वासवदत्ता (महाकवि सुबन्धु - श्लेष-प्रधान शास्त्रीय गद्यकाव्य सान्वय सटीक)

INTRODUCTION 27
naturally led to consider what literary value we may assign to it.
Here the ‘personal equation’ must inevitably play a part, and
here the fundamental difference between Oriental and Occidental
concepts must be duly recognised. In the West the subject-
matter comes first in nearly every form of literary composition ;
and the more tense and nervous the people, the more simple and
direct is the style. In the East, on the contrary, the form is
often more important than the matter, especially in periods of
hyper-civilisation, such as was that during which Subandhu
wrote. We must, therefore, consider the Vāsavadattā from the
luxuriant atmosphere of the land of its author, not from the
‘practical’ point of view of the West. To me, at least, there is
true melody in the long, rolling compounds, a sesquipedalian
majesty which can never be equalled save in Sanskrit ; and the
alliterations have a lulling music all their own to ears weary of
the blatant discords of vaunted modern ‘progress.’ There is, on
the other hand, a compact brevity in the paronomasias, which
are, in most cases, veritable gems of terseness and twofold
appropriateness, even though some are manifestly forced and are
actually detrimental to the sense of the passages in which they
occur. Yet in judging Subandhu for his faults, it must be re-
membered that he created, at least so far as we now know, a new
literary genre in India ; and if this fact be borne in mind, his
blemishes appear to be marvellously few. In estimating his
literary merits special stress should be laid on his descriptions.
These are, it must be confessed, cloying from their abundance.
They form the preponderating part of the entire romance, and
the slender framework of the story is wellnigh lost beneath
them. Yet despite this tropical luxuriance, the descriptions are
not without beauty and appropriateness, whether they set forth
the charms of mountain, forest, and stream, or portray the
rāja’s valour and the loveliness of the heroine herself. The
entire romance may, in a sense, be likened to India’s own
architecture, where the whole structure is so overlaid with minute
detail that the eye forgets the outlines of the building in amaze-
ment at the delicate traceries which cover it.