stanza-forms are commonly employed in the same poem, though not in the same canto, except that the concluding verses of a canto are not infrequently written in a metre of more compass than the remainder.

I have called The Cloud-Messenger an elegiac poem, though it would not perhaps see the test of a rigid definition. The Hindus grade it with The Dynasty of Raghu and The Birth of the State of war-god as a kavya, but this nomenclature but evidences their embarrassment. In fact, Kalidasa created in The Cloud-Messenger a new genre. No further explanation is needed here, every bit the entire verse form is translated below.

The brusque descriptive poem called The Seasons has arable analogues in other literatures, and requires no annotate.

It is not possible to gear up the chronology of Kalidasa's writings, even so nosotros are not wholly in the night. Malavika and Agnimitra was certainly his starting time drama, nigh certainly his kickoff work. It is a reasonable conjecture, though nada more, that Urvashi was written late, when the poet's powers were waning. The introductory stanzas of The Dynasty of Raghu suggest that this epic was written before The Birth of the War-god, though the inference is far from sure. Again, it is reasonable to presume that the smashing works on which Kalidasa'southward fame chiefly rests—Shakuntala, The Deject-Messenger, The Dynasty of Raghu, the first eight cantos of The Birth of the State of war-god—were equanimous when he was in the prime of manhood. Only every bit to the succession of these four works we tin can practise petty but guess.

Kalidasa's celebrity depends primarily upon the quality of his work, nevertheless would be much macerated if he had failed in bulk and variety. In Republic of india, more than would be the example in Europe, the extent of his writing is an indication of originality and ability; for the poets of the classical period underwent an education that encouraged an exaggerated fastidiousness, and they wrote for a public meticulously critical. Thus the great Bhavabhuti spent his life in constructing three dramas; mighty spirit though he was, he withal suffers from the very scrupulosity of his labour. In this matter, as in others, Kalidasa preserves his intellectual balance and his spiritual initiative: what greatness of soul is required for this, every i knows who has ever had the misfortune to differ in stance from an intellectual clique.

III

Le nom de Kâlidâsa domine la poésie indienne et la résume brillamment. Le drame, l'épopée savante, l'élégie attestent aujourd'hui encore la puissance et la souplesse de ce magnifique génie; seul entre les disciples de Sarasvatî [the goddess of eloquence], il a eu le bonheur de produire un chef-d'œuvre vraiment classique, où 50'Inde s'adore et où l'humanité se reconnaît. Les applaudissements qui saluèrent la naissance de Çakuntalá à Ujjayinî ont après de longs siècles éclaté d'un tour du monde à l'autre, quand William Jones l'eut révélée à l'Occident. Kâlidâsa a marqué sa place dans cette pléiade étincelante où chaque nom résume une période de l'camaraderie humain. La série de ces noms forme l'histoire, ou plutôt elle est l'histoire même.1

Information technology is hardly possible to say anything true most Kalidasa's accomplishment which is not already contained in this appreciation. Yet i loves to expand the praise, even though realising that the critic is by his very nature a fool. Hither there shall at whatever charge per unit be none of that common cold-blooded criticism which imagines itself set above a world-author to assess and judge, but a generous tribute of affectionate admiration.

The all-time proof of a poet'south greatness is the inability of men to live without him; in other words, his ability to win and hold through centuries the love and admiration of his own people, specially when that people has shown itself capable of high intellectual and spiritual achievement.

For something similar 15 hundred years, Kalidasa has been more widely read in India than any other author who wrote in Sanskrit. There have as well been many attempts to express in words the hole-and-corner of his abiding power: such attempts can never be wholly successful, still they are not without considerable involvement. Thus Bana, a celebrated novelist of the 7th century, has the following lines in some stanzas of poetical criticism which he prefixes to a historical romance:

• Where observe a soul that does not thrill
• In Kalidasa'due south verse to meet
• The smooth, inevitable lines
• Like flower-clusters, honey-sweetness?

A afterward writer, speaking of Kalidasa and another poet, is more laconic in this alliterative line: Bhaso hasah, Kalidaso vilasah—Bhasa is mirth, Kalidasa is grace.

These 2 critics encounter Kalidasa's grace, his sweetness, his delicate taste, without doing justice to the massive quality without which his poesy could non have survived.

