Translations Of Shakuntala And Other Works Part 37

_Fifteenth canto. Rama goes to heaven_.--The canto opens with a rather long description of a fight between Rama's youngest brother and a giant. On the journey to meet the giant, Shatrughna spends a night in Valmiki's hermitage, and that very night Sita gives birth to twin sons. Valmiki gives them the names Kusha and Lava, and when they grow out of childhood he teaches them his own composition, the _Ramayana_, "the sweet story of Rama," "the first path shown to poets." At this time the young son of a Brahman dies in the capital, and the father laments at the king's gate, for he believes that the king is unworthy, else heaven would not send death prematurely. Rama is roused to stamp out evil-doing in the kingdom, whereupon the dead boy comes to life.

The king then feels that his task on earth is nearly done, and prepares to celebrate the great horse-sacrifice.[4]

At this sacrifice appear the two youths Kusha and Lava, who sing the epic of Rama's deeds in the presence of Rama himself. The father perceives their likeness to himself, then learns that they are indeed his children, whom he has never seen. Thereupon Sita is brought forward by the poet-sage Valmiki and in the presence of her husband and her detractors establishes her constant purity in a terrible fashion.

"If I am faithful to my lord In thought, in action, and in word, I pray that Earth who bears us all May bid me in her bosom fall."

The faithful wife no sooner spoke Than earth divided, and there broke From deep within a flashing light That flamed like lightning, blinding-bright.

And, seated on a splendid throne Upheld by serpents' hoods alone, The G.o.ddess Earth rose visibly, And she was girded with the sea.

Sita was clasped in her embrace, While still she gazed on Rama's face: He cried aloud in wild despair; She sank, and left him standing there.

Rama then establishes his brothers, sons, and nephews in different cities of the kingdom, buries the three queens of his father, and awaits death. He has not long to wait; Death comes, wearing a hermit's garb, asks for a private interview, and threatens any who shall disturb their conference. Lakshmana disturbs them, and so dies before Rama. Then Rama is translated.

Cantos sixteen to nineteen form the third division of the epic, and treat of Rama's descendants. The interest wanes, for the great hero is gone.

_Sixteenth canto. k.u.mudvati's wedding_.--As Kusha lies awake one night, a female figure appears in his chamber; and in answer to his question, declares that she is the presiding G.o.ddess of the ancient capital Ayodhya, which has been deserted since Rama's departure to heaven. She pictures the sad state of the city thus:

I have no king; my towers and terraces Crumble and fall; my walls are overthrown; As when the ugly winds of evening seize The rack of clouds in helpless darkness blown.

In streets where maidens gaily pa.s.sed at night, Where once was known the tinkle and the shine Of anklets, jackals slink, and by the light Of flashing fangs, seek carrion, snarl, and whine.

The water of the pools that used to splash With drumlike music, under maidens' hands, Groans now when bisons from the jungle lash It with their clumsy horns, and roil its sands.

The peac.o.c.k-pets are wild that once were tame; They roost on trees, not perches; lose desire For dancing to the drums; and feel no shame For fans singed close by sparks of forest-fire.

On stairways where the women once were glad To leave their pink and graceful footprints, here Unwelcome, blood-stained paws of tigers pad, Fresh-smeared from slaughter of the forest deer.

Wall-painted elephants in lotus-brooks, Receiving each a lily from his mate, Are torn and gashed, as if by cruel hooks, By claws of lions, showing furious hate.

I see my pillared caryatides Neglected, weathered, stained by pa.s.sing time, Wearing in place of garments that should please, The skins of sloughing cobras, foul with slime.

The balconies grow black with long neglect, And gra.s.s-blades sprout through floors no longer tight; They still receive but cannot now reflect The old, familiar moonbeams, pearly white.

The vines that blossomed in my garden bowers, That used to show their graceful beauty, when Girls gently bent their twigs and plucked their flowers, Are broken by wild apes and wilder men.

The windows are not lit by lamps at night, Nor by fair faces shining in the day, But webs of spiders dim the delicate, light Smoke-tracery with one mere daub of grey.

