THE TESTIMONY OF THE RAMAYANA 43
be earlier in date. The Ramayana in fact, as we have it, affords an illustration of the process of refinement which style was under- going, but it is essential to realize that even in its original form the poem must have shown a distinct tendency to conscious ornament. The mere theme, the blending together of two distinct legends, the couit intrigues of Ayodhya and the legend of Rama's war on Ravana for the rape of Sita — in ultimate origin a nature myth — is the work of an artist, and the same trait is revealed in the uniformity of the language and the delicate perfection of the metre, when compared with the simpler and less polished Mahabharata. Valmiki and those who improved on him, probably in the period 400-200 B.C., are clearly the legiti- mate ancestors of the court epic.
Anandavardhana ' has' not inaptly contrasted the object of the court epic with that of the legend (itihasa) ; the latter is content to narrate what has happened, the former is essentially depen- dent on form. The Ramayana occupies an intermediate place, and its formal merits are not slight. But in any case it essenti- ally anticipates the means by which the later poets seek to lend distinction and charm to their subject-matter; as they drew deeply, upon it for their themes, so they found in it the models for the ornaments of their style. If the city of Ayodhya appears in human form to the king in Kalidasa's Raghuvanga, Valmiki has set the example in his vision of Lanka in the Sundarakanda. The action in the later Kavya is all but obstructed by the wealth of the poet's descriptive powers ; Valmlki's followers have de- scribed with no less than twenty-nine similes the woes of Sita in her captivity, with sixteen the sad plight of Ayodhya bereft of Rama. 2 Descriptions of the seasons, of mountains and rivers, bulk largely in the Kavya, but Valmiki has set the example in his elaborate accounts of the rainy season and autumn, of the winter, of Mount Citrakuta, and of the river Mandakinl. 3 Meta- phors of beauty abound in the Kavya side by side with those of strained taste and pointless wit ; the Ramayana is guilty of visadanakradhynsite paritrasormimalini kitn mam na trdyase magiidm vipule gokasagare ?
1 Dhvanyaloka,?. 148. ! 11. 19 and 114.
' iv. 28 ; iii, 16 ; ii. 94, 95. There is a brilliant picture of the sound of the sea : parvasudirnavegasya sagarasyeva nifisvanah.
