THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

162 The Harmony of Virtuethought and genius and the greatness of all things mighty andbold and regal; when therefore his characters feel powerful emotion,they are impelled to express it in the dialect of thought. We seethe heart in their utterances but it is not the heart in its nakedness,it is not the heart of the common man; or rather it is theuniversal heart of man but robed in the intellectual purple. Thenote of Sanskrit poetry is always aristocratic; it has no answerto the democratic feeling or to the modern sentimental cult ofthe average man, but deals with exalted, large and aspiring natureswhose pride it is that they do not act like common men(prÀkÐto janaÕ). They are the great spirits, the mahÀjanÀÕ, inwhose footsteps the world follows. Whatever sentimental objectionsmay be urged against this high and arrogating spirit, it cannotbe doubted that a literature pervaded with the soul of heroworshipand noblesse oblige and full of great examples is eminentlyfitted to elevate and strengthen a nation and prepare itfor a great part in history. And with this high tendency of theliterature there is no poet who is so deeply imbued as Vyasa.Even the least of his characters is an intellect and a personality,and of intellectual personality their every utterance reeks, as itwere, and is full. I have already quoted the cry of Draupadi toBhima; it is a supreme utterance of insulted feeling, and yet notehow it expresses itself, in the language of intellect, in a thought:£iÒZ#oiÒZ# ik' xeze .Imsen yqa m*t" -nam*tSy ih papIyan( .ayaRmal>y jIvit -- 1uttiØÒhottiØÒha kiÌ ÙeØe bhÈmasena yathÀ mÐtaÕnÀmÐtasya hi pÀpÈyÀn bhÀryÀmÀlabhya jÈvatiThe whole personality of Draupadi breaks out in that cry, herchastity, her pride, her passionate and unforgiving temper, but itflashes out not in an expression of pure feeling, but in a fieryand pregnant apophthegm. It is this temperament, this dynamicforce of intellectualism blended with heroic fire and a strongpersonality that gives its peculiar stamp to Vyasa's writing anddistinguishes it from that of all other epic poets. The heroic andprofoundly intellectual rational type of the Bharata races, theKurus, Bhojas and Panchalas who created the Veda and theVedanta, find in Vyasa their fitting poetical type and exponent,1The Mahabharata, Virataparva, 17.15.