The river is deserted; on the sh.o.r.e No gaily bathing men and maidens leave Food for the swans; its reedy bowers no more Are vocal: seeing this, I can but grieve.

The G.o.ddess therefore begs Kusha to return with his court to the old capital, and when he a.s.sents, she smiles and vanishes. The next morning Kusha announces the vision of the night, and immediately sets out for Ayodhya with his whole army. Arrived there, King Kusha quickly restores the city to its former splendour. Then when the hot summer comes, the king goes down to the river to bathe with the ladies of the court. While in the water he loses a great gem which his father had given him. The divers are unable to find it, and declare their belief that it has been stolen by the serpent k.u.muda who lives in the river.

The king threatens to shoot an arrow into the river, whereupon the waters divide, and the serpent appears with the gem. He is accompanied by a beautiful maiden, whom he introduces as his sister k.u.mudvati, and whom he offers in marriage to Kusha. The offer is accepted, and the wedding celebrated with great pomp.

_Seventeenth canto. King At.i.thi_.--To the king and queen is born a son, who is named At.i.thi. When he has grown into manhood, his father Kusha engages in a struggle with a demon, in which the king is killed in the act of killing his adversary. He goes to heaven, followed by his faithful queen, and At.i.thi is anointed king. The remainder of the canto describes King At.i.thi's glorious reign.

_Eighteenth canto. The later princes_.--This canto gives a brief, impressionistic sketch of the twenty-one kings who in their order succeeded At.i.thi.

_Nineteenth canto. The loves of Agnivarna_.--After the twenty-one kings just mentioned, there succeeds a king named Agnivarna, who gives himself to dissipation. He shuts himself up in the palace; even when duty requires him to appear before his subjects, he does so merely by hanging one foot out of a window. He trains dancing-girls himself, and has so many mistresses that he cannot always call them by their right names. It is not wonderful that this kind of life leads before long to a consuming disease; and as Agnivarna is even then unable to resist the pleasures of the senses, he dies. His queen is pregnant, and she mounts the throne as regent in behalf of her unborn son. With this strange scene, half tragic, half vulgar, the epic, in the form in which it has come down to us, abruptly ends.

If we now endeavour to form some critical estimate of the poem, we are met at the outset by this strangely unnatural termination. We cannot avoid wondering whether the poem as we have it is complete. And we shall find that there are good reasons for believing that Kalidasa did not let the glorious solar line end in the person of the voluptuous Agnivarna and his unborn child. In the first place, there is a constant tradition which affirms that _The Dynasty of Raghu_ originally consisted of twenty-five cantos. A similar tradition concerning Kalidasa's second epic has justified itself; for some time only seven cantos were known; then more were discovered, and we now have seventeen. Again, there is a rhetorical rule, almost never disregarded, which requires a literary work to end with an epilogue in the form of a little prayer for the welfare of readers or auditors.

Kalidasa himself complies with this rule, certainly in five of his other six books. Once again, Kalidasa has nothing of the tragedian in his soul; his works, without exception, end happily. In the drama _Urvashi_ he seriously injures a splendid old tragic story for the sake of a happy ending. These facts all point to the probability that the conclusion of the epic has been lost. We may even a.s.sign a natural, though conjectural, reason for this. _The Dynasty of Raghu_ has been used for centuries as a text-book in India, so that ma.n.u.scripts abound, and commentaries are very numerous. Now if the concluding cantos were unfitted for use as a text-book, they might very easily be lost during the centuries before the introduction of printing-presses into India. Indeed, this very unfitness for use as a school text seems to be the explanation of the temporary loss of several cantos of Kalidasa's second epic.

On the other hand, we are met by the fact that numerous commentators, living in different parts of India, know the text of only nineteen cantos. Furthermore, it is unlikely that Kalidasa left the poem incomplete at his death; for it was, without serious question, one of his earlier works. Apart from evidences of style, there is the subject-matter of the introductory stanzas, in which the poet presents himself as an aspirant for literary fame. No writer of established reputation would be likely to say:

The fool who seeks a poet's fame, Must look for ridicule and blame, Like tiptoe dwarf who fain would try To pluck the fruit for giants high.

