Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works | Page 7

littlest flower. It is
delightful to imagine a meeting between Kalidasa and Darwin. They
would have understood each other perfectly; for in each the same kind
of imagination worked with the same wealth of observed fact.
I have already hinted at the wonderful balance in Kalidasa's character,
by virtue of which he found himself equally at home in a palace and in
a wilderness. I know not with whom to compare him in this; even
Shakespeare, for all his magical insight into natural beauty, is primarily
a poet of the human heart. That can hardly be said of Kalidasa, nor can
it be said that he is primarily a poet of natural beauty. The two
characters unite in him, it might almost be said, chemically. The matter
which I am clumsily endeavouring to make plain is beautifully
epitomised in The Cloud-Messenger. The former half is a description of
external nature, yet interwoven with human feeling; the latter half is a
picture of a human heart, yet the picture is framed in natural beauty. So
exquisitely is the thing done that none can say which half is superior.
Of those who read this perfect poem in the original text, some are more
moved by the one, some by the other. Kalidasa understood in the fifth
century what Europe did not learn until the nineteenth, and even now
comprehends only imperfectly: that the world was not made for man,
that man reaches his full stature only as he realises the dignity and
worth of life that is not human.
That Kalidasa seized this truth is a magnificent tribute to his
intellectual power, a quality quite as necessary to great poetry as
perfection of form. Poetical fluency is not rare; intellectual grasp is not
very uncommon: but the combination has not been found perhaps more
than a dozen times since the world began. Because he possessed this
harmonious combination, Kalidasa ranks not with Anacreon and
Horace and Shelley, but with Sophocles, Vergil, Milton.
He would doubtless have been somewhat bewildered by Wordsworth's
gospel of nature. "The world is too much with us," we can fancy him

repeating. "How can the world, the beautiful human world, be too much
with us? How can sympathy with one form of life do other than vivify
our sympathy with other forms of life?"
It remains to say what can be said in a foreign language of Kalidasa's
style. We have seen that he had a formal and systematic education; in
this respect he is rather to be compared with Milton and Tennyson than
with Shakespeare or Burns. He was completely master of his learning.
In an age and a country which reprobated carelessness but were tolerant
of pedantry, he held the scales with a wonderfully even hand, never
heedless and never indulging in the elaborate trifling with Sanskrit
diction which repels the reader from much of Indian literature. It is true
that some western critics have spoken of his disfiguring conceits and
puerile plays on words. One can only wonder whether these critics have
ever read Elizabethan literature; for Kalidasa's style is far less
obnoxious to such condemnation than Shakespeare's. That he had a rich
and glowing imagination, "excelling in metaphor," as the Hindus
themselves affirm, is indeed true; that he may, both in youth and age,
have written lines which would not have passed his scrutiny in the
vigour of manhood, it is not worth while to deny: yet the total effect
left by his poetry is one of extraordinary sureness and delicacy of taste.
This is scarcely a matter for argument; a reader can do no more than
state his own subjective impression, though he is glad to find that
impression confirmed by the unanimous authority of fifty generations
of Hindus, surely the most competent judges on such a point.
Analysis of Kalidasa's writings might easily be continued, but analysis
can never explain life. The only real criticism is subjective. We know
that Kalidasa is a very great poet, because the world has not been able
to leave him alone.
ARTHUR W. RYDER.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
On Kalidasa's life and writings may be consulted A.A. Macdonell's
History of Sanskrit Literature (1900); the same author's article
"Kalidasa" in the eleventh edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_

(1910); and Sylvain Lévi's _Le Théâtre Indien_ (1890).
The more important translations in English are the following: of the
Shakuntala, by Sir William Jones (1789) and Monier Williams (fifth
edition, 1887); of the Urvashi, by H.H. Wilson (in his _Select
Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus_, third edition, 1871); of _The
Dynasty of Raghu_, by P. de Lacy Johnstone (1902); of _The Birth of
The War-god_ (cantos one to seven), by Ralph T.H. Griffith (second
edition, 1879); of The Cloud-Messenger, by H.H. Wilson (1813).
There is an inexpensive reprint of Jones's Shakuntala and