Though Kalidasa has not been as widely appreciated in Europe every bit he deserves, he is the merely Sanskrit poet who can properly be said to have been appreciated at all. Hither he must struggle with the truly Himalayan barrier of linguistic communication. Since there will never be many Europeans, even among the cultivated, who will find information technology possible to report the intricate Sanskrit language, there remains but one means of presentation. None knows the vicious inadequacy of poetical translation similar the translator. He understands amend than others can, the significance of the position which Kalidasa has won in Europe. When Sir William Jones first translated the Shakuntala in 1789, his work was enthusiastically received in Europe, and most warmly, as was fitting, by the greatest living poet of Europe. Since that 24-hour interval, as is testified by new translations and past reprints of the one-time, there have been many thousands who have read at least one of Kalidasa'due south works; other thousands have seen it on the stage in Europe and America.

How explain a reputation that maintains itself indefinitely and that conquers a new continent after a lapse of thirteen hundred years? None can explain information technology, yet sure contributory causes can be named.

No other poet in any land has sung of happy beloved between man and woman every bit Kalidasa sang. Every ane of his works is a dearest-verse form, however much more it may exist. All the same the theme is then infinitely varied that the reader never wearies. If ane were to doubt from a study of European literature, comparison the ancient classics with modern works, whether romantic beloved be the expression of a natural instinct, be non rather a morbid survival of decaying chivalry, he has just to plough to India's independently growing literature to discover the question settled. Kalidasa's love-poetry rings as truthful in our ears as information technology did in his countrymen's ears fifteen hundred years ago.

It is of love eventually happy, though oftentimes struggling for a time against external obstacles, that Kalidasa writes. There is nowhere in his works a trace of that not quite good for you feeling that sometimes assumes the name "modern dear." If it were not and so, his poetry could hardly have survived; for happy love, blessed with children, is surely the more fundamental thing. In his drama Urvashi he is set up to change and greatly injure a tragic story, given him by long tradition, in order that a loving pair may not exist permanently separated. One apparent exception there is—the story of Rama and Sita in The Dynasty of Raghu. In this case it must exist remembered that Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu, and the story of a mighty god incarnate is not to be lightly tampered with.

It is perhaps an inevitable result of Kalidasa's bailiwick that his women appeal more strongly to a modern reader than his men. The man is the more than variable miracle, and though manly virtues are the same in all countries and centuries, the accent has been variously laid. But the truthful woman seems timeless, universal. I know of no poet, unless it be Shakespeare, who has given the world a grouping of heroines and then individual yet then universal; heroines as truthful, as tender, as brave as are Indumati, Sita, Parvati, the Yaksha'south bride, and Shakuntala.

Kalidasa could not sympathise women without agreement children. It would exist difficult to find anywhere lovelier pictures of childhood than those in which our poet presents the footling Bharata, Ayus, Raghu, Kumara. It is a fact worth noticing that Kalidasa's children are all boys. Beautiful every bit his women are, he never does more than than glance at a little girl.

Some other pervading note of Kalidasa's writing is his love of external nature. No doubt it is easier for a Hindu, with his almost instinctive belief in reincarnation, to feel that all life, from institute to god, is truly one; yet none, even among the Hindus, has expressed this feeling with such disarming beauty as has Kalidasa. It is inappreciably truthful to say that he personifies rivers and mountains and trees; to him they have a conscious individuality as truly and as certainly as animals or men or gods. Fully to appreciate Kalidasa'due south poetry one must have spent some weeks at least among wild mountains and forests untouched by man; there the conviction grows that trees and flowers are indeed individuals, fully conscious of a personal life and happy in that life. The return to urban surroundings makes the vision fade; yet the retention remains, like a great love or a glimpse of mystic insight, equally an intuitive conviction of a college truth.

Kalidasa's cognition of nature is not only sympathetic, it is also minutely authentic. Not merely are the snows and windy music of the Himalayas, the mighty current of the sacred Ganges, his possession; his too are smaller streams and copse and every littlest blossom. Information technology is delightful to imagine a meeting between Kalidasa and Darwin. They would have understood each other perfectly; for in each the same kind of imagination worked with the same wealth of observed fact.

I accept already hinted at the wonderful balance in Kalidasa's character, by virtue of which he establish himself as at dwelling house in a palace and in a wilderness. I know not with whom to compare him in this; even Shakespeare, for all his magical insight into natural dazzler, is primarily a poet of the human heart. That can hardly be said of Kalidasa, nor tin can it be said that he is primarily a poet of natural beauty. The two characters unite in him, it might nearly be said, chemically. The affair which I am clumsily endeavouring to brand plain is beautifully epitomised in The Cloud-Messenger. The former half is a clarification of external nature, yet interwoven with human feeling; the latter half is a picture of a human heart, yet the motion-picture show is framed in natural dazzler. So exquisitely is the affair done that none tin say which half is superior. Of those who read this perfect poem in the original text, some are more moved by the one, some by the other. Kalidasa understood in the fifth century what Europe did not learn until the nineteenth, and even at present comprehends only imperfectly: that the world was not made for man, that homo reaches his total stature only as he realises the dignity and worth of life that is not human.

