pure comedy; the farce and the monologue may hover on the borders of that form; they certainly never attain it.
To the force of the tradition is presumably to be ascribed the absence of any effort at tragedy, though its absence undoubtedly coincides with the mental outlook of the Indian people and their philosophy of life. Bhāsa has indeed been claimed as a tragedian, but with complete disregard for the facts; there is in fact in his dramas disregard of the rule which objects to death on the stage, but the slain are always evil men, whose death is just punishment; the Ūrubhan̄ga may to us be tragic, but that is because we are not adorers of Viṣṇu who regard with relish the fate of the enemy of that god, the evil Duryodhana. The tragic sentiment is nowhere recognized, for the term (raudra), which is unhappily often so rendered, is the sentiment which is based on anger, and has nothing truly tragic in it. The idea is, indeed, entirely wanting in the theory as it is in the practice.
To the developed thought of India, as it existed during the vogue of the drama, there was little possibility of a realization of the elements of which Greek tragedy is composed. The conception of human activity striving with circumstance, endeavouring to assert itself in the teeth of forces superhuman in power and uncontrollable, and meeting with utter ruin, but yet maintaining its honour, which affords the spring of tragedy in Greece, is alien to Indian thought. Fate is nothing outside man; he is subject to no alien influences; he is what he has made himself by acts in past lives; if he suffers evil he has deserved it as just retribution, and to sympathize with him, to feel the pathos of his plight, is really unthinkable. Death, therefore, by violence is merely a just punishment of crime, and it is a more refined taste than that of Bhāsa which bids us banish from the stage the spectacle of what is no more than an execution, a scene as ill-suited to the decorum and good taste of the serious drama[1] as to the rude merriment of the farce or monologue.
- ↑ Cf. the later view in Rome, which forbids death on the stage, Horace, Ars Poetica, 183 ff., with Aristotle, Poetics, 1452 b 10 ff., which approves the presentation of death and other acts on the stage.
