Part 75 (1/2)
Hesitate no longer. Your husband must be one of the G.o.ds.”
Then said Damayanti, while her eyes were diffused with anguish-born tears: ”My reverence to the G.o.ds! As husband I choose you, mighty ruler on earth. What I say to you is immutable truth.” ”I am here now as messenger of the G.o.ds, and cannot, therefore, plead my own cause.
Later I shall have a chance to speak for myself,” said Nala; and Damayanti said, smiling, while tears choked her voice:
”I shall arrange that you as well as the G.o.ds are present on the day of my husband-choice. Then I shall choose you in the presence of the immortals. In that way no blame can fall on anyone.”
Returning to the G.o.ds, Nala told them just what happened, not omitting her promise that she would choose him in presence of the G.o.ds. The day now was approaching when the kings, who, urged by love-longings, had a.s.sembled, were to appear before the maiden. With their beautiful hair, noses, eyes, and brows, these royal personages shone like the stars in heaven. They fixed their gaze on the maiden's limbs, and wherever the eyes first rested there they remained fixed immovably.
But the four G.o.ds had all a.s.sumed the exact form and appearance of Nala, and when Damayanti was about to choose him she saw five men all alike. How could she tell which of them was the king, her beloved?
After a moment's thought she uttered an invocation to the G.o.ds calling upon them to a.s.sume the characteristics by which they differ from mortals. The G.o.ds, moved by her anguish, her faith in the power of truth, her intelligence and pa.s.sionate devotion, heard her prayer and forthwith they appeared to her free from perspiration, with fixed gaze, ever fresh wreath, free from dust; and none of them, while standing, touched the floor; whereas King Nala betrayed himself by throwing a shadow, by having dust and perspiration on his body, a withered wreath, and eyelids that winked.
Thereupon the big-eyed maiden timidly seized him by the hem of his garment and put a beautiful wreath on his shoulders. Thus did she choose him to be her husband; and the G.o.ds granted them special favors.[279]
According to Schroeder, the Hindoos are ”the romantic nation” among the ancients, as the Germans are among the moderns; and Albrecht Weber says that when, a little more than a century ago, Europe first became acquainted with Sanscrit literature, it was noticed that in the amorous poetry of India in particular the 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 of the right or left arm or eye to indicate what kind of luck he is going to have; and she is equally favored. Usually the love is mutual and at first sight--nay, preferably _before_ first sight. The mere hearsay that a certain man or maiden is very beautiful suffices, as we saw in the story of Nala and Damayanti, to banish sleep and appet.i.te, and to make the lover pale and wan and most wretched. Sakuntala's royal lover wastes away so rapidly that in a few days his bracelet falls from his attenuated arm, and Sakuntala herself becomes so weak that she cannot rise, and is supposed to have sunstroke! Malati dwindles until her form resembles the moon in its last quarter; her face is as pale as the moon at morning dawn. Always both the lovers, though he be a king--as he generally is--and she a G.o.ddess, are diffident at first, fearing failure, even after the most unmistakable signs of fondness, in the betrayal of which the girls are anything but coy. All these symptoms the poets prescribe as regularly as a physician makes out a prescription for an apothecary.
A peculiar stare--which must be sidelong, not direct at the beloved--is another conventional characteristic of Hindoo amorous fiction. The gait becomes languid, the breathing difficult, the heart stops beating or is paralyzed with joy; the limbs or the whole body wither like flower-stalks after a frost; the mind is lamed, the memory weakened; cold s.h.i.+vers run down the limbs and fever shakes the body; the arms hang limp at the side, the breast heaves, words stick in the throat; pastimes no longer entertain; the perfumed Malayan wind crazes the mind; the eyelids are motionless, sighs give vent to anguish, which may end in a swoon, and if things take an unfavorable turn the thought of suicide is not distant. Attempts to cure this ardent love are futile; Madhava tries snow, and moonlight, and camphor, and lotos roots, and pearls, and sandal oil rubbed on his skin, but all in vain.
THE HINDOO G.o.d OF LOVE
Quite as artificial and unsentimental as the notions of the Hindoos concerning the symptoms of love is their conception of their G.o.d of love, Kama, the husband of l.u.s.t. His bow is made of sugar-cane, its string a row of bees, and his arrow-tips are red flower-buds. Spring is his bosom friend, and he rides on a parrot or the sea-monster Makara. He is also called Ananga--the bodiless--because Siwa once burned him up with the fire that flashed from his third eye for disturbing him in his devotions by awakening in him love for Parwati.
Sakuntala's lover wails that Kama's arrows are ”not flowers, but hard as diamond.” Agnimitra declares that the Creator made his beloved ”the poison-steeped arrow of the G.o.d of Love;” and again, he says: ”The softest and the sharpest things are united in you, O Kama.” Urvasi's royal lover complains that his ”heart is pierced by Kama's arrow,” and in _Malati and Madhava_ we are told that ”a cruel G.o.d no doubt is Kama;” while No. 329 of Ilala's love-poems declares:
”The arrows of Kama are most diverse in their effects--though made of flowers, very hard; though not coming into direct contact, insufferably hot; and though piercing, yet causing delight.”
Our familiarity with Greek and Roman literature has made us so accustomed to the idea of a Cupid awakening love by shooting arrows that we fail to realize how entirely fanciful, not to say whimsical, this conceit is. It would be odd, indeed, if the Hindoo poets had happened on the same fancy as the Greeks of their own accord; but there is no reason to suppose that they did. Kama is one of the later G.o.ds of the Indian Pantheon, and there is every reason to believe that the Hindoos borrowed him from the Greeks, as the Romans did. In _Sakuntala_ (27) there is a reference to the Greek women who form the king's body-guard; in _Urvasi_ (70) to a slave of Greek descent; and there are many things in the Hindoo drama that betray Greek influence.
Besides being artificial and borrowed, Kama is entirely sensual. Kama means ”gratification of the senses,”[281] and of all the epithets bestowed on their G.o.d of love by the Hindoos none rises distinctly above sensual ideas. Dowson (147) has collated these epithets; they are: ”the beautiful,” ”the inflamer,” ”l.u.s.tful,” ”desirous,” ”the happy,” ”the gay, or wanton,” ”deluder,” ”the lamp of honey, or of spring,” ”the bewilderer,” ”the crackling fire,” ”the stalk of pa.s.sion,” ”the weapon of beauty,” ”the voluptuary,” ”remembrance,”
”fire,” ”the handsome.”[282]
The same disregard of sentimental, devotional, and altruistic elements is shown in the Ten Stages of Love-Sickness as conceived by the Hindoos: (1) desire; (2) thinking of her (his) beauty; (3) reminiscent revery; (4) boasting of her (his) excellence; (5) excitement; (6) lamentations; (7) distraction; (8) illness; (9) insensibility; (10) death.[283]
DYING FOR LOVE
The notion that the fever of love may become so severe as to lead to death plays an important role in Hindoo amorous sophistry. ”Hindoo casuists,” says Lamairesse (151, 179), ”always have a peremptory reason, in their own eyes, for dispensing with all scruples in love-affairs: the necessity of not dying for love.” ”It is permissible,” says the author of _Kama Soutra_, ”to seduce another man's wife if one is in danger of dying from love for her;” upon which Lamairesse comments: