A History of Sanskrit Literature c15.s1.12

c15.s1.12

Bhartṛhari’s poetry exhibits Sanskrit to the best advantage. The epics unquestionably lack life and action, their characters are stereotyped, and their descriptions, admirable in detail, tend to be over-elaborate and to lose force by this very fact. In Bhartṛhari each stanza normally can stand by itself and serves to express one idea, be it a sentiment of love, of resignation, or of policy, in complete and daintily finished form. The extraordinary power of compression which Sanskrit possesses is seen here at its best; the effect on the mind is that of a perfect whole in which the parts coalesce by inner necessity, and the impression thus created on the mind cannot be reproduced in an analytical speech like English, in which it is necessary to convey the same content, not in a single sentence syntactically merged into a whole, like the idea which it expresses, but in a series of loosely connected predications. The effect which the best stanzas of the lyric and gnomic poets achieve is essentially synthetic, as opposed to the analytic methods of modern poetry, and it follows inevitably that a series of stanzas of this kind is too heavy a burden for the mind; considered, however, each in itself, as they should be, these stanzas, like those of the Greek anthology,¹ present us with an almost infinite number of brilliant poems in miniature, on which it would often be hard to improve. It must be remembered that the use of the longer metres gives a Sanskrit poet the opportunity of compressing into a single stanza material sufficient to fill a compact English sonnet, so that there is no need to restrict within too narrow limits either the thought or the expression.