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Vyasa: Some
Characteristics
THE
Mahabharata, although neither
the greatest nor the richest masterpiece of the secular literature of India, is
at the same time its most considerable and important body of poetry. Being so,
it is the pivot on which the history of Sanskrit literature and incidentally the
history of Aryan civilisation in India, must perforce turn. To the great
discredit of European scholarship the problem of this all-important work is one
that remains not only unsolved, but untouched. Yet until it is solved, until the
confusion of its heterogeneous materials is reduced to some sort of order, the
different layers of which it consists separated, classed and attributed to their
relative dates, and its relations with the Ramayana on the one hand and the
Puranic and classic literature on the other fully and patiently examined, the
history of our civilisation must remain in the air, a field for pedantic
wranglings and worthless conjectures. The world knows something of our origins
because much labour has been bestowed on the Vedas, something of our decline
because post-Buddhistic literature has been much read, annotated and discussed,
but of our great medial and flourishing period it knows little, and that little
is neither coherent nor reliable.
All that we know of the Mahabharata at
present is that it is the work of several hands and of different periods — this
is literally the limit of the reliable knowledge European scholarship has so far
been able to extract from it. For the rest we have to be content with arbitrary
conjectures based upon an unwarrantable application of European analogies to
Indian things or random assumptions snatched from a word here or a line there,
but never proceeding from that weighty, careful and unbiassed study of the work,
canto by canto, passage by passage, line by line, which can alone bring us to
any valuable conclusions. A fancy was started in Germany that the Iliad of Homer
is really a pastiche or clever rifacimento of old ballads put together in the
time of Pisistratus. This truly barbarous imagination with its rude
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ignorance of the psychological bases of
all great poetry has now fallen into some discredit; it has been replaced by a
more plausible attempt to discover a nucleus in the poem, an Achilleid, out of
which the larger Iliad has grown. Very possibly the whole discussion will
finally end in the restoration of a single Homer with a single poem, subjected
indeed to some inevitable interpolation and corruption, but mainly the work of
one mind, a theory still held by more than one considerable scholar. In the
meanwhile, however, haste has been made to apply the analogy to the
Mahabharata; lynx-eyed theorists have discovered in the poem — apparently
without taking the trouble to study it — an early and rude ballad epic worked
up, doctored and defaced by those wicked Brahmins, who are made responsible for
all the literary and other enormities which have been discovered by the bushelful, and not by Europeans alone — in our literature and civilisation. A
similar method of "arguing from Homer" is probably at the bottom of Professor
Weber's assertion that the War Parvas contain the original epic. An observant
eye at once perceives that the War Parvas are more hopelessly tangled than any
that precede them except the first. It is here and here only that the keenest
eye becomes confused and the most confident explorer begins to lose heart and
self-reliance. Now whether the theory is true or not, — and one sees nothing in
its favour, — it has at present no value at all; for it is a pure theory without
any justifying facts. It is not difficult to build these intellectual
card-houses. Anyone may raise them by the dozen if he can find no better manner
of wasting valuable time. But the Iliad is all battles and it therefore follows
in the European mind that the original Mahabharata must have been all battles.
Another method is that of ingenious, if forced, argument from stray Slokas of
the poem to the equally stray and obscure remarks in Buddhist compilations. The
curious theory of some scholars that the Pandavas were a later invention and
that the original war was between the Kurus and Panchalas only and Professor
Weber's singularly positive inference from a Sloka¹ which does not at first
sight bear
¹The
Mahabharata, Adiparva, I. 81.
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the meaning he puts on it, that the
original epic contained only 8,800 verses, are ingenuities of this type. They are
based on the Teutonic art of building a whole mammoth out of a single and often
problematical bone and remind one strongly of Mr. Pickwick and the historic
inscription which was so rudely, if in a Pickwickian sense, challenged by the
refractory Mr. Blotton. All these theorisings are idle enough; they are made of
too airy a stuff to last.
