THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

The Historical MethodOF Kalidasa, the man who represents oneof the greatest periods in our civilisation and typifies so manysides and facets of it in his writing, we know if possible evenless than of Valmiki and Vyasa. It is probable but not certainthat he was a native of Malva born not in the capital Ujjayini,but in one of those villages of which he speaks in the Cloud-Messenger and that he afterwards resorted to the capital and wroteunder the patronage of the great Vikramaditya who founded theera of the Malavas in the middle of the first century before Christ.Of his attainments, his creed, his character we may gather somethingfrom his poetry, but external facts we have none. There isindeed a mass of apocryphal anecdotes about him couching anumber of witticisms and ingenuities mostly ribald, but these maybe safely discredited. Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa, our three greatestnames, are to us, outside their poetical creation, names merelyand nothing more.This is an exceedingly fortunate circumstance. The naturalman within us rebels indeed against such a void; who Kalidasawas, what was his personal as distinguished from his poeticalindividuality, what manner of man was the great king whosepatronage he enjoyed, who were his friends, who his rivals andhow he dealt with either or both, whether or not he was a loverof wine and women in practice as well as in imagination, underwhat special surroundings he wrote and who were the minds bywhom he was most influenced, all this the natural man clamoursto know; and yet all these are things we are very fortunate notto know. The historical method is certainly an attractive one andit leads to some distinct advantages, for it decidedly aids thosewho are not gifted with fine insight and literary discrimination, tounderstand certain sides of a poet's work more clearly and intelligently.But while it increases our knowledge of the workings ofthe human mind, it does not in the end assist or improve our criticalappreciation of poetry; it helps to an understanding of the man