CHARACTERISTICS AND DEVELOPMENT IN LITERATURE 21
is less cumbrous than ' whose sons have been slain '. But when new members are added there are soon lost the advantages of an inflective language with its due syntactical union of formed words into sentences ; brevity is attained at a fatal cost in clearness. A compound like jaldntagcandracapala, ' fickle as the moon reflected in the water ', is comparatively innocuous, but even a stylist like Kalidasa permits himself such a phrase as viciksobha- stanitavihagagrenikdhclgund, ' whose girdle-string is a row of birds loquacious through the agitation of the waves '. True, in such a case there is no real doubt as to the sense, but often this is not the case, and in point of fact it is one of the delights of the later poets to compose compounds which contain a double entendre, since they can be read in two ways ; of such monstro- sities Subandhu is a master. Moreover, the nominal forms of the verb are given a marked preference ; the expression of past time is regularly carried out by a past participle passive in form of an intransitive verb, such as gatas, he went, or if the verb is active the subject is put into the instrumental and the past participle passive is employed, as in mrgenoktam, the deer said. Or an active past participle is created by adding vant to the passive participle, fyrtavan, he did ; a distant parallel in the grammarians has been seen in the sanction by Panini of the use of such forms as ddgvdhs in lieu of a finite verb. Or the use of any save a verb of colourless kind may be avoided by substitut- ing such an expression as pakvant karoti for pacati, he cooks, or pakvo bhavati, it is cooked, for pacyate. Similarly the peri- phrastic future is preferred to the finite verb. Or the verb may wholly disappear as when for ayam indnsam bhaksayati we have mdhsabhojako 'yam, he is a meat eater. In harmony with this is the tendency to lay great stress on case relations as expressing meaning, a practice which in the later style in philosophy, exegesis, and dialectics results in the occurrence of sentences passim with no verb and practically only the nominative and ablative cases of abstract nouns. Frequent, and indeed in some forms of composition, such as the folk tale, tedious in its reiteration, is the use of gerunds in lieu of subordi- nate clauses.
We are reduced to conjecture as to the cause of this tendency. The desire for brevity is already seen in the style of the Vedic