Yet to extricate the original epic from
the mass of accretions is not, I believe, so difficult a task as it may at first
appear. One is struck in perusing the Mahabharata by the presence of a mass of
poetry which bears the style and impress of a single, strong and original, even
unusual mind, differing in his manner of expression, tone of thought and stamp
of personality not only from every other Sanskrit poet we know, but from every
other great poet known to literature. When we look more closely into the
distribution of this peculiar style of writing, we come to perceive certain very
suggestive and helpful facts. We realise that this impress is only found in
those parts of the poem which are necessary to the due conduct of the story;
seldom to be detected in the more miraculous, Puranistic or trivial episodes,
but usually broken up by passages and sometimes shot through with lines of a
discernibly different inspiration. Equally noteworthy is it that nowhere does
this part admit any trait, incident or speech which deviates from the strict
propriety of dramatic characterisation and psychological probability. Finally,
in this body, Krishna's divinity is recognised but more often hinted at than
aggressively stated. The tendency is to keep it in the background as a fact to
which, while himself crediting it, the writer does not hope for a universal
consent, still less is able to speak of it as a general tenet and matter of
dogmatic belief; he prefers to show Krishna rather in his human character,
acting always by wise, discerning and inspired methods, but still not
transgressing the limit of human possibility. All this leads one to the
conclusion that in the body of poetry I have described, we have the real
Bharata, an epic which tells plainly and straight-forwardly of the events which
led to the great war and the empire of the Bharata princes. Certainly, if
Professor Weber's venture-
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some assertion as to the length of the
original Mahabharata be correct, this conclusion falls to the ground; for the
mass of this
poetry amounts to considerably over 20,000 Slokas. Professor Weber's inference,
however, is worth some discussion; for the length of the original epic is a very
important element in the problem. If we accept it we must say farewell to all
hopes of unravelling the tangle. His assertion is founded on a single and
obscure verse in the huge prolegomena to the poem which takes up the greater
part of the Adiparva, no very strong basis for so far-reaching an assumption.
The Sloka itself says no more than this that much of the Mahabharata was written
in so difficult a style that Vyasa himself could remember only 8,800 of the
Slokas, Suka an equal amount and Sanjaya perhaps as much, perhaps something
less. There is certainly here no assertion such as Prof. Weber would have us
find in it that the Mahabharata at any time amounted to no more than 8,800
Slokas. Even if we assume what the text does not say that Vyasa, Suka and
Sanjaya knew the same 8,800 Slokas, we do not get to that conclusion. The point
simply is that the style of the Mahabharata was too difficult for a single man
to keep in memory more than a certain portion of it. This does not carry us very
far. Following the genius of the Sanskrit language we are led to suppose the
repetition was intended to relate astau ślokasahasrāni etc. with each
name, otherwise the repetition has no raison d'être and it is otiose and
inept. But if we understand it thus, the conclusion is irresistible that each
knew a different 8,800. The writer would have no object in wishing us to repeat
the number three times in our mind. If, however, we are to assume that this
verse means more than meets the eye, that it is a cryptic way of stating the
length of the original poem — and I do not deny that this is possible, perhaps
even probable — we should note the repetition of vetti — aham vedmi śuko
vetti sañjayo vetti vā na vā. The length of the epic as derived from this
single Sloka should then be 26,000 Slokas or
less, for the writer hesitates about the exact number to be attributed to
Sanjaya. Another passage farther on in the prolegomena agrees remarkably with
this conclusion and is in itself much more explicit. It is there stated plainly
enough that Vyasa first wrote the Mahabharata in 24,000 Slokas and afterwards
enlarged
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it to 100,000 for the world of man as well
as a still more unconscionable number of verses for the Gandharva and other
worlds.¹ In spite of the embroidery of fancy, of a type familiar enough to all
who are acquainted with the Puranic method of recording facts, the meaning of
this is unmistakable. The original Mahabharata consisted of 24,000 Slokas; but
in its final form it runs to 100,000. The figures are probably loose and
slovenly, for at any rate the first form of the Mahabharata is considerably
under 100,000 Slokas. It is possible therefore that the original epic was
something over 24,000 and under 26,400 Slokas, in which case the two passages
would agree well enough. But it would be unsafe to found any dogmatic assertion
on isolated couplets; at the most we can say that we are justified in taking the
estimate as a probable and workable hypothesis and if it is found to be
corroborated by other facts, we may venture to suggest its correctness as a
moral certainty.
