THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

V.. 7. Kalidasa's Characters285Arthur, whom the Shakespeare-worshipper would have usregard as a masterpiece, is no real child; he is too voulu, tooeloquent, too much dressed up for pathos and too conscious ofthe fine sentimental pose he strikes. Children do pose and childrendo sentimentalise, but they are perfectly naive and unconsciousabout it; they pose with sincerity, they sentimentalise witha sort of passionate simplicity, indeed an earnest business-likenesswhich is so sincere that it does not even require an audience.The greatest minds have their limitations and Shakespeare'soverabounding wit shuts him out from two Paradises, the mindof a child and the heart of a mother. Constance, the patheticmother, is a fitting pendant to Arthur, the pathetic child, as insincereand falsely drawn a portraiture, as obviously dressed upfor the part. Indeed throughout the meagre and mostly unsympatheticlist of mothers in Shakespeare's otherwise various andsplendid gallery there is not even one in whose speech there isthe throbbing of a mother's heart; the sacred beauty of maternityis touched upon in a phrase or two; but from Shakespeare weexpect something more, some perfect and passionate enshriningof the most engrossing and selfless of human affections. To thisthere is not even an approach. In this one respect the Indianpoet, perhaps from the superior depth and keenness of the domesticfeelings peculiar to his nation, outstripped his greater Englishcompeer.Kalidasa, like Shakespeare, seems to have realised the instinctof paternal tenderness far more strongly than the maternal;his works both dramatic and epic give us many powerfuland emotional expressions of the love of father and child to whichthere are few corresponding outbursts of maternal feeling. Valmiki'sCowshalya has no parallel in Kalidasa. Yet he expresses the truesentiment of motherhood with sweetness and truth if not withpassion.Ayus and Urvasie in this play were certainly not intendedfor the dramatic picture of mother and child. This mother hasabandoned her child to the care of strangers; this child is new tothe faces of his parents. Such a situation might easily have beenmade harsh and unsympathetic, but for the fine dramatic tact ofthe poet which has purified everything that might repel and