In only one other of his writings, in the drama which was undoubtedly written earlier than the other two dramas, does the poet thus present his feeling of diffidence to his auditors.

It is of course possible that Kalidasa wrote the first nineteen cantos when a young man, intending to add more, then turned to other matters, and never afterwards cared to take up the rather thankless task of ending a youthful work.

The question does not admit of final solution. Yet whoever reads and re-reads _The Dynasty of Raghu_, and the other works of its author, finds the conviction growing ever stronger that our poem in nineteen cantos is mutilated. We are thus enabled to clear the author of the charge of a lame and impotent conclusion.

Another adverse criticism cannot so readily be disposed of; that of a lack of unity in the plot. As the poem treats of a kingly dynasty, we frequently meet the cry: The king is dead. Long live the king! The story of Rama himself occupies only six cantos; he is not born until the tenth canto, he is in heaven after the fifteenth. There are in truth six heroes, each of whom has to die to make room for his successor. One may go farther and say that it is not possible to give a brief and accurate t.i.tle to the poem. It is not a _Ramayana_, or epic of Rama's deeds, for Rama is on the stage during only a third of the poem. It is not properly an epic of Raghu's line, for many kings of this line are unmentioned. Not merely kings who escape notice by their obscurity, but also several who fill a large place in Indian story, whose deeds and adventures are splendidly worthy of epic treatment. _The Dynasty of Raghu_ is rather an epic poem in which Rama is the central figure, giving it such unity as it possesses, but which provides Rama with a most generous background in the shape of selected episodes concerning his ancestors and his descendants.

Rama is the central figure. Take him away and the poem falls to pieces like a pearl necklace with a broken string. Yet it may well be doubted whether the cantos dealing with Rama are the most successful. They are too compressed, too briefly allusive. Kalidasa attempts to tell the story in about one-thirtieth of the s.p.a.ce given to it by his great predecessor Valmiki. The result is much loss by omission and much loss by compression. Many of the best episodes of the _Ramayana_ are quite omitted by Kalidasa: for example, the story of the jealous humpback who eggs on Queen Kaikeyi to demand her two boons; the beautiful scene in which Sita insists on following Rama into the forest; the account of the somnolent giant Pot-ear, a character quite as good as Polyphemus. Other fine episodes are so briefly alluded to as to lose all their charm: for example, the story of the golden deer that attracts the attention of Rama while Ravana is stealing his wife; the journey of the monkey Hanumat to Ravana's fortress and his interview with Sita.

The Rama-story, as told by Valmiki, is one of the great epic stories of the world. It has been for two thousand years and more the story _par excellence_ of the Hindus; and the Hindus may fairly claim to be the best story-tellers of the world. There is therefore real matter for regret in the fact that so great a poet as Kalidasa should have treated it in a way not quite worthy of it and of himself. The reason is not far to seek, nor can there be any reasonable doubt as to its truth. Kalidasa did not care to put himself into direct compet.i.tion with Valmiki. The younger poet's admiration of his mighty predecessor is clearly expressed. It is with especial reference to Valmiki that he says in his introduction:

Yet I may enter through the door That mightier poets pierced of yore; A thread may pierce a jewel, but Must follow where the diamond cut.

He introduces Valmiki into his own epic, making him compose the _Ramayana_ in Rama's lifetime. Kalidasa speaks of Valmiki as "the poet," and the great epic he calls "the sweet story of Rama," "the first path shown to poets," which, when sung by the two boys, was heard with motionless delight by the deer, and, when sung before a gathering of learned men, made them heedless of the tears that rolled down their cheeks.

Bearing these matters in mind, we can see the course of Kalidasa's thoughts almost as clearly as if he had expressed them directly. He was irresistibly driven to write the wonderful story of Rama, as any poet would be who became familiar with it. At the same time, his modesty prevented him from challenging the old epic directly. He therefore writes a poem which shall appeal to the hallowed a.s.sociation that cl.u.s.ter round the great name of Rama, but devotes two-thirds of it to themes that permit him greater freedom. The result is a formless plot.

This is a real weakness, yet not a fatal weakness. In general, literary critics lay far too much emphasis on plot. Of the elements that make a great book, two, style and presentation of character, hardly permit critical a.n.a.lysis. The third, plot, does permit such a.n.a.lysis. Therefore the a.n.a.lyst overrates its importance. It is fatal to all claim of greatness in a narrative if it is shown to have a bad style or to be without interesting characters. It is not fatal if it is shown that the plot is rambling. In recent literature it is easy to find truly great narratives in which the plot leaves much to be desired. We may cite the _Pickwick Papers, Les Miserables, War and Peace_.

We must then regard _The Dynasty of Raghu_ as a poem in which single episodes take a stronger hold upon the reader than does the unfolding of an ingenious plot. In some degree, this is true of all long poems.

The _aeneid_ itself, the most perfect long poem ever written, has dull pa.s.sages. And when this allowance is made, what wonderful pa.s.sages we have in Kalidasa's poem! One hardly knows which of them makes the strongest appeal, so many are they and so varied. There is the description of the small boy Raghu in the third canto, the choice of the princess in the sixth, the lament of King Aja in the eighth, the story of Dasharatha and the hermit youth in the ninth, the account of the ruined city in the sixteenth. Besides these, the Rama cantos, ten to fifteen, make an epic within an epic. And if Kalidasa is not seen at his very best here, yet his second best is of a higher quality than the best of others. Also, the Rama story is so moving that a mere allusion to it stirs like a sentimental memory of childhood. It has the usual qualities of a good epic story: abundance of travel and fighting and adventure and magic interweaving of human with superhuman, but it has more than this. In both hero and heroine there is real development of character. Odysseus and aeneas do not grow; they go through adventures. But King Rama, torn between love for his wife and duty to his subjects, is almost a different person from the handsome, light-hearted prince who won his bride by breaking Shiva's bow. Sita, faithful to the husband who rejects her, has made a long, character-forming journey since the day when she left her father's palace, a youthful bride. Herein lies the unique beauty of the tale of Rama, that it unites romantic love and moral conflict with a splendid story of wild adventure. No wonder that the Hindus, connoisseurs of story-telling, have loved the tale of Rama's deeds better than any other story.

If we compare _The Dynasty of Raghu_ with Kalidasa's other books, we find it inferior to _The Birth of the War-G.o.d_ in unity of plot, inferior to _Shakuntala_ in sustained interest, inferior to _The Cloud-Messenger_ in perfection of every detail. Yet pa.s.sages in it are as high and sweet as anything in these works. And over it is shed the magic charm of Kalidasa's style. Of that it is vain to speak. It can be had only at first hand. The final proof that _The Dynasty of Raghu_ is a very great poem, is this: no one who once reads it can leave it alone thereafter.{}

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: If a king aspired to the t.i.tle of emperor, or king of kings, he was at liberty to celebrate the horse-sacrifice. A horse was set free to wander at will for a year, and was escorted by a band of n.o.ble youths who were not permitted to interfere with his movements.

If the horse wandered into the territory of another king, such king must either submit to be the va.s.sal of the horse's owner, or must fight him. If the owner of the horse received the submission, with or without fighting, of all the kings into whose territories the horse wandered during the year of freedom, he offered the horse in sacrifice and a.s.sumed the imperial t.i.tle.]

[Footnote 2: This is not the place to discuss the many interesting questions of geography and ethnology suggested by the fourth canto.

But it is important to notice that Kalidasa had at least superficial knowledge of the entire Indian peninsula and of certain outlying regions.]

[Footnote 3: A girl of the warrior caste had the privilege of choosing her husband. The procedure was this. All the eligible youths of the neighbourhood were invited to her house, and were lavishly entertained. On the appointed day, they a.s.sembled in a hall of the palace, and the maiden entered with a garland in her hand. The suitors were presented to her with some account of their claims upon her attention, after which she threw the garland around the neck of him whom she preferred.]

[Footnote 4: See footnote, p. 128.]