पृष्ठम्:Sanskrit Literature.djvu/१३०

KĀLIDĀSA AND THE GUPTAS intolerable affectation is perhaps not the production of Ravideva, author of the Rākṣasakāvya, of equal demerit, before the seven- teenth century, but the work of Vasudeva, protégé of Kulaçek- hara and Rama. 98 Kalidasa's Thought As Sophokles seems to have found his perfect milieu in the Athens of Perikles' happy days, so Kālidāsa appears to us as the embodiment in his poems, as in his dramas, of the Brahmanical ideal of the age of the Guptas, when oder had been restored to a troubled earth, foreigners assimilated or reduced, and prosperity broadcast.¹ Ingenuity has traced in the history of the first five of the rulers in the Raghuvança an exemplar of the exploits of the first five of the Gupta kings; granted that Kālidāsa may have known and profited by the literary activity of Harisena, which doubtless extended far beyond the one inscription which has come down to us, still we may safely doubt any such parallelism. But Kalidasa does represent, if we may judge from his poetry, the complete carrying out of the rule of life laid down for a Brahmin or a warrior or clansman. Youth, in this view, is the time for study under a teacher, then follows the period of manhood with its happy wedlock, then in stages that of the hermit whose mind is set on things eternal. The scheme is in many ways perfectly adapted to Indian life; it starves no side of man's life; four aims of existence are recognized by Kālidāsa himself, who finds them embodied in the sons of Dilipa, them- selves reflexes of Visņu himself. They are duty, governing man's whole life; the pursuit of wealth and of love, the occupa- tions of his manhood; and release, the fruit of his meditations in old age. We may not share the affection of Indian and even of a section of modern taste for the erotic scenes of the last cantos of the Raghuvança, but we must not regard them as the outpour- ings of a sensual mind. The sages of the Upaniṣads themselves deemed marriage obligatory and the Brhadaranyaka gives the Yudhisthiravijaya, Tripuradahana, and Çaurikathodaya, all rimed, to the 9th cent. The date is improbable; ZII. v. 226 f. ¹ Cf M. T. Narasimhiengar, IA. xxxix. 236 ff. with Hillebrandt, Kalidasa, PP. 137 ff. 2 A. Gawroński, The Digvijaya of Raghu (1915).