Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c83.48

v2.c83.48

These three types of poetry are then elaborated and classified with somewhat minute and subtle ingenuity. In this treatment, we find the characteristic passion for reducing everything to a formula and the scholastic delight in indulging in fastidious refinements; but at the same time there is a sincere effort to do justice to all the aesthetic facts, so far as they have been recognised, and to unify the various currents of ideas obtaining in different schools by synthesising them with the central principle of suggestion in poetry. We see throughout the speculations of this school an anxiety to protect itself from the reproach of being too theoretical, of ignoring or doing violence to facts; and this anxiety made the theorists evolve a scheme which should not overlook the inherited stock of notions but find a place for them in a comprehensive system. We need not take the *dhvani*-theory here in all its minute details, and go through the five thousand, three hundred and fifty-five subdivisions of suggestive poetry, the object of which was possibly to mark out not distinct classes, but distinct properties or circumstances; but we shall attempt to trace here briefly the effort made by this school to dispose of the already accumulated matter of Poetics, represented by the notions of the *rasa*, *rīti*, *guṇa*, *doṣa* and *alaṃkāra*, into the *dhvani*-system itself, by means of different arrangements or classification of the idea of suggestion.