पृष्ठम्:Sanskrit Literature.djvu/११४

82 KĀLIDĀSA AND THE GUPTAS These stanzas can hardly be deemed other than an attempt to improve on v. 65 of the Meghadūta: vidyutvantam lalitavanitāḥ sendracāpam sacitrāḥ samgitaya prahatamurajāḥ snigdhagambhiraghoṣam antastoyam manimayabhuvas tuñgam abhraṁlihāgrāḥ prāsādās tvām tulayitum alam yatra tais tair viçeşaih. 'There the palaces can vie with thee at every point: their fair maidens rival thy lightning, their paintings thy rainbow, their drums beaten in concert thy lovely deep thundering, their jewelled floors thy water, their peaks that touch the sky thy height.' To suppose that Kālidāsa knew these clumsy verses of an obscure poetaster and turned them into the simple elegance of his verse is absurd; to hold that a local poet appropriated and tried to improve on a verse of the great poet of Ujjayini is natural and simple, and, if confirmation were needed, it is supplied by the fact that v. 31 of the inscription deals simi- larly with vv. 2 and 3 of Canto v of the Rtusamhara. Kalidāsa then lived before A. D. 472, and probably at a considerable dis- tance, so that to place him about A.D. 400 seems completely justified.² 4. The Rtusamhāra 3 The opinion of India which makes the Rtusamhāra, cycle of the seasons, a youthful work of Kālidāsa, has recently ³ been assailed on many grounds. Thus it has been complained that the poem lacks Kālidāsa's ethical quality, that it is too simple and uniform, too easy to understand. The obvious reply is that there is all the difference between the youth and the maturity of a poet, that there is as much discrepancy between the youthful work of Virgil, Ovid, Tennyson, or Goethe, and the poems of their manhood as between Kālidāsa's primitiae and the rest 1 Kielhorn, GN. 1890, pp. 251 ff. 2 On the later emperors, see R. C. Majumdar, JPASB. 1921, pp. 249 ff. 3 Walter, Indica, iii, 6 ff.; Nobel, ZDMG. lxvi. 275 ff.; JRAS. 1913, pp. 401 ff.; Hari Chand, Kalidasa, pp. 240 ff. Contra Keith, JRAS. 1912, pp. 1066 ff.; 1913, pp. 410 ff.; Hillebrandt, Kalıdäsa, pp. 66 ff. Kielhorn, Buhler, Hultzsch, Mac- donell, von Schroeder, among others, accept Kalidasa's authorship; often ed., e.g. Gajendragadkar, 1916.