bhartṛpriyaḥ priyair bhartur ānṛṇyam asubhir gataḥ.
‘Eager in this misfortune to protect her, terrified by the enemy’s onslaught, he paid with his dear life his debt of affection to the lord whom he loved.’ The king’s reply is manly: bhagavati tanutyajām īdṛçī lokayātrā: na çocyaṁ tatrabhavān saphalīkṛtabhartṛpiṇḍaḥ. ‘O lady, such is the fate of brave men; thou must not mourn for him who showed himself thus worthy of his master’s salt.’ [[166]]
5. The Language and the Metres
In Kālidāsa we find the normal state of the Prākrits in the later drama, Çaurasenī for the prose speeches, and Māhārāṣṭrī for the verses.[52] The police officers and the fisher in the Çakuntalā use Māgadhī, but the king’s brother-in-law, who is in charge of the police and is a faint echo of the Çakāra, speaks, as we have the drama, neither Çākārī nor Māgadhī nor Dākṣiṇātyā but simply Çaurasenī. By this time, of course, we may assume that Prākrit for the drama had been stereotyped by the authority of Vararuci’s Prākrit grammar, and that it differed considerably from the spoken dialect; there would be clear proof if the Apabhraṅça verses of the Vikramorvaçī could safely be ascribed to Kālidāsa. The Māhārāṣṭrī unquestionably owes its vogue to the outburst of lyric in that dialect, which has left its traces in the anthology of Hāla and later texts, and which about the period of Kālidāsa invaded the epic.[53]
Kālidāsa’s Sanskrit is classical; here and there deviations from the norm are found, but in most instances the expressions are capable of defence on some rule or other, while in others we may remember the fact of the epic tradition which is strong in Bhāsa.
The metres of Kālidāsa show in the Mālavikāgnimitra a restricted variety; the Āryā (35) and the Çloka (17) are the only metres often occurring. In the Vikramorvaçī the Āryā (29) and the Çloka (30) are almost in equal favour, while the Vasantatilaka (12) and the Çārdūlavikrīḍita (11) make a distinct advance in importance. In the Çakuntalā the Āryā (38) and Çloka (36) preserve their relative positions, while the Vasantatilaka (30) and Çārdūlavikrīḍita (22) advance in frequency of use, a striking proof of Kālidāsa’s growing power of using elaborate metrical forms. The Upajāti types increase to 16. The other metres used in the drama are none of frequent occurrence; common to all the dramas are Aparavaktra,[54] Aupacchandasika,[55] and Vaitālīya, Drutavilambita, Puṣpitāgrā, Pṛthvī, Mandākrāntā, Mālinī, Vaṅçasthā, Çārdūlavikrīḍita, Çikhariṇī, and Hariṇī; the Mālavikāgnimitra [[167]]and the Çakuntalā share also Praharṣiṇī, Rucirā,[56] Çālinī, and Sragdharā; the latter adds the Rathoddhatā,[57] the Vikramorvaçī a Mañjubhāṣiṇī.[58] The earliest play has one irregular Prākrit verse, the second two Āryās, and 29 of varied form of the types measured by feet or morae, and the last seven Āryās and two Vaitālīyas. The predominance of the Āryā is interesting, for it is essentially a Prākrit metre, whence it seems to have secured admission into Sanskrit verse.
Not unnaturally, efforts[59] have been made on the score of metre to ascertain the dates of the plays inter se, and in relation to the rest of the acknowledged work of Kālidāsa. The result achieved by Dr. Huth would place the works in the order Raghuvaṅça, Meghadūta, Mālavikāgnimitra, Çakuntalā, Kumārasambhava, and Vikramorvaçī. But the criteria are quite inadequate; the Meghadūta has but one metre, the Mandākrāntā, which occurs so seldom in the other poems and plays that any comparison is impossible,[60] and the points relied upon by Dr. Huth are of minimal importance; they assume such doctrines as that the poem which contains the fewest abnormal caesuras is the more metrically perfect and therefore the later, while the poem which has the largest number of abnormal forms of the Çloka metre is artistically the more perfect and so later. A detailed investigation of the different forms of abnormal caesuras reveals the most perplexing counter-indications of relative date, and the essential impression produced by the investigations is that Kālidāsa was a finished metrist, who did not seriously alter his metrical forms at any period of his career as revealed in his poems, and that there is no possibility of deducing any satisfactory conclusions from metrical evidence. The fact that the evidence would place the mature and meditative Raghuvaṅça,[61] which bears within it unmistakable proofs of the author’s old age, before the Meghadūta and long before the Kumārasambhava, both redolent of love and youth, is sufficient to establish its total untrustworthiness. [[168]]