This body of poetry then, let us suppose,
is the original Mahabharata. Tradition attributes it to Krishna of the Island
called Vyasa who certainly lived about this time and was an editor of the Vedas;
and since there is nothing in this part of the poem which makes the tradition
impossible and much which favours it, we may as a matter both of convenience and
of possibility accept it at least provisionally. Whether these hypotheses can be
upheld is a question for long and scrupulous consideration and analysis. In this
article I wish to formulate, assuming their validity, the larger features of
poetical style, the manner of thought and creation and the personal note of
Vyasa.
Vyasa is the most masculine of writers.
When Coleridge spoke of the femineity of genius he had in mind certain features
of temperament which, whether justly or not, are usually thought to count for
more in the feminine mould than in the masculine, the love of ornament,
emotionalism, mobile impressionability, the tyranny of imagination over the
reason, excessive sensitiveness to form and outward beauty, tendency to be
dominated imaginatively by violence and the show of strength; to be prodigal of
oneself, not to husband the powers, to be for showing them off, to fail in
self-restraint is also feminine. All these are natural
¹The
Mahabharata, Adiparva, I. 102-107.
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properties of the quick artistic
temperament prone to lose balance by throwing all itself outward and therefore
seldom perfectly sane and strong in all its parts. So much did these elements
form the basis of Coleridge's own temperament that he could not perhaps imagine
a genius in which they are wanting. Yet Wordsworth, Goethe, Dante and Sophocles
show however that the very highest genius can exist without them. But none of
the great poets I have named is so singularly masculine, so deficient in
femineity as Vyasa, none dominates so much by intellect and personality, yet
satisfies so little the romantic imagination. Indeed no poet at all near the
first rank has the same granite mind in which impressions are received with
difficulty but once received are ineffaceable, the same bare energy and strength
without violence and the same absolute empire of inspired intellect over the
more showy faculties. In his austere self-restraint and economy of power he is
indifferent to ornament for its own sake, to the pleasures of poetry as
distinguished from its ardours, to little graces and indulgences of style. The
substance counts for everything and the form has to limit itself to its proper
work of expressing with precision and power the substance. Even his most
romantic pieces have a virgin coldness and loftiness in their beauty. To
intellects fed on the elaborate pomp and imagery of Kalidasa's numbers and the
somewhat gaudy, expensive and meretricious spirit of English poetry, Vyasa may
seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats,
Byron and Tennyson is no good preparation for the severe classics. It is,
indeed, I believe, the general impression of many "educated" young Indians that
the Mahabharata is a mass of old wives' stories without a spark of poetry or
imagination. But to those who have bathed even a little in the fountain-head of
poetry, and can bear the keenness and purity of these mountain sources, the
naked and unadorned poetry of Vyasa is as delightful as to bathe in a chill
fountain in the heats of summer. They
find that one has an unfailing source of tonic and refreshment to the soul; one
comes into relation with a mind whose bare strong contact has the power of
infusing strength, courage and endurance. There are certain things which have
this inborn power and are accordingly valued by those who have felt deeply its
properties
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— the air of the mountains or the
struggle of a capable mind with hardship and difficulty; the Vedanta philosophy,
the ideal of the niskāma dharma, the poetry of Vyasa, three closely
related entities are intellectual forces that exercise a similar effect and
attraction.
The style of this powerful writer is
perhaps the one example in literature of strength in its purity, a strength
undefaced by violence and excess, yet not weakened by flagging and negligence.
It is less propped or helped out by any artifices and aids than any other poetic
style. Vyasa takes little trouble with similes, metaphors, rhetorical turns, the
usual paraphernalia of poetry, nor when he uses them, is he at pains to select
such as will be new and curiously beautiful; they are there to define more
clearly what he has in mind, and he makes just enough of them for that purpose,
never striving to convert them into a separate grace or a decorative element.
