THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

IV. 3. The Problem of the Mahabharata187The choice of words, the texture of style has a certain similarity,the run of the sentences differs little if at all; but what fineliterary sense does not feel that here is another poetical atmosphereand the ring of a different voice? And yet to put a precisename on the difference would not be easy. The personal differencebecomes still more marked if we take a passage from Miltonin which the nameable merits are precisely the same, a simplicityin strength of diction, thought and the run of the verse,What though the field be lost....And when we pass farther down in the stream of literature andreadThy thunder, conscious of the new command...we feel that the poet has nourished his genius on the greatnessof Milton till his own soft and luxurious style rises into epic vigour;yet we feel too that the lines are only Miltonic, they are notMilton.Now there are certain great poetical styles which are of akind apart, they are so extraordinarily bare and restrained thatthe untutored mind often wonders what difficulty there can bein writing poetry like that; yet when the attempt is made, it isfound that so far as manner goes it is easier to write somewhatlike Shakespeare or Homer or Valmiki than to write like these.Just because the style is so bare, has no seizable mannerism, nostriking and imitable peculiarities, the failure of the imitation appearscomplete and unsoftened; for in such poets there is butone thing to be caught, the unanalysable note, the personal greatnesslike everything that comes straight from God which it is impossibleto locate or limit, and precisely the one that most eludesthe grasp.This poetry it is always possible to distinguish with someapproach to certainty from imitative or spurious work. Very fortunatelythe style of Vyasa is exactly such a manner of poetry.Granted therefore adhikÀra in the critic, that is to say, a naturalgift of fine literary sensitiveness and the careful cultivation of