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III. MINOR CHARACTERS
Nothing more certainly distinguishes the dramatic artist from the poet who has trespassed into drama than the careful pains he devotes to his minor characters. To the artist nothing is small; he bestows as much of his art within the narrow limit of his small characters as within the wide compass of his greatest. Shakespeare lavishes life upon his minor characters; but in Shakespeare it is the result of an abounding creative energy; he makes living men as God made the world, because he could not help it, because it was in his nature and must out. But Kalidasa’s dramatic gift, always suave and keen, had not this godlike abundance; it is therefore well to note the persistence of this feature of high art in all his dramas. In the Urvasie the noble figure of Queen Aushinarie is the most excellent evidence of his fine artistry; but even slight sketches like the Apsaras are seen upon close attention to be portrayed with a subtle and discriminating design; thought has been bestowed on each word they speak, an observable delicacy of various touch shows itself in each tone and gesture they employ. A number of shining figures crowded into a corner of the canvas, like in meaning, like in situation, like in nature, they seem to offer the very narrowest scope for differentiation; yet every face varies from its sister, the diction of each tongue has its revealing individuality. The timid, warm-hearted Rumbha easily despondent, full of quick outbursts of eagerness and tenderness is other than the statelier Menaca with her royal gift of speech and her high confidence. Sahajanya is of an intenser, more silent, less imaginative, more practical type than either of these. It is she who gives Pururavas the information of the road which the ravisher has taken, and from that point onward amid all the anxious and tender chatter of the sisters she is silent until she has the practical fact of Pururavas’ disappearance to seize upon. This she is again the first to descry and announce. Her utterance is brief and of great point and substance; from the few words she has uttered we unconsciously receive a deep impression of helpfulness, earnestness and strength. We know her voice, are ready and recognize it again in the Fourth Act. Her
Page – 282 attitude there is characteristic; she will not waste time over vain lamentation, since she cannot help. Fate has divided the lovers, Fate will unite them again; so with a cheerful and noble word of consolation she turns to the immediate work in hand. Chitraleqha, more fortunate than the other Apsaras, obtaining through three Acts a large canvas as the favourite and comrade of Urvasie, suffers dramatically from her good fortune, for she must necessarily appear a little indistinct, so near to the superior light of her companion. Indeed, dramatic necessity demands subdued tones in her portraiture lest she should deflect attention from Urvasie; richness of colour and prominence of line therefore are not permissible. Yet in spite of these hampering conditions the poet has made her a sufficiently definite personality. Indeed, her indulgent affection, her playful kindliness, her little outbreaks of loving impatience or sage advice, — the neglect of which she takes in excellent part, — her continual half-smiling surrender to Urvasie’s petulance and wilfulness and her whole half matron-like air of elder-sisterly protection, give her a very sensible charm and attractiveness; there is a true nymph-like and divine grace, tact and felicity in all that she says and does. Outside the group of Apsaras the Hermitess Satyavatie is a slighter but equally attractive figure, venerable, kind, a little impersonal owing to the self-restraint which is her vocation, but with glimpses through it of a fine motherliness and friendliness. The perpetual grace of humanness, which is so eminently Kalidasian, forming the atmosphere of all his plays, seems to deepen with a peculiar beauty around his ascetics, Kanwa, Satyavatie, the learned and unfortunate lady of the Malavica. The "little rogue of a tiring woman" Nipounica, sly and smooth-tongued, though with no real harm in her beyond a delight in her own slyness and a fine sense of exhilaration in the midst of a family row, pleasantly brings up the slighter of these feminine personalities. The masculine sketches are drawn in even more unobtrusive outlines and, after Kalidasa’s manner, less individualized than his women. The Charioteer and the Huntsmen are indeed hardly distinct figures; they have but a few lines to utter between them and are only remarkable for the shadow of the purple which continual association with Pururavas has cast over their manner of
Page – 283 speech. Manavaca and Ayus need a larger mention, yet they are less interesting in themselves than for their place, one in the history of Kalidasa’s artistic development, the other among the finest evidences of his delicacy in portraiture and the scrupulous economy, almost miserliness, with which he extracts its utmost artistic utility, possibility, value from each detail of his drama. The Chamberlain again, fine as he is in his staid melancholy, his aged fidelity, his worn-out and decrepit venerableness and that continual suggestion of the sorrowfulness of grey hairs, is still mainly the fine Kalidasian version of a conventional dramatic figure. The one touch that gives him a personal humanity is the sad resignation of his, "It is your will, Sire", when Pururavas, about to depart to asceticism in the forests, commands the investiture of his son. For it is the last and crowning misfortune that the weary old man must bear; the master over whose youth and greatness he has watched, for whose sake he serves in his old age, with the events of whose reign all the memories of his life are bound up, is about to depart and a youthful stranger will sit in his place. With that change all meaning must go out of the old man’s existence; but with a pathetic fidelity of resignation he goes out to do his last bidding uttering his daily formula, — now changed in its newly acquired pathos from the old pompous formality, "It is your will, Sire."
