42 ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF KAVYA LITERATURE
been striven after. The Vedic poets, who can compare 1 the goddess Dawn to a fair dancer, to a maiden who unveils her bosom to a lover, cannot have been "incapable of producing love poetry for secular use. Nor is it doubtful that it was the early writers of the love lyric who enriched Sanskrit with a vast abun- dance of elaborate metres ; for the flow of epic narrative such metrical forms were wholly unsuited ; on the other hand, the limited theme of love demanded variety of expression if it were to be worthily developed. The gnomic utterance of which the Aitareya Brahmana has preserved some Vedic specimens natur- ally shared in the cultivation of the lyric, and the elaboration of verse doubtless reacted on prose style, inducing writers to seek to reproduce in that medium something of the elegance after which poets now habitually strove. There is, then, no justification for presuming a breach in literary continuity, and, despite the fact that so much has perished, we have indisputable proofs of the active cultivation of Sanskrit literature during the period from 200 B.C. to A.D. 200, when on one theory it had not yet come into being, and secular literature was composed in Prakrit.
2. The Testimony of the Ramayana
The validity of the Ramayana as evidence of the growth of the Kavya has been disputed on the score that the poem was, even if in large measure early in date, 2 still under constant revision, so that those features in it which foreshadow the later Kavya and justify its own claim to that title as the first of Kavyas may be dismissed as interpolations. The argument, however, is clearly unsatisfactory, and does not establish the result at which it aims. We may readily agree that some part at least of the elegancies of style 3 which mark the poem is a later addition, but there is no ground whatever to admit that these additions fall later than the second century B.C., and they may
1 Hirzel, Gltichnisse und Mttaphtrn im Rgvtda (1908). For the early, which is also the later, ideal of feminine beauty, see Qatapatha Brahmana, i. 2. 5. 16 ; iii. 5. 1. 11 ; the love charmsvof the Atharva attest the beginnings of erotic*poetry (IS. v. ai8ff.).
' Keith, JRAS. 1915, pp. 318 ft.
' Jacobi, Ramayana, pp. 1 19 ff. The Ramayana also shows the development of the (Jloka metre almost to its classic state ; cf. SIFI. VIII. ii. 38 ff. See also Krishnamachariar, Raghuvanfavimarfa (1908).
