Strangely enough, in Shakespeare's dramas, like those of Kalidasa, we
find a secret vein of complaint against the artificial life of the
king's court--the life of ungrateful treachery and falsehood. And
almost everywhere, in his dramas, foreign scenes have been introduced
in connection with some working of the life of unscrupulous ambition.
It is perfectly obvious in _Timon of Athens_--but there Nature offers
no message or balm to the injured soul of man. In _Cymbeline_ the
mountainous forest and the cave appear in their aspect of obstruction
to life's opportunities. These only seem tolerable in comparison with
the vicissitudes of fortune in the artificial court life. In _As You
Like It_ the forest of Arden is didactic in its lessons. It does not
bring peace, but preaches, when it says:
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
In the _Tempest_, through Prospero's treatment of Ariel and Caliban we
realise man's struggle with Nature and his longing to sever connection
with her. In _Macbeth_, as a prelude to a bloody crime of treachery
and treason, we are introduced to a scene of barren heath where the
three witches appear as personifications of Nature's malignant forces;
and in _King Lear_ it is the fury of a father's love turned into
curses by the ingratitude born of the unnatural life of the court that
finds its symbol in the storm on the heath. The tragic intensity of
_Hamlet_ and _Othello_ is unrelieved by any touch of Nature's
eternity. Except in a passing glimpse of a moonlight night in the love
scene in the _Merchant of Venice_, Nature has not been allowed in
other dramas of this series, including _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony
and Cleopatra_, to contribute her own music to the music of man's
love. In _The Winter's Tale_ the cruelty of a king's suspicion stands
bare in its relentlessness, and Nature cowers before it, offering no
consolation.
I hope it is needless for me to say that these observations are not
intended to minimise Shakespeare's great power as a dramatic poet, but
to show in his works the gulf between Nature and human nature owing to
the tradition of his race and time. It cannot be said that beauty of
nature is ignored in his writings; only he fails to recognise in them
the truth of the inter-penetration of human life with the cosmic life
of the world. We observe a completely different attitude of mind in
the later English poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, which can be
attributed in the main to the great mental change in Europe, at that
particular period, through the influence of the newly discovered
philosophy of India which stirred the soul of Germany and aroused the
attention of other Western countries.
In Milton's _Paradise Lost_, the very subject--Man dwelling in the
garden of Paradise--seems to afford a special opportunity for bringing
out the true greatness of man's relationship with Nature. But though
the poet has described to us the beauties of the garden, though he has
shown to us the animals living there in amity and peace among
themselves, there is no reality of kinship between them and man. They
were created for man's enjoyment; man was their lord and master. We
find no trace of the love between the first man and woman gradually
surpassing themselves and overflowing the rest of creation, such as we
find in the love scenes in _Kumara-Sambhava_ and _Shakuntala_. In the
seclusion of the bower, where the first man and woman rested in the
garden of Paradise--
Bird, beast, insect or worm
Durst enter none, such was their awe of man.
Not that India denied the superiority of man, but the test of that
superiority lay, according to her, in the comprehensiveness of
sympathy, not in the aloofness of absolute distinction.