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The age of childhood, its charm and sportive grace and candour, seems to have had a peculiar charm for Kalidasa’s imagination; there is an exquisite light and freshness of morning and dew about his children; an added felicity of touch, of easy and radiant truth in his dramatic presentation. Kalidasa’s marvellous modesty of dramatic effect and power of reproducing ordinary, hardly observable speech, gesture and action, magicalising but not falsifying them, saves him from that embarrassment which most poets feel in dealing dramatically with children. Even Shakespeare disappoints us. This great poet with his rich and complex mind usually finds it difficult to attune himself again to the simplicity, irresponsibility and naïve charm of childhood.
Page – 284 Arthur, whom the Shakespeare-worshipper would have us regard as a masterpiece, is no real child; he is too voulu, too eloquent, too much dressed up for pathos and too conscious of the fine sentimental pose he strikes. Children do pose and children do sentimentalise, but they are perfectly naïve and unconscious about it; they pose with sincerity, they sentimentalise with a sort of passionate simplicity, indeed an earnest business-likeness which is so sincere that it does not even require an audience. The greatest minds have their limitations and Shakespeare’s overabounding wit shuts him out from two Paradises, the mind of a child and the heart of a mother. Constance, the pathetic mother, is a fitting pendant to Arthur, the pathetic child, as insincere and falsely drawn a portraiture, as obviously dressed up for the part. Indeed throughout the meagre and mostly unsympathetic list of mothers in Shakespeare’s otherwise various and splendid gallery there is not even one in whose speech there is the throbbing of a mother’s heart; the sacred beauty of maternity is touched upon in a phrase or two; but from Shakespeare we expect something more, some perfect and passionate enshrining of the most engrossing and selfless of human affections. To this there is not even an approach. In this one respect the Indian poet, perhaps from the superior depth and keenness of the domestic feelings peculiar to his nation, outstripped his greater English compeer. Kalidasa, like Shakespeare, seems to have realised the instinct of paternal tenderness far more strongly than the maternal; his works both dramatic and epic give us many powerful and emotional expressions of the love of father and child to which there are few corresponding outbursts of maternal feeling. Valmiki’s Cowshalya has no parallel in Kalidasa. Yet he expresses the true sentiment of motherhood with sweetness and truth if not with passion. Ayus and Urvasie in this play were certainly not intended for the dramatic picture of mother and child. This mother has abandoned her child to the care of strangers; this child is new to the faces of his parents. Such a situation might easily have been made harsh and unsympathetic, but for the fine dramatic tact of the poet which has purified everything that might repel and
Page – 285 smoothed away all the angles of the incident. But here the circumstances excuse it, not justify Urvasie. Acting under hard conditions, she has chosen the lesser of two evils; for by keeping Ayus she would have lost both her child and Pururavas; by delivering him into wise and tender hands, she has insured his welfare and for her part only anticipated the long parting which the rule of education in ancient India demanded from parents as their sacrifice to the social ideal; but it is not from maternal insensibility that she bears quietly the starvation of the mother within her. Knowing that the child was in good hands she solaces herself with the love of her husband. When he returns to her, there is a wonderful subdued intensity, characteristic of her simple and fine nature, in the force with which that suppressed passion awakes to life; she approaches her son, wordless, but her "veiled bosom heaving towards him and wet with sacred milk"; in her joy over him she forgets even the impending separation from the husband to avert which she has sacrificed the embrace of his infancy. It is this circumstance, not any words, that testifies to the depth of her maternal feeling; her character forbids her to express it in splendours of poetic emotion such as well spontaneously from the heart of Pururavas. A look, a few ordinary words are all; if it were not for these and the observation of others, we should have to live with her daily before we could realise the depth 