That Kalidasa seized this truth is a magnificent tribute to his intellectual ability, a quality quite as necessary to great poetry equally perfection of class. Poetical fluency is non rare; intellectual grasp is not very uncommon: merely the combination has non been found perchance more than a dozen times since the world began. Because he possessed this harmonious combination, Kalidasa ranks not with Anacreon and Horace and Shelley, but with Sophocles, Vergil, Milton.

He would doubtless have been somewhat bewildered by Wordsworth'south gospel of nature. "The globe is besides much with us," we can fancy him repeating. "How can the world, the beautiful human world, be too much with u.s.? How tin can sympathy with ane class of life exercise other than vivify our sympathy with other forms of life?"

Information technology remains to say what can be said in a strange language of Kalidasa's style. We have seen that he had a formal and systematic education; in this respect he is rather to exist compared with Milton and Tennyson than with Shakespeare or Burns. He was completely master of his learning. In an historic period and a land which reprobated carelessness but were tolerant of pedantry, he held the scales with a wonderfully even paw, never heedless and never indulging in the elaborate trifling with Sanskrit diction which repels the reader from much of Indian literature. Information technology is truthful that some western critics have spoken of his disfiguring concerts and puerile plays on words. One can only wonder whether these critics have ever read Elizabethan literature; for Kalidasa's style is far less obnoxious to such condemnation than Shakespeare's. That he had a rich and glowing imagination, "excelling in metaphor," as the Hindus themselves affirm, is indeed true; that he may, both in youth and age, have written lines which would not accept passed his scrutiny in the vigour of manhood, it is not worth while to deny: yet the total effect left by his poetry is one of extraordinary sureness and delicacy of taste. This is scarcely a thing for argument; a reader tin practice no more than than state his ain subjective impression, though he is glad to find that impression confirmed by the unanimous authority of fifty generations of Hindus, surely the most competent judges on such a point.

Analysis of Kalidasa's writings might hands exist continued, but analysis can never explain life. The only existent criticism is subjective. Nosotros know that Kalidasa is a very dandy poet, because the globe has non been able to leave him solitary.

ARTHUR W. RYDER.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

On Kalidasa'due south life and writings may be consulted A. A. Macdonell's History of Sanskrit Literature (1900); the same author'southward article "Kalidasa" in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910); and Sylvain Lévi'due south Le Théâtre Indien (1890).

The more important translations in English language are the post-obit: of the Shakuntala, by Sir William Jones (1789) and Monier Williams (fifth edition, 1887); of the Urvashi, by H. H. Wilson (in his Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus, third edition, 1871); of The Dynasty of Raghu, by P. de Lacy Johnstone (1902); of The Birth of The War-god (cantos 1 to seven), by Ralph T. H. Griffith (second edition, 1879); of The Cloud-Messenger, past H. H. Wilson (1813).

At that place is an inexpensive reprint of Jones's Shakuntala and Wilson's Cloud-Messenger in one book in the Camelot Series.

KALIDASA

• • An aboriginal heathen poet, loving more than
  • God's creatures, and His women, and His flowers
  • Than nosotros who avowal of consecrated powers;
  • Still lavishing his unexhausted store
• • Of dear's deep, simple wisdom, healing o'er
  • The world's erstwhile sorrows, Bharat'due south griefs and ours;
  • That healing love he found in palace towers,
  • On mount, evidently, and dark, sea-belted shore,
• • In songs of holy Raghu'due south kingly line
  • Or sweet Shakuntala in pious grove,
  • In hearts that met where starry jasmines twine
• • Or hearts that from long, lovelorn absence strove
  • Together. Even so his words of wisdom smoothen:
  • All'due south well with man, when man and adult female honey.

Goethe.

• Willst du die Blüte des frühen, die
• Früchte des späteren Jahres,
• Willst du, was reizt und entzückt,
• Willst du, was sattigt und nährt,
• Willst du den Hummel, dice erde mit
• Einem Namen begreifen,
• Nenn' ich, Sakuntala, dich, und
• dann ist alles gesagt.

[1 ]These verses are translated on pp. 123, 124.

[2 ]The passage will be found on pp. 190-192.

[1 ]This affair is more fully discussed in the introduction to my translation of The Little Clay Cart (1905).

[1 ]Lévi, Le Théâtre Indien, p. 163.

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