Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/288

Rh Indian theory ever recognized that the drama by the tenth century A.D. was in a state of decadence.

The peculiar and limited view of the drama was intimately connected with its Brahmanical character. The drama of Greece was popular; it appealed to all free Athenian citizens, an infinitely wider class than that for which the dramas of India in Sanskrit and Prākrit were composed, and it was written in a language easily comprehended by all those who viewed the spectacle. From the period of the earliest dramas known to us the full comprehension of the words can have been confined to a limited section of the audience, which, however, had sufficient pleasure in the spectacle, in the song, the pantomimic dances, and the music, and sufficient general comprehension of the drama to follow it adequately enough. Such an audience, however, acted as a stimulus to refinement and elaboration; the dramatist could neglect the prime necessity of being understood which weighed on the Greek dramatist, and indulge in the production of something recondite, calculated to manifest his skill in metrical form and management of words. The fact that Sanskrit was not a normal living language presented him with the temptation, to which none of the later dramatists rises superior, of the free use of the vast store of alleged synonyms presented by the lexica, freed from any inconvenient necessity, such as exists in every living language, of using words only in that precise nuance which every synonym possesses in a living dialect.

The same tendency to artificiality was undoubtedly stimulated by the fact that plays for their reputation must have depended largely on being read, not witnessed, however important it may have been for the poet to secure the honour of public performance. The popularity and number of the Kāvyas which have come down to us attests the existence of an effective public which, if it did not read the works, at least enjoyed having them read aloud, and the dramatist was thus encouraged, while adhering to the dramatic form, to vie in this genre of literature with the effects produced in the Kāvya. The Kāvya, however,