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 child on one side of his nature and a young man on the other and of all psychological states such periods of transitional unstable equilibrium are the most difficult to render dramatically without making the character either a confused blur or an ill-joined piece of carpenter’s work. Here Kalidasa excels. He has the ready tact of speech-gradations, the power of simple and telling slightness that can alone meet the difficulty. By an unlaboured and inevitable device the necessary materials are provided. The boy comes straight from the wild green and ascetic forest into the splendours of an Oriental court and the presence of a father and mother whom he has never seen; a more trying situation could not be easily imagined; he inevitably becomes self-conscious,
Page – 286 embarrassed, burdened with the necessity of maintaining himself against the oppression of his surroundings. He attempts therefore to disguise his youthful nervousness behind the usual shield of an overdose of formal dignity, a half unconscious pompousness and an air of playing the man. We are even conscious of a slight touch of precocity, etc. Confronted with all these new faces making claims upon him to which his past consciousness is an alien, the whole adult side of his nature turns uppermost. But fortunately for our comprehension of his true state of mind, something of the green forest which is his home has come with him in the person of his fostermother Satyavatie. With her he feels as a child may feel with his mother. When he turns to her or speaks to her, he is again and instinctively in manner, utterance and action the child who ran by her side clutching the skirts of her dress in the free woodland. He speaks like a child, thinks like a child, acts docilely at her bidding like a child. Nothing could be more finely artistic in execution or more charmingly faithful to nature in its conception. Vasuluxmie in the Malavica does not even appear on the stage, yet in that urbane and gracious work there is nothing more charming than her two fateful irruptions into the action of the play. They bring up a picture of the laughing light-hearted and innocent child, which remains with us as vividly as the most carefully-drawn character in the piece. The scene of the child playing with the lion’s cub in the Shacountala has the same inevitable charm; ninety-nine poets out of a hundred would have hopelessly bungled it, but in Kalidasa’s hands it becomes so admirably life-like and spontaneous that it seems as natural as if the child were playing with a kitten. Manavaca on the other hand is an element of weakness rather than of strength. I have already spoken of the progressive attenuation of the traditional buffoon part which keeps pace with Kalidasa’s dramatic development. Gautama in the Malavica is a complete and living personality who has much to say to the action of the plot; witty, mischievous, mendacious and irresponsible, he adds to the interest of the play even independently of this functional importance. But in the Urvasie to have made the main action of the plot turn in any way on the buffoon
Page – 287 would have been incongruous with the high romantic beauty of the drama and therefore a serious dramatic error. The function of Manavaca is accordingly reduced to that of an interlocutor; he is there because Pururavas must have somebody to confide in and talk with, otherwise his only dramatic purpose is to give rise by his carelessness to the episode of Aushinarie’s jealousy and self-subdual. Nevertheless his presence affects the composite tone of the picture. He is other than the buffoons of the Malavica and Shacountala, far more coarse in the grain, far less talented and high-spirited than Gautama, yet not a stupid block. He has, along with the stock characteristics of gluttony, ugliness and cowardice, an occasional coarse humour, infertile and broad, and even a real gift of commonsense and rather cynical practicality, to say nothing of that shadow of the purple flung across the speech of all those who associate habitually with Pururavas; he is at the same time low in mind, unable to understand characters higher than his own. His best virtue is perhaps the absence of all pretensions and readiness to make a gibe on himself. Such a figure necessarily tends to set off by its drab colour and equal dimensions the lyric idealism of Pururavas, the radiant charm of Urvasie and the pale loftiness of the Queen. But it is by his place in the picture and not what he is in himself that he justifies his