Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/284

Rh failure to realize the possibility of a great dramatic creation presented by the character of Rāvaṇa as the rival of Rāma for Sītā's love. Rāvaṇa varies in the hands of the dramatists, but all tend to reduce him to the status of a boastful and rather stupid villain, who is inferior at every point to his rival. Equally effectively the drama banishes from the possibilities the conception of a struggle of conscience in the mind of the hero or the heroine; if this were represented, it would create a similar struggle in the mind of the audience, and destroy the unity and purity of the sentiment, which it is the part of the drama to generate.

The style similarly is explained and justified by the end of suggesting sentiment. The lyric stanzas, at first sight strangely undramatic, find their full explanation when it is remembered how effective each is in exciting the appropriate emotion in the mind of the audience, which, deeply versed in Sanskrit poetry, is keen to appreciate the effect of each stanza. The simplicity or even negligence of the prose of the drama is thus also explained and excused. It is not necessary to excite sentiment; it serves merely as the mode of communicating facts, and of enabling the audience to follow the action, until an opportunity is afforded to excite feeling by the melody of a verse, all the more effective from its sudden emergence from the flatness of its environment. The same consideration explains the importance of those elements of which we can form so faint an impression, the dance, music, song, and the mimetic art. The elaborate code of gestures laid down in the theory, and unquestionably bulking large in practice, was all intended to produce in cultivated spirits the sentiments appropriate to the play.

The ideal character of the heroic drama extends itself even to the Nāṭikā, where a closer approach to real life might be expected. The dramatists, however, make no attempt at realism; they choose their subjects from the legend, and they cast over the trivial amourettes of their heroes the glamour derived from the assurance that the winning in marriage of a maiden will