sentimental qualities of
modern verse were traced in a much higher degree than they had been
found in Greek and Roman literature. All this is doubtless true. The
Hindoos appear to have been the only ancient people that took delight
in forests, rivers, and mountains as we do; in reading their
descriptions of Nature we are sometimes affected by a mysterious
feeling of awe, like a reminiscence of the time when our ancestors
lived in India. Their amorous hyperbole, too, despite its frequent
grotesqueness, affects us perhaps more sympathetically than that of
the Greeks. And yet the essentials of what we call romantic love are
so entirely absent from ancient Hindoo literature that such amorous
symptoms as are noted therein can all be readily brought under the
three heads of artificiality, sensuality, and selfishness.

ARTIFICIAL SYMPTOMS

Commenting on the directions for caressing given in the _Kama Soutra_,
Lamairesse remarks (56):

"All these practices and caresses are conventional rather
than natural, like everything the Hindoos do. A bayaderes
straying to Paris and making use of them would be a
curiosity so extraordinary that she would certainly enjoy a
succes de vogue pour rire."

Nail-marks on various parts of the body, blows, bites, meaningless
exclamations are prescribed or described in the diverse love-scenes.
In Hindoo dramas several of the artificial symptoms--pure figments of
the poetic fancy--are incessantly referred to. One of the most
ludicrous of them is the drops of perspiration on the cheeks or other
parts of the body, which are regarded as an infallible and inevitable
sign of love. Urvasi's royal lover is afraid to take her birch-bark
message in his hand lest his perspiration wipe away the letters. In
Bhavabhuti's drama, _Malati and Madhava_, the heroine's feet perspire
so profusely from excess of longing, that the lacquer of her couch is
melted; and one of the stage directions in the same drama is:
"Perspiration appears on Madayantika, with other things indicating
love."

Another of these grotesque symptoms is the notion that the touch or
mere thought of the beloved makes the small hairs all over the body
stand erect. No love-scene seems to be complete without this detail.
The drama just referred to, in different scenes, makes the hairs on
the cheeks, on the arms, all over the body, rise "splendidly," the
author says in one line.[280] A Hindoo lover always has twitching o