THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

286 The Harmony of Virtuesmoothed away all the angles of the incident. But here the circumstancesexcuse it, not justify Urvasie. Acting under hardconditions, she has chosen the lesser of two evils; for by keepingAyus she would have lost both her child and Pururavas; bydelivering him into wise and tender hands, she has insured hiswelfare and for her part only anticipated the long parting whichthe rule of education in ancient India demanded from parents astheir sacrifice to the social ideal; but it is not from maternal insensibilitythat she bears quietly the starvation of the mother withinher. Knowing that the child was in good hands she solaces herselfwith the love of her husband. When he returns to her, thereis a wonderful subdued intensity, characteristic of her simple andfine nature, in the force with which that suppressed passion awakesto life; she approaches her son, wordless, but her “veiled bosomheaving towards him and wet with sacred milk”; in her joy overhim she forgets even the impending separation from the husbandto avert which she has sacrificed the embrace of his infancy.It is this circumstance, not any words, that testifies to thedepth of her maternal feeling; her character forbids her to expressit in splendours of poetic emotion such as well spontaneouslyfrom the heart of Pururavas. A look, a few ordinary wordsare all; if it were not for these and the observation of others, weshould have to live with her daily before we could realise thedepth of feeling behind her silence.Ayus himself is an admirable bit of dramatic craftsmanship.There is a certain critical age when the growing boy is a childon one side of his nature and a young man on the other and ofall psychological states such periods of transitional unstable equilibriumare the most difficult to render dramatically without makingthe character either a confused blur or an ill-joined piece of carpenter'swork. Here Kalidasa excels. He has the ready tact ofspeech-gradations, the power of simple and telling slightness thatcan alone meet the difficulty. By an unlaboured and inevitabledevice the necessary materials are provided. The boy comesstraight from the wild green and ascetic forest into the splendoursof an Oriental court and the presence of a father andmother whom he has never seen; a more trying situation couldnot be easily imagined; he inevitably becomes self-conscious,