"To characterize the Indian Epics in a single word: though often
disfigured by grotesque fancies and wild exaggerations, they are
yet noble works, abounding in passages of remarkable descriptive
power; and while as works of art they are far inferior to the
Greek epics, in some respects they appeal far more strongly to
the romantic mind of europe, namely, by the loving appreciation
of natural beauty, their exquisite delineation of womanly love
and devotion, and their tender sentiment of mercy and forgiveness."
--Precisely because they come from a much higher civilization
that the Greek. From a civilization, that is to say, older and
more continuous. Before Rome fell, the Romans were evolving
humanitarian and compassionate ideas quite unlike their old-time
callousness. And no, it was not the influence of Christianity;
we see it in the legislation of Hadrian for example, and
especially in the anti-Christian Marcus Aurelius. These feeling
grow up in ages unscarred by wars and human cataclysms; every
war puts back their growth. The fall of Rome and the succeeding
pralaya threw Europe back into ruthless barbarity. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries humanism began to grow again;
and has been gaining ground especially since H. P. Blavatsky
began her teaching. But not much more than a century ago they
were publicly hanging, drawing, and quartering people in England;
crowds were gathering at Tyburn or before the Old Bailey to enjoy
an execution. We have hardly had four generations in Western
Europe in which men have not been ruthless and brutal barbarians
with a sprinkling of fine spirits incarnate among them; no
European literature yet has had time to evolve to the point where
it could portray a Yudhishthira, at the end of a national epic,
arriving at the gates of heaven with his dog,--and refusing to
enter because the dog was not to be admitted. There have been,
with us, too great ups and downs of civilization; too little
continuity. We might have grown to it by now, had that medieval
pralaya been a quiet and natural thing, instead of what it was:--
a smash-up total and orgy of brutalities come as punishment for
our sins done in the prime of manvantara.
A word or two as to the _Ramayana._ Probably Valmiki had the
other epic before his mental vision when he wrote it; as Virgil
had Homer. There are parallel incidents; but his genius does
not appear in them;--he cannot compete in their own line with the
old Kshattriya bards. You do not find here so done to the life
the chargings of lordly tuskers, the gilt and crimson, the
scarlet and pomp and blazonry, of war. The braying of the battle
conches is muted: all is cast in a more gentle mold. You get
instead the forest and its beauty; you get tender idylls of
domestic life.--This poem, like the _Mahabharata,_ has come
swelling down the centuries; but whereas the latter grew by the
addition of new incidents, the _Ramayana_ grew by the re-telling
of old ones. Thus you may get book after book telling the same
story of Rama's life in the forest-hermitage by the Godavari;
each book by a new poet in love with the gentle beauty of
the tale and its setting, and anxious to put them into his
own language. India never grows tired of these Ramayanic
repetitions. Sita, the heroine, Rama's bride, is the ideal of
every good woman there; I suppose Shakespeare has created no
truer or more beautiful figure. To the _Mahabharata,_ the
_Ramayana_ stands perhaps as the higher Wordsworth to Milton;
it belongs to the same great age, but to another day in it.
Both are and have been wonderfully near the life of the people:
children are brought up on them; all ages, castes, and
conditions make them the staple of their mental diet. Both are
semi-sacred; neither is quite secular; either relates the deeds
of an avatar of Vishnu; ages have done their work upon them, to
lift them into the region of things sacrosanct.
And now at last we come to the age of King Vikramaditya of
Ujjain,--to the Nine Gems of Literature,--to a secular era of
literary creation,--to the Sanskrit Drama, and to Kalidisa, its
Shakespeare;--and to his masterpiece, _The Ring of Sakoontala._
There is a tendency with us to derive all things Indian from
Greek sources. Some Greek writer says the Indians were familiar
with Homer; whereupon we take up the cry,--The _Ramayana_ is
evidently a plagiarism from the _Iliad;_ the abduction of Sita
by Ravan, of the abduction of Helen by Paris; the siege of
Lanka, of the siege of Troy. And the _Mahabharata_ is too;
because,--because it must be; there's a deal of fighting in
both. (So Macedon plagiarized its river from Monmouth.) We
believe a Greek at all times against an Indian; forgetting that
the Greeks themselves, when they got to India, were astounded at
the truthfulness of the people they found there. Such strained
avoidance of the natural lie,--the harmless, necessary lie
that came so trippingly to a Greek tongue,--seemed to them
extraordinary.--So too our critics naturally set out from the
position that the Indian Drama must have been an offshoot or
imitation of the Greek. But fortunately that position had to be
quitted _toute de suite;_ for the Indian theory is much nearer
the English than the Greek;--much liker Shakespeare's than
Aeschylus's. _Sakoontal_ is romantic; it came in a Third or
Alawn Period; of all Englishmen, Keats might most easily have
written it; if _Endymion_ were a play, _Endymion_ would be the
likest thing to it in English. You must remember that downward
trend in the Great Cycle; that make each succeeding period in
Sanskrit literature a descent from the heights of esotericism
towards the personal plane. That is what brings Kalidasa on to a
level with Keats.
