A HISTORY OF SANSKRIT LITERATURE
refers to a ‘distinguished scholar’ known to him who ‘has entered so fully into the spirit of that poetry that he is unable to derive pleasure from any other’. Indian sculpture and painting also were once similarly ignored or even belittled but now, thanks to the efforts of some Indian as well as European scholars, their worth has come to be properly appraised. What has been done in their case remains yet to do for the sister art of poetry. The present work, while not neglecting the historical or the antiquarian side of the study, pays full attention to the literary and artistic qualities of the works discussed. The author brings to this task a sympathet- ic mind which can appreciate not only the sentiments contained in them but also their more formal and technical excellences such as the blending of sound and sense in style, the elegance of metre and the significance of poetical conventions. This is not to imply that he is blind to the deficiencies of Sanskrit literature; on the contrary he often directs attention to them as for example to the highly tiresome manner of the descriptions in the Prose Romances.
The earlier chapters of this Part are concerned with works of Poetry. The first author to be taken up is Asvaghosa, the renown- ed Buddhist thinker, who also wrote poetry which in point of artistic value stands next only to that of Kalidasa. It may seem strange that a history of Sanskrit literature should begin with an account of a Buddhistic poet. That is the result of the neglect and the subsequent loss of the older works in every department of literature owing to their supersession by the best that appeared later. Asvaghosa who preceded Kalidasa by a couple of centuries himself had, as it is now clear, many predecessors ; but their very names have perished and, had it not been for a few quotations from them preserved in ancient works like the Mahabhdsya of Patanjali, we would not have known of them at all. It is true that much
difficulty was experienced then in copying and preserving books; but whatever the reason, it proved the bane of Sanskrit literature
and we have lost many an old work of value in this way. Even
A^vaghosa’s poems had fallen into oblivion and their resuscitation
is due to the impetus given to Sanskrit study in modern times. The next poet to be considered is Kalidasa, who, according to the view taken here, wrote about a.d. 400 at Ujjain to which place the Gupta power had shifted by that time from Pataliputra. Then follow brief estimates of lesser epic poets like Bharavi and Magha. After Epic poetry we come to the Lyric in which so many Indian
