THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

IV. 2.Vyasa: Some Characteristics175into the Ramayana. Vyasa's poem has been increased to threefoldits original size; the additions to Valmiki, few in themselvesif we set apart the Uttara Kanda, have been immaterial and forthe most part of an accidental nature.Gifted with such poetical powers, limited by such intellectualand emotional characteristics, endowed with such grandeurof soul and severe purity of taste, what was the special workwhich Vyasa did for his country and in what, beyond the ordinaryelements of poetical treatise, lies his claim to world-wideacceptance? It has been suggested already that the Mahabharatais the great national poem of India. It is true the Ramayana alsorepresents an Aryan civilisation idealised: Rama and Sita are moreintimately characteristic types of the Hindu temperament as itfinally shaped itself than are Arjuna and Draupadi; Sri Krishna,though his character is founded in the national type, yet risesfar above it. But although Valmiki, writing the poem of mankind,drew his chief figures in the Hindu model and Vyasa, writinga great national epic, lifted his divine hero above the basis ofnational character into an universal humanity, yet the originalpurpose of either poem remains intact. In the Ramayana underthe disguise of an Aryan golden age, the wide world with all itselemental impulses and affections finds itself mirrored. TheMahabharata reflects rather a great Aryan civilisation with thetypes, ideas, aims and passions of a heroic and pregnant periodin the history of a high-hearted and deep-thoughted nation. Ithas, moreover, as I have attempted to indicate, a formative ethicaland religious spirit which is absolutely corrective to the faultsthat have most marred in the past and mar to the present daythe Hindu character and type of thought. And it provides us withthis corrective not in the form of an alien civilisation difficult toassimilate and associated with other elements as dangerous tous as this is salutary, but in a great creative work of our ownliterature written by the mightiest of our sages (munÈnÀmapyahaÌvyÀsaÕ, Krishna has said), one therefore who speaks ourown language, thinks our own thoughts and has the same nationalcast of mind, nature and conscience. His ideals will thereforebe a corrective not only to our own faults but to the dangersof that attractive but unwholesome Asura civilisation which has