on, the
scarlet and pomp and blazonry, of war. The braying of the battle
conches is muted: all is cast in a more gentle mold. You get
instead the forest and its beauty; you get tender idylls of
domestic life.--This poem, like the _Mahabharata,_ has come
swelling down the centuries; but whereas the latter grew by the
addition of new incidents, the _Ramayana_ grew by the re-telling
of old ones. Thus you may get book after book telling the same
story of Rama's life in the forest-hermitage by the Godavari;
each book by a new poet in love with the gentle beauty of
the tale and its setting, and anxious to put them into his
own language. India never grows tired of these Ramayanic
repetitions. Sita, the heroine, Rama's bride, is the ideal of
every good woman there; I suppose Shakespeare has created no
truer or more beautiful figure. To the _Mahabharata,_ the
_Ramayana_ stands perhaps as the higher Wordsworth to Milton;
it belongs to the same great age, but to another day in it.
Both are and have been wonderfully near the life of the people:
children are brought up on them; all ages, castes, and
conditions make them the staple of their mental diet. Both are
semi-sacred; neither is quite secular; either relates the deeds
of an avatar of Vishnu; ages have done their work upon them, to
lift them into the region of things sacrosanct.

And now at last we come to the age of King Vikramaditya of
Ujjain,--to the Nine Gems of Literature,--to a secular era of
literary creation,--to the Sanskrit Drama, and to Kalidisa, its
Shakespeare;--and to his masterpiece, _The Ring of Sakoontala._

There is a tendency with us to derive all things Indian from
Greek sources. Some Greek writer says the Indians were familiar
with Homer; whereupon we take up the cry,--The _Ramayana_ is
evidently a plagiarism from the _Iliad;_ the abduction of Sita
by Ravan, of the abduction of Helen by Paris; the siege of
Lanka, of the siege of Troy. And the _Mahabharata_ is too;
because,--because it must be; there's a deal of fighting in
both. (So Macedon plagiarized its river from Monmouth.) We
believe a Greek at all times against an Indian; forgetting that
the Greeks themselves, when they got to India, were astounded at
the truthfulness of the people they found there. Such strained
avoidance of the natural lie,--the harmless, necessary lie
that came so trippingly to a Greek tongue,--seemed to them
extraordinary.--So too our critics naturally set out