They have force and beauty in their context but cannot be turned into elegant
excerpts; in themselves they are in fact little or nothing. When Bhima is spoken
of as breathing hard like a weakling borne down by a load too heavy for him,
there is nothing in the simile itself. It derives its force from its aptness to
the heavy burden of unaccomplished revenge which the fierce spirit of the strong
man was condemned to bear. We may say the same of his epithets, that great
preoccupation of romantic artists; they are such as are most natural, crisp and
firm, but suited to the plain idea and only unusual when the business in hand
requires an unusual thought, but never recherché or existing for their
own beauty. Thus when he is describing the greatness of Krishna and hinting his
claims to be considered as identical with the Godhead, he gives him the one
epithet aprameya, immeasurable, which is strong and unusual enough to
rise to the thought, but not to be a piece of literary decoration or a violence
of expression. In brief, he religiously avoids overstress, his audacities of
phrase are few, and they have a grace of restraint in their boldness. There is
indeed a rushing vast Valmikian style which intervenes often in the Mahabharata,
but it is evidently the work of a different hand, for it belongs to a less
powerful intellect, duller poetic insight and coarser taste, which has yet
caught something of the surge and cry of Valmiki's oceanic poetry. Vyasa in fact
stands at the opposite pole from
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Valmiki. The poet of the Ramayana has a
flexible and universal genius embracing the Titanic and the divine, the human
and the gigantic at once or with an inspired ease of transition. But Vyasa is
unmixed Olympian, he lives in a world of pure verse and diction, enjoying his
own heaven of golden clearness. We have seen what are the main negative
qualities of the style; pureness, strength, grandeur of intellect and
personality are its positive virtues. It is the expression of a pregnant and
forceful mind, in which the idea is sufficient to itself, conscious of its own
intrinsic greatness; when this mind runs in the groove of narrative or emotion,
the style wears an air of high and pellucid ease in the midst of which its
strenuous compactness and brevity moves and lives as a saving and strengthening
spirit; but when it begins to think rapidly and profoundly, as often happens in
the great speeches, it is apt to leave the hearer behind; sufficient to itself,
thinking quickly, briefly and greatly, it does not care to pause on its own
ideas or explain them at length, but speaks as it thinks, in a condensed often
elliptical style, preferring to indicate rather than expatiate, often passing
over the steps by which it should arrive at the idea and hastening to the idea
itself; often it is subtle and multiplies many shades and ramifications of
thought in a short compass. From this arises that frequent knottiness and
excessive compression of logical sequence, that appearance of elliptical and
sometimes obscure expression, which so struck the ancient critics in Vyasa and
which they expressed in the legend that when dictating the Mahabharata to
Ganesha — for it was Ganesha's stipulation that not for one moment should he be
left without matter to write — the poet in order not to be outstripped by his
divine scribe threw in frequently knotty and close-knit passages which forced
the lightning swift hand to pause and labour slowly over the work.¹
To a strenuous mind these passages are, from the exercise they give to the
intellect, an added charm, just as a mountain climber takes an especial delight
in steep ascents which let him feel his ability. Of one thing, however, we may
be confident in reading Vyasa that the expression will always be just to the
thought; he never palters with or labours to dress up the reality within him.
For the rest we must
¹The
Mahabharata, Adiparva, I. 78-83.
