A History of Sanskrit Literature c21.s9.1

c21.s9.1

Weber,¹ who was rarely moved to wrath, made once a most effective protest against Bāṇa's defects of style; he condemned him, as compared with Daṇḍin, for a subtlety and tautology which were repugnant, the outrageous overloading of single words with epithets, the construction of sentences in which the solitary verb is held over for pages, the interval being filled by epithets and epithets upon these epithets, these epithets moreover frequently extending over more than a line in the form of compounds, so that Bāṇa's prose is an Indian wood where progress is impossible through the undergrowth until the traveller cuts out a path for himself, and where even then he is confronted by malicious wild beasts in the shape of unknown words to terrify him. The censure is just; Bāṇa revels in the construction of sentences consisting of heaped up epithets in compound form, throwing away all the advantages of an inflected language; moreover he loves to pile up in these compounds double meanings, and these he brings about repeatedly by the use of rare senses of ordinary words or the use of utterly abnormal phraseology. He shows his exact knowledge of grammar in many points, and adheres to the due use of the perfect, as against Subandhu who employs it as a narrative tense without the restriction of reference to matters not within the experience of him who uses it. His employment of the figures of speech is unwearying, and he is largely dominated by the desire to produce prose which shall be rhythmical. His long compounds are often clearly built up and interspersed with shorter words simply in order to achieve this effect which Daṇḍin and other writers of poetics extol under the style of Ojas, strength. Like other Indian authors he clearly attaches to this end an importance foreign to our conceptions, but part at least of his influence on later writers such as Dharmadāsa, Govardhana, and Jayadeva must be assigned to his sound effects as well as to his brilliance in figures of speech, to which they no doubt, from a modern point of view, attached undue merit. But it is fair to remember that Bāṇa is by no means without sense of propriety; he can resort to brief interchange of speeches when he deems it fit, Kapiñjala's advice to Puṇḍarīka is direct and forcible, and the ejaculations of the maidens of the queen Rājyaçrī when on the point of lighting the pyre, or of the dying king Prabhākaravardhana, are perfectly phrased. In its own way there is a model of force in the picture of the exclamations of the motley host of the royal army and the cries of the despairing villagers who are being plundered right and left. Nor is Bāṇa at all incapable of epigrammatic brevity, though unhappily he too rarely practises it.