THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

244 The Harmony of Virtueprominent and essential member of the human body, would bechosen as the seat of the symbol. Kalidasa had in this as in manyother instances to take the Puranic allegory of the old poetic figureand new-subject it to the law of artistic beauty. In no casedoes he depart from the Puranic conception, but his method isto suppress the ungainly elements of the idea, often preservingit only in an epithet, and bring into prominence all the elementsof beauty. Here the horse-faces are entirely suppressed and thepicture offered is that of women singing with unearthly voiceson the mountain-tops. The use of the word Kinnarie here wouldhave no poetic propriety; to the uninstructed it would mean nothingand to the instructed would suggest only the ungainly horse-facewhich Kalidasa here ignores and conflict with the idea of wildand divine melody which is emphasised. I have therefore translated“the Oreads of the hills”; these spirits of the mountains are theonly image in English which can at all render the idea of beautyand vague strangeness here implied; at the same time I haveused the apparently tautologous enlargement “of the hills”, becauseit was necessary to give some idea of the distant, wildand mystic which the Greek Oreads does not in itself quite bringout. I have moreover transposed the two lines in translationfor very obvious reasons. The first line demands still more carefultranslation. The word ÙabdÀyante means literally “sound, makea noise”, but unlike its English rendering it is a rare word usedby Kalidasa for the sake of a certain effect of sound and acertain shade of signification; while therefore rendering by “noise”I have added the epithet “shrill” to bring it up to the requiredvalue. Again, the force and sound of pÓryamÀÍÀÕ cannot berendered by its literal rendering “filled”, and anila, one of themany beautiful and significant Sanskrit words for wind, —vÀyu, anila, pavana, samÈra, samÈraÍa, vÀta, prabhaÜjana,marut, sadÀgati — suggests powerfully the breath and flowingof wind and is in the Upanishad used as equivalent to Prana,the breath or emotional soul; to render adequately the word“inspired” has been preferred to “filled” and the epithet “rushing”added to wind. KÈcakÀÕ pÓryamÀÍÀÕ anilaiÕ in the originalsuggests at once the sound of the flute, because the flute isin India made of the hollow bamboo and the shrillness of the