PREFACE
TAKEN in conjunction with my Sanskrit Drama, published in 1924, this work covers the field of Classical Sanskrit Literature, as opposed to the Vedic Literature, the epics, and the Puranas. To bring the subject-matter within the limits of a single volume has rendered it necessary to treat the scientific literature briefly, and to avoid discussions of its subject-matter which appertain rather to the historian of grammar, philosophy, law, medicine, astronomy, or mathematics, than to the literary his- torian. This mode of treatment has rendered it possible, for the first time in any treatise in English on Sanskrit Literature, to pay due attention to the literary qualities of the Kavya. Though it was to Englishmen, such as Sir William Jones and H. T. Cole- brooke, that our earliest knowledge of Sanskrit poetry was due, no English poet shared Goethe's marvellous appreciation of the merits of works known to him only through the distorting medium of translations, and attention in England has usually been limited to the Vedic literature, as a source for comparative philology, the history of religion, or Indo-European antiquities ; to the mysticism and monism of Sanskrit philosophy ; and to the fables and fairy-tales in their relations to western parallels.
The neglect of Sanskrit Kavya is doubtless natural. The great poets of India wrote for audiences of experts ; they were masters of the learning of their day, long trained in the use of language, and they aim to please by subtlety, not simplicity of effect. They had at their disposal a singularly beautiful speech, and they commanded elaborate and most effective metres. Under these circumstances it was inevitable that their works should be diffi- cult, but of those who on that score pass them by it may fairly be said ardua dum metuunt amiitunt vera viai. It is in the great writers of Kavya alone, headed by Kalidasa, that we find depth of feeling for life and nature matched with perfection of expres- sion and rhythm. The Kavya literature includes some of the great poetry of the world, but it can never e xpect to . altainjyide- popula rity^jn— th e We st^for^it^is esse ntially untran slatable.;
