Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Two. On Literature
The Poetry of Kalidasa
Appendix
Vikramorvasie: The Characters [4]
The grace of childhood seems to have had a charm for the mind of Kalidasa; for whenever he introduces a child it is with a double measure of his magical felicity and naturalness.
There is a child in each of his plays; the princess Vasuluxmie in Malavica does not appear on the stage in the course of the play, yet she twice intervenes with considerable effect in its action, and each time what a delightful fragrance of home, of the beauty and innocence and loveableness of childhood, comes breathing about the scene.
It is part of the marvellous genius of Kalidasa that packing beauty into each word he writes with so little he can suggest so much.
In Ayus we find not quite the same beauty, but the same tender and skilful portraiture and the same loving knowledge of child nature.
It seems to me that in two respects at least Kalidasa far surpasses Shakespeare, in knowledge of a mother’s heart, in knowledge of the child.
Shakespeare’s mothers, and how few of them there are! are either null or intolerable.
In only one of his plays does Shakespeare really attempt to give us a mother’s heart and a child.
But Arthur is not a success, he is too voulu, too much dressed up for pathos, too eloquent and full of unchildlike sentimentality and posing.
Children are fond of posing and children are sentimental, but not in that way.
As for the Princes in King Henry VI and Richard III no real lover of children could endure them; one feels almost thankful to the crookback for mercifully putting them out of the way.
Nor is Constance a sympathetic figure; her shrieking, her rant, her selfishness, her bold and bitter volubility, could Shakespeare give us no sweeter and truer picture of a mother?