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evidently trace this peculiarity to the
compact, steep and sometimes elliptical, but always strenuous diction of the
Upanishads in which the mind of the poet was trained and his personality
tempered. At the same time, like the Upanishads themselves or like the enigmatic
Aeschylus, he can be perfectly clear, precise and full whenever he chooses; and
he more often chooses than not. His expression of thought is usually strong and
abrupt, his expression of fact and of emotion strong and precise. His verse has
similar peculiarities. It is a golden and equable stream that sometimes whirls
itself into eddies or dashes upon rocks, but it always runs in harmony with the
thought. Vyasa has not Valmiki's movement as of the sea, the wide and unbroken
surge with its infinite variety of waves, which enables him not only to find in
the facile anustup metre a sufficient vehicle for his vast and
ambitious work but to maintain it throughout without its palling or losing its
capacity of adjustment to ever-varying moods and turns of narrative. But in his
narrower limits and on the level of his lower flight Vyasa has great subtlety
and fineness. Especially admirable is his use, in speeches, of broken effects
such as would in less skilful hands have become veritable discords; and again
in narrative of the simplest and barest metrical movements, as in the opening Sarga of the Sabhaparva, to create certain calculated effects. But it would be
idle to pretend for him any equality as a master of verse with Valmiki. When he
has to rise from his levels to express powerful emotion, grandiose eloquence or
swift and sweeping narrative, he cannot always effect it in the anustup
metre; he falls back more often than not on the rolling magnificence of the
tristup (and its variations) which best sets and ennobles his
strong-winged austerity.
Be its limits what one will, this is
certain that there was never a style and verse of such bare, direct and
resistless strength as this of Vyasa's or one that went so straight to the heart
of all that is heroic in a man. Listen to the cry of insulted Draupadi to her
husband:
¹The
Mahabharata, Virataparva, 17.
15.
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"Arise, arise, O Bhimasena, wherefore
liest thou like one that is dead ? For nought but dead is he whose wife a sinful
hand has touched and lives."
Or the reproach of Krishna to Arjuna for
his weak pity which opens the second Sarga [Adhyaya] of the Bhagavadgita. Or
again hear Krishna's description of Bhima's rage and solitary brooding over
revenge and his taunting accusations of cowardice:
"At other times, O Bhimasena, thou
praisest war, thou art all for crushing Dhritarashtra's heartless sons who take
delight in death; thou sleepest not at night, O conquering soldier, but wakest
lying face downwards, and ever thou utterest dread speech of storm and wrath,
breathing fire in the torment of thy own rage and thy mind is without rest like
a smoking fire, yea, thou liest all apart breathing heavily like a weakling
borne down (distressed) by his load, so that some who know not, even think thee
mad. For as an elephant tramples on uprooted trees and breaks them to fragments,
so thou stormest along with labouring breath hurting earth with thy feet. Thou
takest no delight in all these people but cursest them in thy heart, O Bhima,
son of Pandu, nor in aught else hast thou any pleasure night or day;
but thou sittest in secret like one
weeping and sometimes of a sudden laughest aloud, yea, thou sittest for long
with thy head between thy knees and thy eyes closed; and then again thou starest
before thee frowning and clenching thy teeth, thy every action is one of wrath.
'Surely as the father Sun is seen in the East when luminously he ascendeth and
surely as wide with rays he wheeleth down to his release in the West, so sure is
this oath I utter and never shall be broken. With this club I will meet and slay
this haughty Duryodhana,' thus touching thy club thou swearest among thy
brothers. And today thou thinkest of peace, O Warrior! Ah yes, I know the hearts
of those that clamour for war alter very strangely when war showeth its face,
since fear findeth out even thee, O Bhima! Ah yes, son of Pritha, thou seest
omens adverse both when thou sleepest and when thou wakest, therefore thou
desirest peace. Ah yes, thou feelest no more the man in thyself, but an eunuch
and thy heart sinketh with alarm,
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therefore art thou thus overcome. Thy
heart quakes, thy mind fainteth, thou art seized with a trembling in thy thighs,
therefore
thou desirest peace. Verily, O son of Pritha, wavering and inconstant is the
heart of a mortal man, like the pods of the silk-cotton driven by the swiftness
of every wind. This shameful thought of thine, monstrous as a human voice in a
dumb beast, makes the heart of Pandu's son to sink like (ship-wrecked) men that
have no raft. Look on thine own deeds, O seed of Bharata, remember thy lofty
birth! Arise, put off thy weakness; be firm, O heart of a hero; unworthy of thee
is this languor; what he cannot win by the mightiness of him, that a Kshatriya
will not touch."¹
This passage I have quoted at some length
because it is eminently characteristic of Vyasa's poetical method. Another poet
would have felt himself justified by the nature of the speech in using some wild
and whirling words seeking vividness by exaggeration, at the very least in
raising his voice a little. Contrast with this the perfect temperance of this
passage, the confident and unemotional reliance on the weight of what is said,
not on the manner of saying it. The vividness of the portraiture arises from the
quiet accuracy of vision and the care in the choice of simple but effective
words, not from any seeking after the salient and graphic such as gives Kalidasa
his wonderful power of description; and the bitterness of the taunts arises from
the quiet and searching irony with which the shaft is tipped and not from any
force used in driving them home. Yet every line goes straight as an arrow to its
mark, every word is the utterance of a strong man speaking to a strong man and
gives iron to the mind. Strength is one constant term of the Vyasic style;
temperance, justness of taste is the other.
