It remains to say what can be said in a foreign language of Kalidasa's
style. We have seen that he had a formal and systematic education; in
this respect he is rather to be compared with Milton and Tennyson than
with Shakespeare or Burns. He was completely master of his learning.
In an age and a country which reprobated carelessness but were
tolerant of pedantry, he held the scales with a wonderfully even hand,
never heedless and never indulging in the elaborate trifling with
Sanskrit diction which repels the reader from much of Indian
literature. It is true that some western critics have spoken of his
disfiguring conceits and puerile plays on words. One can only wonder
whether these critics have ever read Elizabethan literature; for
Kalidasa's style is far less obnoxious to such condemnation than
Shakespeare's. That he had a rich and glowing imagination, "excelling
in metaphor," as the Hindus themselves affirm, is indeed true; that he
may, both in youth and age, have written lines which would not have
passed his scrutiny in the vigour of manhood, it is not worth while to
deny: yet the total effect left by his poetry is one of extraordinary
sureness and delicacy of taste. This is scarcely a matter for
argument; a reader can do no more than state his own subjective
impression, though he is glad to find that impression confirmed by the
unanimous authority of fifty generations of Hindus, surely the most
competent judges on such a point.

Analysis of Kalidasa's writings might easily be continued, but
analysis can never explain life. The only real criticism is
subjective. We know that Kalidasa is a very great poet, because the
world has not been able to leave him alone.

ARTHUR W. RYDER.