Behind _Sakoontala,_ as behind _Endymion,_ there is a Soul-symbol;
only Kalidasa, like Keats, is preoccupied in his outer mind
more with forest beauty and natural magic and his romantic
tale of love. It marks a stage in the descent of literature from
the old impersonal to the modern personal reaches: from tales
told merely to express the Soul-Symbol, to tales told merely for
the sake of telling them. The stories in the _Upanishads_ are
glyphs pure and simple. In the epics, they have taken on much
more human color, though still exalting and ennobling,--and all
embodying, or molded to, the glyph. Now, in _The Ring of
Sakoontala,_--and it is typical of its class,--we have to look a
little diligently for the glyph; what impresses us is the
stillness and morning beauty of the forest, and,--yes, it must be
said.--the emotions, quite personal, of King Dushyanta and
Sakoontala, the hero and heroine.
She is a fairy's child, full beautiful; and has been brought up
by her foster-father, the yogi Kanwa, in his forest hermitage.
While Kanwa is absent, Dushyanta, hunting, follows an antelope
into that quiet refuge; finds Sakoontala, loves and marries her.
Here we are amidst the drowsy hum of bees, the flowering of large
Indian forest blossoms, the scent of the jasmine in bloom; it is
what Keats would have written, had his nightingale sung in an
Indian jungle.--The king departs for his capital, leaving with
Sakoontala a magical ring with power to reawaken memory of her in
his heart, should he ever forget. But Durvasas, a wandering
ascetic, passes by the hermitage; and Sakoontala, absorbed in
her dreams, fails to greet him; for which he dooms her to be
forgotten by her husband. She waits and waits, and at last seeks
the unreturning Dushyanta at his court; who, under the spell of
Durvasas, fails to recognise her. If what she claims is true,
she can produce the ring?--But no; she has lost it on her
journey through the forest. He repudiates her; whereupon
she is caught up by the Gods into the Grove of Kasyapa beyond
the clouds.
But the ring had fallen into a stream in the forest, and a fish
had swallowed it, and a fisherman had caught the fish, and the
police had caught the fisherman .... and so it came into the
hands of Dushyanta again; who, at sight of it, remembered all,
and was plunged in grief over his lost love.
Years pass, and Indra summons him at last to fight a race of
giants that threaten the sovereignty of the Gods. In the course
of that warfare, mounting to heaven in the car of Indra,
Dushyanta comes to the Grove of Kasyapa, and is reunited with
Sakoontala and with their son, now grown into an heroic boy.
As in _The Tempest_ a certain preoccupation with the magical
beauty of the island dims the character-drawing a little,
and perhaps thereby makes the symbol more distinct,--so in
Sakoontala. It is a faery piece: begining in the morning calm
and forest magic; then permitting passion to rise, and sadness
to follow; ending in the crystal and blue clearness of the upper
air. In this we see the basic form of the Soul-Symbol, which is
worked out in the incidents and characters. Dushyanta, hunting
in the unexplored forest, comes to the abode of holiness, finds
and loves Sakoontala;--and from their union is born the perfect
hero,--Sarva-Damana, the 'All-tamer.'--Searching in the
impersonal and unexplored regions within us, we do at some time
in our career of lives come to the holy place, get vision of our
Immortal Self; from the union of which with this, our human
personality is to be born some time that new being we are to
become,--the Perfect Man or Adept. But that first vision may be
lost; I suppose almost always is;--and there are wanderings and
sorrows, forgetfulness and above all heroic services to be
performed, before the final reunion can be attained.