morbid survival of decaying chivalry, he has only to turn to India's
independently growing literature to find the question settled.
Kalidasa's love-poetry rings as true in our ears as it did in his
countrymen's ears fifteen hundred years ago.

It is of love eventually happy, though often struggling for a time
against external obstacles, that Kalidasa writes. There is nowhere in
his works a trace of that not quite healthy feeling that sometimes
assumes the name "modern love." If it were not so, his poetry could
hardly have survived; for happy love, blessed with children, is surely
the more fundamental thing. In his drama _Urvashi_ he is ready to
change and greatly injure a tragic story, given him by long tradition,
in order that a loving pair may not be permanently separated. One
apparent exception there is--the story of Rama and Sita in _The
Dynasty of Raghu_. In this case it must be remembered that Rama is an
incarnation of Vishnu, and the story of a mighty god incarnate is not
to be lightly tampered with.

It is perhaps an inevitable consequence of Kalidasa's subject that his
women appeal more strongly to a modern reader than his men. The man is
the more variable phenomenon, and though manly virtues are the same in
all countries and centuries, the emphasis has been variously laid. But
the true woman seems timeless, universal. I know of no poet, unless it
be Shakespeare, who has given the world a group of heroines so
individual yet so universal; heroines as true, as tender, as brave as
are Indumati, Sita, Parvati, the Yaksha's bride, and Shakuntala.

Kalidasa could not understand women without understanding children. It
would be difficult to find anywhere lovelier pictures of childhood
than those in which our poet presents the little Bharata, Ayus, Raghu,