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A History of Sanskrit Literature c23.s2: 2. The Achievement

A History of Sanskrit Literature c23.s2

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English

2. The Achievement

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It is easy to see the defects in Sanskrit poetry and still easier to exaggerate them. The difficulty of the language is added to by the elaboration given to it by poets who were writing always for highly cultured audiences and who had no chance of winning reputation and wealth by anything that was commonplace or simple. The long compounds which are affected by some poets even in verse and which are *de règle* in poetic prose are sometimes obscure; they are always a barrier to quick comprehension by all who are not deeply imbued with the spirit of the Kāvya literature. The elaborate alliterations and assonances which had to the Indian ear a definite aesthetic relation to the sense conveyed are less easy for us to appreciate, especially as the blending of sound and sense has been less eagerly pursued and much less successfully attained by western poets, so that we are apt to dismiss as pedantic the careful rules of the writers on poetics who came to divide styles largely on the basis of sound effects.

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Moreover, the love of double meanings, which is essential in Subandhu and Bāṇa and much loved by many other poets, is perplexing, and demands from us an intellectual strain which was doubtless not exacted from the select coteries who admired the poems when they were first produced. Nor is it easy for us to appreciate the constant effort slightly to improve on phrases and ideas which have been given currency by an earlier poet, an attempt which is unquestionably apt to lead to forced uses of language and lack of simplicity. Still less of course can we appreciate those tricks in poetic form and grotesque experiments in the use of but one or two letters to make up the consonants in a line which Bhāravi and Māgha, not to mention minor poets, were willing to carry out. Nor does the elaboration of the poetic vocabulary, based largely on the free use of poetical dictionaries, appeal to us, and the rich variety of conventional ornaments unquestionably soon palls.

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Apart from defects of style we miss in Sanskrit literature the revelation of personal character by the poets in their poems; Sappho, Catullus, Lucretius, distant as they are from us, produce an impression infinitely more vivid than does any Sanskrit poet. Those that have come down to us preserve far more of the calm of Vergil; the writers on poetics appreciated to the full the generalizing power of poetry, its impersonal character, its duty of suggestion in lieu of expression, and their appreciation was due to the practice of the great poets. They live moreover in a world of tranquil calm, not in the sense that sorrow and suffering are unknown, but in the sense that there prevails a rational order in the world which is the outcome not of blind chance but of the actions of man in previous births. Discontent with the constitution of the universe, rebellion against its decrees, are incompatible with the serenity engendered by this recognition by all the Brahmanical poets of the rationality of the world order. Hence we can trace no echo of social discontent; the poets were courtiers who saw nothing whatever unsatisfactory in the life around them. Nor in the classical period do we find them much moved by patriotism; they wrote, so far as we have them, in times when national feeling was not excited by any foreign attack, and the clashes between neighbouring kings appeared to them in the light of the normal occupation of the warrior class. Political liberty within the state was undreamed of; the fiery passion which ennobles Lucan is impossible for an Indian poet. The Buddhist writers glorified their teacher and magnified his doctrine, but in the main they are too deeply affected by the Brahmanical spirit to move beyond the confines of emotion allowable. It is in Çāntideva above all that we find a deep seriousness, which blends in the most curious and inconsistent manner with a denial of the reality of the universe.

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The conventionality of the themes of the poets may be admitted, and due regard had to the limit of their range and outlook, but the fact of the great merit of Sanskrit poetry remains unquestioned. At their best the poets had complete command of the ordinary emotions which appeal most deeply to the human heart; they know to the full the nature of love, in youth and in wedlock, of sorrow, of the joy of union and the pangs of separation, of the utter hopelessness induced by the loss in death of the beloved, or its mitigation by the assurance of reunion in a life to come. Moreover, their love of nature is intimate and real; whether because of their belief in transmigration or simply through natural sympathy, they look on life of all kinds with a kindly eye, and they share in the feelings of nature, as they assume it to share in the vicissitudes of man. Nor do they ignore the more manly virtues; heroism, constancy, uprightness, self-sacrifice, all receive their meed of recognition in energetic portrayal. Humour comes naturally to many of them, and the wit of their paronomasias is often unquestionable and strikingly effective. Their descriptive power is undeniable and applies equally to scenes from life and to cameos of nature. Their miniature-painting, illuminated by the brilliant condensation of style and set off by the effective and melodious metre, while the sounds are skilfully chosen to match the sense, often achieves perfection in its kind. But the ability of the authors is not limited to description; they are capable of rapid and luminous narrative, and even if they smack sometimes of the Arthaçāstra the speeches of their characters are lacking neither in force, vigour, nor logical power.