existence. He does not attract or interest, indeed he at times only just escapes being tiresome. At the same time he lives. Among all these minor figures who group themselves around the two protagonists and are of purely accessory interest, there is one who stands out and compels the eye by her nobler proportions and her independent personality. Queen Aushinarie has no real claim by any essentiality in her action on the large space she occupies in the play; her jealousy does not retard and her renunciation sanctifies rather than assists the course of Pururavas’ love for Urvasie. The whole episode in which she figures fits more loosely into the architecture of the play than can be exampled elsewhere in Kalidasa’s dramatic workmanship. The interest of her personality justifies the insertion of the episode rather than the episode that justifies the not inconsiderable space devoted to her. The motif of her appearance is the same conventional element of wifely rivalry, the jealousy of the rose-in-bloom
Page – 288 against the rose-in-bud that has formed the whole groundwork of the Malavica. There the groundwork, here its interest is brief and episodical. And yet none of the more elaborated figures in the earlier play, not even Dharinie herself, is as fine and deep a conception as the wife of Pururavas. Princess of Kashie, daughter of the Ushinars, acknowledged by her rival to deserve by right of her noble majesty of fairness the style of Goddess and of Empress, we feel that she has a right to resent the preference to her even of an Apsara from heaven and the completeness of Pururavas’ absorption in Urvasie gives a tragic significance to her loss which is not involved in the lighter loves and jealousies of Vidisha. The character is more profoundly and boldly conceived. The passion of her love strikes deeper than the mere heyday of youth and beauty and the senses in Iravatie, as the noble sadness of her self-renunciation moves more powerfully than the kind and gentle wilfulness of Queen Dharinie. And in the manner of her delineation there is more incisiveness, restraint with a nobler economy of touch. The rush of her jealousy comes with less of a storm than Iravatie’s but it has fierier and keener edge and it is felt to be the disguise of a deep and mighty love. The passion of that love leaps out in the bitter irony of her self-accusal:
Not yours the guilt, my lord. I am in fault Who force my hated and unwelcome face Upon you.
And again when in the very height of her legitimate resentment she has the sure consciousness of her after-repentance:
And yet the terror Of the remorse I know that I shall feel If I shun his kindness, frightens me.
Anger for the time sweeps her away, but we are prepared for the repentance and sacrifice in the next act. Even in her anger she has been imperially strong and restrained and much of the poetic force of her renunciation comes from the perfect sweet-
Page – 289 ness, dignity and self-control with which she acts in that scene. The emotion of self-sacrificing love breaks out only once at the half-sneering reproach of the buffoon:
Dull fool! I with the death of my own happiness Would give my husband ease. From this consider How dearly I love him.
Putting gently but sorrowfully away from her the king’s half-sincere protestations of abiding love, she goes out of the drama, a pure, devoted and noble nature, clad in gracious white and sylvanly adorned with flowers, her raven tresses spangled with young green of sacred grass; yet the fragrance of her flowers, of sacrifice and the mild beauty of the moonlight remain behind her. She does not reappear unless it is in the haste of Urvasie to bring her recovered child to his "elder mother". This haste with its implied fullness of gratitude and affection is one of Kalidasa’s careful side-touches to tell us better than words that in spirit and letter she has fulfilled utterly the vow she made on the moonlit terrace under seal of
The divine wife and husband, Rohinie And Mrigalanchan named the spotted moon.
The deepening of moral perception, the increase in power and pathos, the greater largeness of drawing and finer emotional strength and restraint show the advance Kalidasa has made in dramatic characterisation. Grace, sweetness, truth to life and character, perfect and delicate workmanship, all that reveals the presence of the artist were his before; but the Urvasie reveals a riper and larger genius widening the scope, raising mightier vans before yet it takes its last high and surpassing flight.
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