Strength and a fine austerity are then the
two tests which give us safe guidance through the morass of the Mahabharata;
where these two exist together, we
may reasonably presume some touch of Vyasa; where they do not exist or do not
conjoin, we feel at once the redactor or the interpolator. I have spoken of
another poet whose more turbid and vehement style breaks con-
¹The
Mahabharata, Udyogaparva, 75.4 - 23.
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tinually into the pure gold of Vyasa's work. The
whole temperament of this redacting poet, for he is something more than an
interpolator, has its roots in Valmiki; but like most poets of a secondary and
fallible genius he exaggerates, while adopting the more audacious and therefore
the more perilous tendencies of his master. The love of the wonderful touched
with the grotesque, the taste for the amorphous, a marked element in Valmiki's
complex temperament, is with his follower something like a malady. He grows
impatient with the apparent tameness of Vyasa's inexorable self-restraint, and
restlessly throws in here couplets, there whole paragraphs of a more flamboyant
vigour. Occasionally this is done with real ability and success, but as a rule
they are true purple patches, daubs of paint on the stainless dignity of marble.
For his rage for the wonderful is not always accompanied by the prodigious sweep
of imagination which in Valmiki successfully grasps and compels the most
reluctant materials. The result is that puerilities and gross breaches of taste
fall easily and hardily from his pen. Not one of these could we possibly imagine
as consistent with the severe, self-possessed intellect of Vyasa. Fineness,
justness, discrimination and propriety of taste are the very soul of the man.
Nowhere is his restrained and quiet art
more visible than when he handles the miraculous. But since the Mahabharata is
honeycombed with the work of inept wondermongers, we are driven for an
undisturbed appreciation of it to works which are not parts of the
original Mahabharata and are yet by the same hand, the Nala and the Savitri.
These poems have all the peculiar qualities which we have decided to be very
Vyasa: the style, the diction, the personality are identical and refer us back
to him as clearly as the sunlight refers us back to the sun, and yet they have
something which the Mahabharata has not. Here we have the very morning of
Vyasa's genius, when he was young and ardent, perhaps still under the immediate
influence of Valmiki (one of the most pathetic touches in the Nala is borrowed
straight out of the Ramayana), at any rate able, without ceasing to be finely
restrained, to give some rein to his fancy. The Nala therefore has the delicate
and unusual romantic grace of a young and severe classic who has permitted
himself to go a-maying in the
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fields of romance. There is a remote charm
of restraint in the midst of abandon, of vigilance in the play of fancy which is
passing sweet and strange. The Savitri is a maturer and nobler work, perfect and
restrained in detail, but it has still some glow of the same youth and grace
over it. This then is the rare charm of these two poems that we find there the
soul of the pale and marble Rishi, the philosopher, the great statesman, the
strong and stem poet of war and empire, when it was yet in its radiant morning,
far from the turmoil of courts and cities and the roar of the battlefield and
had not yet scaled the mountain-tops of thought. Young, a Brahmacharin and a
student, Vyasa dwelt with the green silences of earth, felt the fascination and
loneliness of the forests of which his earlier poetry is full, and walked by
many a clear and lucid river white with the thronging water-fowl, perhaps
Payoshni, that ocean-seeking stream, or heard the thunder of multitudinous
crickets in some lone tremendous forest, or with Valmiki's mighty stanzas in his