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It is not, of course, given to many poets to excel in epic, and we have many fine lyric stanzas from poets who failed to produce anything distinguished on a larger scale. The highest merit belongs also to the expression in verse of maxims on life; deeply original they seldom are, but the power of giving impressive utterance to the essential facts of human life belonged to men like Bhartṛhari in the highest degree, and many others have recorded impressions with complete adequacy of language. It is in the romances of Subandhu and Bāṇa that we feel most the serious defects of Sanskrit prose style, and even with these drawbacks Bāṇa deserves his reputation both for the depth of his feeling of the nature of love and for the vigour and fire of his pictures of the court of Harṣa, of the death of Prabhākaravardhana, and the martial preparations of the king.

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The merits of India in the fable and the fairy tale have never been ignored, and in addition to the interesting character of the imaginative production of India in these genres there must be set to her credit the easy and elegant style of the original *Pañcatantra* and Somadeva’s skill in rapid yet pleasing and pointed narrative. History never succeeded in winning a real place in Indian literature, though panegyrics are often clever and valuable as sources of historical information, but Kalhaṇa was not merely an interesting chronicler; often he achieves true poetry, and for the period with which he was almost contemporary his work has all the interest possessed by Lucan’s *Pharsalia*. Widely different as were the two men by temperament, the studied elaboration of their style and the fine effects of which they are capable attest a real similarity of genius.

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It is natural to compare Sanskrit writers with the Greeks of the Alexandrian age or the post-Augustan Latin poets, and there is no doubt some justice in the parallels drawn between the literatures. They are essentially the outcome of study and of the deliberate and conscious use of older models.¹ But it would be unjust to suggest for a moment that the Sanskrit poets were in general only on the level of the Alexandrians or of Statius. If we allow this to be true of Māgha, it could hardly be asserted of Bhāravi, and Kālidāsa merits comparison with all but the greatest of poets, superior by far to men as able as Ovid and Propertius.¹ Of English writers Tennyson has much in common with him in calmness of outlook and in delicacy of beauty of phrase, coupled with restraint and balance, but Tennyson lacked entirely the dramatic talent which is evinced so remarkably in the *Çakuntalā*.²

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¹ For the Roman practice of recitation and its effect on literature and French and other parallels see Mayor, *Juvenal*, i. 173 ff.; Friedländer, *Sittengesch.*, iii. 601; Rohde, *Der griech. Roman*, pp. 303 ff.; Heitland in Haskins’s *Lucan*, pp. xxxiv f., lxiii ff. H. E. Butler (*Post-Augustan Poetry*), and U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (*Hellenistische Dichtung in der Zeit des Kallimachos*) deal adequately with these periods. Cf. Butcher, *Greek Genius*, pp. 245 ff.

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¹ For an eloquent defence of Propertius, see Postgate’s ed. pp. lvii ff. He approaches more closely to the complexity of Indian poetry than does Ovid’s pellucid simplicity. Cf. also Sellar, *Horace and the Elegiac Poets* (1892).

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² Matthew Arnold’s polish is no compensation for his lack of force.

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The similarities, however, between the Alexandrians, the Flavians, and the lesser masters of the Kāvya are as interesting as they are natural. Encyclopaedic learning is common to all three; Apollonios does his best to weary us of the *Argonautika* by his intempestive geographical dissertations, and Lucan, despite his youth, loses no opportunity of showing his mastery³ of the Roman counterpart of the Indian Kalās. The subject-matter is, on the whole, sacrificed to the form; threadbare legends, descriptions of scenery, and commonplace reflections are crowded in without regard to appropriateness; Māgha is no greater a sinner than Apollonios or Lucan, and Valerius Flaccus and Statius are infinitely worse than he. Point, antithesis, and metaphor became essential; it was demanded of the Roman poets that they should like the prose authors adorn their writings with *sententiae*, *lumina orationis*; success was often achieved in this genre. There is a remarkable similarity between the average stanza of a Kāvya and the style of post-Augustan poetry. ‘Almost every group’, writes Merivale,⁴ ‘of three or four lines in Statius constitutes in itself an idea, perhaps a conceit, a play of thought or of words; it fastens itself like a burr upon the memory: such is the distinctness of his vision, such the elaborate accuracy of his touch. The epigram is the crowning result of this elaborate terseness of diction, and this lucid perception of the end in view. The verses of Martial are the quintessence of the Flavian poetry.’ This holds good no less of Kallimachos and the Greek epigrammatists, who come nearest to achieving similar effects to Sanskrit poets. Latin prose felt the effects of poetry; it became poetical in construction, vocabulary, and ornaments. Old and obsolete words were revived, new words invented or existing terms given new senses, and bold metaphorical transfers of meaning were affected,¹ all phenomena which occur freely in the ornate prose of the Sanskrit romances. As we have seen, Subandhu shows traces of the appropriation of verses for his work, and Tacitus himself is full of reminiscences of Vergil; Kalhaṇa in his turn freely adapts to poetry the happier turns of Bāṇa’s prose.² In prose and poetry alike we find in the silver age of Latin literature the love of strained expression and involved constructions and a search after metaphorical expression which is often artificial; Lucan, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus offer abundant examples of unsuccessful similes which make the Sanskrit poetaster’s³ comparison of an orange with the freshly shaved chin of a drunken Hun quite pardonable.

