Sri Aurobindo
The Harmony of Virtue
Early Cultural Writings — 1890-1910
Kalidasa
Kalidasa's Characters
III. Minor Characters [2]
The age of childhood, its charm and sportive grace and candour, seems to have had a peculiar charm for Kalidasa's imagination; there is an exquisite light and freshness of morning and dew about his children; an added felicity of touch, of easy and radiant truth in his dramatic presentation.
[Vasuluxmie1 in the Malavica does not even appear on the stage, yet in that urbane and gracious work there is nothing more charming than her two fateful irruptions into the action of the play.
They bring up a picture of the laughing light-hearted and innocent child, which remains with us as vividly as the most carefully-drawn character in the piece.
The scene of the child playing with the lion's cub in the Shacountala has the same inevitable charm; ninety-nine2 poets out of a hundred would have hopelessly bungled it, but in Kalidasa's hands it becomes so admirably life-like and spontaneous that it seems as natural as if the child were playing with a kitten.]
Kalidasa's marvellous modesty of dramatic effect and power of reproducing ordinary, hardly observable speech, gesture and action, magicalising but not falsifying them, saves him from that embarrassment which most poets feel in dealing dramatically with children.
Even Shakespeare disappoints us.
This great poet with his rich and complex mind usually finds it difficult to attune himself again to the simplicity, irresponsibility and naive charm of childhood.
Arthur, whom the Shakespeare-worshipper would have us regard as a masterpiece, is no real child; he is too voulu, too eloquent, too much dressed up for pathos and too conscious of the fine sentimental pose he strikes. Children do pose and children do sentimentalise, but they are perfectly naive and unconscious about it; they pose with sincerity, they sentimentalise with a sort of passionate simplicity, indeed an earnest business-likeness which is so sincere that it does not even require an audience. The greatest minds have their limitations and Shakespeare's overabounding wit shuts3 him out from two Paradises, the mind of a child and the heart of a mother. Constance, the pathetic mother, is a fitting pendant to Arthur, the pathetic child, as insincere and falsely drawn a portraiture, as obviously dressed up for the part. Indeed throughout the meagre and mostly unsympathetic list of mothers in Shakespeare's otherwise various and splendid gallery there is not even one in whose speech there is the throbbing of a mother's heart; the sacred beauty of maternity is touched upon in a phrase or two; but from Shakespeare we expect something more, some perfect and passionate enshrining of the most engrossing and selfless of human affections. To this4 there is not even an approach. In this one respect the Indian poet, perhaps from the superior depth and keenness of the domestic feelings peculiar to his nation, outstripped5 his greater English compeer.
Later edition of this work: The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo.- Set in 37 volumes.- Volume 1.- Early Cultural Writings (1890 — 1910).- Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2003.- 784 p.
1 The text in square brackets in this edition was placed as a separate paragraph before the other manuscript that begins with "Manavaca on the other hand..."). In this file however position of this text was restored according to the edition of 2003 year.
2 2003 ed.: ninety-one
3 2003 ed.: shut
4 2003 ed.: And to this
5 2003 ed.: nation, has outstripped