mind saw giant-haunted glooms, dells where faeries gathered, brakes where some
Python from the underworld came out to bask or listened to the voices of
Kinnaris on the mountain-tops. In such surroundings wonders might seem natural
and deities as in Arcadia might peep from under every tree. Nala's messengers to
Damayanti are a troop of golden-winged swans that speak with a human voice;
he is intercepted on his way by
gods who make him their envoy to a mortal maiden; he receives from them gifts
more than human, fire and water come to him at his bidding and flowers bloom in
his hands; in his downfall the dice become birds who fly away with his remaining
garment; when he wishes to cut in half the robe of Damayanti, a sword comes
ready to his hand in the desolate cabin; he meets the Serpent-King in the ring
of fire and is turned by him into the deformed charioteer, Bahuka; the tiger in
the forest turns away from Damayanti without injuring her and the lustful hunter
falls consumed by the power or offended chastity. The destruction of the caravan
by wild elephants, the mighty driving of Nala, the counting of the leaves or the
cleaving of the Vibhitaka tree; every incident almost is full of that sense of
beauty and wonder which were awakened in Vyasa by his early surroundings. We ask
whether this beautiful fairy-tale is the
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work of that stern and high poet with whom
the actualities of life were everything and the flights of fancy counted for so
little. Yet if we look carefully, we shall see in the Nala abundant proof of the
severe touch of Vyasa, just as in his share of the Mahabharata fleeting touches
of wonder and strangeness, gone as soon as glimpsed, evidence a love of the
supernatural, severely bitted and reined in. Especially do we see the poet of
the Mahabharata in the artistic vigilance which limits each supernatural
incident to a few light strokes, to the exact place and no other where it is
wanted and the exact amount and no more than is necesssary. (It is this sparing
economy of touch almost unequalled in its beauty of just rejection, which makes
the poem an epic instead of a fairy-tale in verse.) There is, for instance, the
incident of the swans; we all know to what prolixities of pathos and bathos
vernacular poets like the Gujarati Premanand have enlarged this feature of the
story. But Vyasa introduced it to give a certain touch of beauty and strangeness
and that touch once imparted, the swans disappear from the scene; for his fine
taste felt that to prolong the incident by one touch more would have been to
lower the form and run the risk of raising a smile. Similarly in the Savitri
what a tremendous figure a romantic poet would have made of Death, what a
passionate struggle between the human being and the master of tears and
partings! But Vyasa would have none of this; he had one object, to paint the
power of a woman's silent love and he rejected everything which went beyond this
or which would have been merely decorative. We cannot regret his choice. There
have been plenty of poets who could have given us imaginative and passionate
pictures of Love struggling with Death, but there has been only one who could
give us a Savitri.
In another respect also the Nala helps us
materially to appreciate Vyasa's genius. His dealings with Nature are a strong
test of a poet's quality; but in the Mahabharata proper, of all epics the most
pitilessly denuded of unnecessary ornament, natural description is rare. We must
therefore again turn for aid to the poems which preceded his hard and lofty
maturity. Vyasa's natural description as we find it there corresponds to the
nervous, masculine and hard-strung make of his intellect. His treatment
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– 155
is always puissant and direct without any
single pervasive atmosphere except in sunlit landscapes, but always effectual,
realizing the scene strongly or boldly by a few simple but sufficient words.
