THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

V. 8. Hindu Drama303all must melt away. It is in an art like this that the soul finds therepose, the opportunity for being confirmed in gentleness and inkindly culture, the unmixed intellectual and aesthetic pleasure inquest of which it turned away from the crudeness and incoherenceof life to the magic regions of Art.If masterly workmanship in plot-making and dramatic situation,subtlety, deftness and strength in dialogue and a vital forceof dramatic poetry by themselves make a fine and effective poeticalplay for the stage, for a really great drama a farther andrarer gift is needed, the gift of dramatic characterisation. Thispower bases itself in its different degrees sometimes upon greatexperience of human life, sometimes on a keen power of observationand accurate imagination making much matter out of asmall circle of experience, but in its richest possessors on a boundlesssympathy with all kinds of humanity accompanied by a powerof imbibing and afterwards of selecting and bringing out fromoneself at will impressions received from the others. This supremepower, European scholars agree, is wanting in Hindu dramaticliterature. A mere poet like Goethe may extend unstintedand superlative praise to a Shacountala, but the wiser criticaland scholarly mind passes a far less favourable verdict. There ismuch art in Hindu poetry, it is said, but no genius; there is plentyof fancy but no imagination; the colouring is rich, but colour isall, humanity is not there; beautiful and even moving poetry isabundant, but the characters are nil. Indian scholars trained inour schools repeat what they have learnt. A Hindu scholar ofacute diligence and wide Sanscrit learning has even argued thatthe Hindu mind is constitutionally incapable of original and livingcreation; he has alleged the gigantic, living and vigorous personalitiesof the Mahabharata as an argument to prove that thesecharacters must have been real men and women, copied fromthe life, since no Hindu poet could have created character withsuch truth and power. On the other side, the Bengali critics,men of no mean literary taste and perception, though inferiorin pure verbal scholarship, are agreed in regarding the charactersof Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti as beautiful and energetic creations,not less deserving of study than any personality of anElizabethan drama. This contradiction, violent as it is, is not