काव्यप्रकाश (आचार्य मम्मट - सम्पूर्ण १० उल्लास सटीक)

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poem, so "recited poetry" and the drama constitute an advance upon
the metrical poem, to the musical effects of metre and rhyme which
enlist the services of the ear in furthering the pleasures of poetry,
the drama adds the scenic effects, which engage the eye also. And
hence the dictum काव्येषु नाटकं श्रेष्ठम् (of poems the drama is the
highest). Thus it appears that Sāhitya treats of the principles of poetry
and it treats of Words and Style only in so far as they express more
fitly or otherwise the appropriate emotion. The treatment of the
metre form it leaves to Prosody for metre and rhyme, and to Nāṭya
Shāstra for dramaturgy. Sanskrit Prosody has little interest for the
general English reader; but the science of Mimetics obviously has,
and there is no work on the subject yet, for a wonder, in the land of
Shakespeare,—the one or two books like Hammerton's "The Actor's
Art," that are just beginning to come out, being scarcely entitled
to rank as scientific books. If opportunities are favourable, the
present writer hopes to bring out some day a translation of Bharata's
Nāṭya Shāstra, the oldest work available on the subject.
The history of the science of poetry in India, like that of all others,
is lost in antiquity. Tradition speaks of original aphorisms by
Çauddhodani, by Bharata and by Vāmana. These aphorisms too
are lost for the present, except the last which has been recently printed
by the enterprising publishers of the Kāvyamālā. Vāmana's Sūtras
are not old, that is to say, not much older than 800 A. C. Fragments
of the other two are met with in the form of quotations by later writers.
It is possible and to be hoped that they may be recovered some day;
for not very old authors refer to them as having formed the subject
of their studies, before they began their own works; and it is very
much to be desired that they may be so recovered, for the Sūtra—
literature shows a finality of statement, so far as general principles
are concerned, which could result only from a perfect grasp of the
completed "circle of knowledge," and it is not likely that any
future races will succeed in improving upon these statements of final
principles, however much they may and will make fuller the contents
of the general ideas in consequence of more varied experience in larger
circles of life.
Shauddhodani appears to have been one of the first to definitely
formulate the view that emotion is the essence of poetry—