There are some poets who are the children of Nature, whose imagination is made
of her dews, whose blood thrills to her with the perfect impulse of spiritual
kinship; Wordsworth is of these and Valmiki. Their voices in speaking of her
unconsciously become rich and liquid and their words are touched with a subtle
significance of thought or emotion. There are others who hold her with a strong
sensuous grasp by virtue of a ripe, sometimes an over-ripe delight in beauty;
such are Shakespeare, Keats, Kalidasa. Others again approach her with a fine or
clear intellectual sense of charm as do some of the old classical poets. Hardly
in the rank of poets are those who like Dryden or Pope use her, if at all, only
to provide them with a smoother well-turned literary expression. Vyasa belongs
to none of these, and yet often touches the first three at particular points
without definitely coinciding with any. He takes the kingdom of Nature by
violence. Approaching her from outside his masculine genius forces its way to
her secret, insists and will take no denial. Accordingly he is impressed at
first contact by the harmony in the midst of variety of her external features,
absorbs these into strong retentive imagination, meditates on them and so reads
his way to the closer impression, the inner sense behind that which is external,
the personal temperament of a landscape. In his record of what he has seen, this
impression more often than not comes first as that which abides and prevails;
sometimes it is all he cares to record; but his tendency towards perfect
faithfulness to the vision within leads him, when the scene is still fresh to
his eye, to record the data through which the impression was reached. We have
all experienced the way in which our observation of a scene, conscious or
unconscious, forms itself out of various separate and often uncoordinated
impressions which, if we write a description at the time or soon after and are
faithful to ourselves, find their way into the picture, even at the expense of
symmetry; but if we allow a long time to elapse before we recall the scene,
there returns to us only a single self-consistent impression which without
accurately rendering it, retains its essence and its atmosphere.
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– 156
Something of this sort occurs in our poet;
for Vyasa is always faithful to himself. When he records the data of his
impression,
he does it with force and clearness, frequently with a luminous atmosphere
around the object, especially with a delight in the naked beauty of the single
clear word which at once communicates itself to the hearer. First come the
strong and magical epithets or the brief and puissant touches by which the soul
of the landscape is made visible and palpable, then the enumeration sometimes
only stately, at others bathed in a clear loveliness. The fine opening of the
twelfth Sarga of the Nala is a signal example of this method. At the threshold
we have the great and sombre line,
A void tremendous forest thundering
With crickets,
striking the keynote of gloom and
loneliness, then the cold stately enumeration of the forest's animal and
vegetable peoples, then again the strong and revealing epithet in his "echoing
woodlands sound-pervaded"; then follows "river and lake and pool and many
beasts and many birds" and once more the touch of wonder and weirdness:
She many alarming shapes
Of fiend and snake and giant... beheld,
making magical the bare following lines
and especially the nearest,
And pools and tarns and summits
everywhere,
¹The
Mahabharata, Vanaparva, 64.1. ²ibid.,
Vanaparva, 64.7,9. ³The
Mahabharata, 64.8.
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– 157
with its poetical delight in the bare
beauty of words. It is instructive to compare with this passage the wonderful
silhouette of night in Valmiki's Book of the Child:
"Motionless are all trees and shrouded the
beasts and birds and the quarters filled, O joy of Raghu, with the glooms of
night; slowly the sky parts with evening and grows full of eyes; dense with
stars and constellations it glitters with points of light; and now yonder with
cold beams rises up the moon and thrusts away the shadows from the world
gladdening the hearts of living things on earth with its luminousness. All
creatures of the night are walking to and fro and spirit-bands and troops of
giants and the carrion-feeding jackals begin to roam."
Here every detail is carefully selected to
produce a certain effect, the charm and weirdness of falling night in the
forest; not a word is wasted; every epithet, every verb, every image is sought
out and chosen so as to aid this effect, while the vowelisation is subtly
managed and assonance and the composition of sounds skilfully yet unobtrusively
woven so as to create a delicate, wary and listening movement, as of one walking
in the forests by moonlight and afraid that the leaves may speak under his
footing or his breath grow loud enough to be heard by himself or by beings whose
presence he does not see but fears. Of such delicately imaginative art as this
Vyasa was not capable, he could not sufficiently turn his strength into
sweetness. Neither had he that rare, salient and effective architecture of style
which makes Kalidasa's
¹The
Ramayana, Bala Kanda, 34. 15-18.
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Contd....
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