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³ Heitland in Haskins’s *Lucan*, pp. li ff.

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⁴ *Romans under the Empire*, chap. lxiv.

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¹ Seneca, *Ep.*, cxiv, § 10.

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² Stein, *Rājataraṅgiṇī*, i. 133; Thomas, WZKM. xii. 33; JRAS. 1899, p. 485.

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³ *Sāhityadarpaṇa*, 622. Pindar’s elaborate similes, bold metaphors, and effective compounds (cf. Gildersleeve, *Pindar*, pp. xl ff.) offer an interesting parallel to the best Indian Kāvya.

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But Sanskrit poets had advantages denied to some of the Alexandrians and post-Augustans. Their outlook on religion was one which it is perhaps difficult for us to appreciate, but it accepted a reality in the tales of the gods such as Viṣṇu or Çiva which was obviously not felt by Kallimachos in his playful treatment of the loves of the deities, or by Apollonios in his revival of the Homeric outlook long after it had ceased to have any reality, still less by Lucan, Statius, or Valerius Flaccus, to whom the gods were no more than machinery sanctioned by Vergilian usage. The Sanskrit poet might regard the gods as ultimately real only in a secondary sense, but he had no difficulty in treating them as something more than idle abstractions. Again, these poets had a deep appreciation of nature and feeling for its beauties which is rare in classical poets of Greece or Rome; it is more akin to the spirit of Theokritos, but, unlike that author, Indian poets expressed not a somewhat artificial appreciation of country scenes as they attracted a poet used to town life, but a natural affection which is not really disguised by their placid acceptance of a large number of purely poetic conventions in their descriptions. It may become tedious to find the themes of the seasons, the dawn, the rising and setting of the moon, and kindred topics so often dealt with in the Kāvya, but taken each by itself these pictures are often accomplished works of art with which Greek and Roman poets have nothing strictly comparable in finish or merit. Nor in their appreciation of love in all its phases have the Sanskrit poets any equal among the Alexandrians save Apollonios in his splendid picture of Medea, while the post-Augustans cannot vie with him despite the real ability of Statius. There is, moreover, a deep gulf between the reticence of Greek and Roman alike in the treatment of love and the frankness of the poet of India; the *Ars Amatoria* of Ovid aided to secure his permanent exile,¹ and the Flavians show no signs of its influence, while Sanskrit poets would have been discredited if they had not been skilled in the topics of the Kāmaçāstra, and been able to depict beauty of form and the delights of dalliance. In this sense they are far more akin to the spirit of romance than are the Greeks or their Roman followers. Indian poets also have a happier outlook on life than the disillusioned Alexandrians or the somewhat depressed post-Augustans;² they lived in a simpler world, were not vexed by political problems or memories of lost liberty, and were parts of a social system and believers in a scheme of life which, if incapable of producing the magnificence of Vergil's vision of the world to come, at least offered something more exhilarating than the systems of Epicureanism or Stoicism.

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¹ Teuffel-Schwabe, *Rom. Lit.*, § 247. The deplorable taste of i. 289 ff. cannot be excelled in India. Characteristically Indian are e. g. *Amores*, i. 5; ii. 15.

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² All the greater classical poets have a vein of sadness; cf. Tyrrell, *Latin Poetry*, pp. 159 ff.; Butcher, *Greek Genius*, pp. 133 ff.

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Moreover, the Sanskrit poets had command of a language capable of finer sound effects than even Greek at its best; they could successfully manage metres of great complexity but remarkable beauty, and they were conscious experts in the task of matching sound to sense, an art practised indeed by Greek and Roman poets alike, but with far less adequate means and with much less subtlety. Their use of alliteration is often overdone, but they resemble Vergil in their power to make it yield effective results, an art in which his followers and notably Lucan were markedly deficient. Their love of metaphor and simile doubtless led them at times to commit faults of taste and to a display of erudition rather than of judgement; but often they show a richness of fancy and power of happy phraseology which is not paralleled either in Greek or Latin poetry. Moreover, though we may easily find their paronomasias¹ tedious, there is no doubt that they are frequently rightly called models of twofold appropriateness, and the free employment of figures of speech is often superior to the somewhat rhetorical manner which was introduced into Latin poetry by the practice of declamation in the oratorical schools, which Juvenal so forcibly derides.

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¹ English lends itself only to comic effects, but Greek and Latin authors alike use this device with serious efforts at beauty; cf. Cope, *Aristotle's Rhetoric*, p. 320, n. 1.

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