[Contents]5.The SentimentsThe most original and interesting part of dramatic theory is the gradual definition of the nature of the sentiment which it is the aim of the performance to evoke in the mind of the audience.66[315]The statement of theNāṭyaçāstrais simple. Sentiment is produced from the union of the determinants (vibhāva), the consequents (anubhāva), and the transitory feelings (vyabhicārin). The determinants fall in the later classification into two divisions, the fundamental determinants (ālambana) and the excitant determinants (uddīpana); fundamental determinants comprise such things as the heroine or the hero, for without them there can be no creation of sentiment in the audience; excitant determinants are such conditions of place and time and circumstance as serve to foster sentiment when it has arisen, for instance the moon, the cry of the cuckoo, the soft breeze from Malaya, all things which foster the erotic sentiment. The consequents are the external manifestations of feeling, by which the actors exhibit to the audience the minds and hearts of the persons of the drama, such as sidelong glances, a smile, a movement of the arm, and—though this is but slightly indicated in later texts—his words.67A special class is later made of those consequents, which are the involuntary product of sympathetic realization of the feeling of the person portrayed, and hence are called Sāttvika, as arising from a heart which is ready to appreciate the sorrows or joys of another (sattva); these are paralysis, fainting, horripilation, perspiration, change of colour, trembling, weeping, and change of voice. The transitory or evanescent feelings are given as thirty-three; they are discouragement, weakness, apprehension, weariness, contentment, stupor, joy, depression, cruelty, anxiety, fright, envy, indignation, arrogance, recollection, death, intoxication, dreaming, sleeping, awakening, shame, epilepsy, distraction, assurance, indolence, agitation, deliberation, dissimulation, sickness, insanity, despair, impatience, and inconstancy. But these factors are not sufficient to account for sentiment, nor does theNāṭyaçāstraintend this. It recognizes that an essential element in the production of sentiment is the dominant emotion (sthāyibhāva) which persists throughout the drama amid the variations of the transitory feelings; it stands to the other factors in the position of the king to his subjects or a master to his pupils, as the Çāstra says; it is, says theDaçarūpa, the source of delight, and brings into harmony with itself the transitory states of feeling.[316]It is the dominant emotions which in some fashion determine or become sentiments even in the view of theNāṭyaçāstra, though in it there is clearly difficulty in conceiving the precise signification of the process, a fact revealed in a tendency to confuse the terms emotion and sentiment, Bhāva and Rasa. In Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa68we have a determined effort to make clear the implication of the doctrine. The dominant emotion of love, for instance, generated by a fundamental determinant such as a maiden, inflamed by an excitant determinant such as a pleasant garden, made cognizable by consequents such as sidelong glances and embraces, and strengthened by transitory feelings such as desire, becomes the erotic sentiment first of all in the hero of the drama, e.g. Rāma. The sentiment is subsequently attributed to the actor who imitates the hero in form, dress, and action, and so it becomes the source of charm to the audience. The fatal objection to this theory is clear; it fails to recognize that the sentiment must be that of the spectator himself; he cannot have enjoyment of a sentiment which exists merely in the actor as a secondary outcome of its existence in Rāma. Moreover, the actor whose chief aim is to please the audience and earn money need not feel at all the emotions of Rāma, while, if he does so, he is then in the same position as a spectator.The view of Lollaṭa, which is classed as one of the production (utpatti) of sentiment and regarded as that of the Mīmāṅsā school, is opposed by the doctrine of Çrīçan̄kuka, regarded as the Naiyāyika view, which interprets the manifestation of sentiment as a process of inference. The emotions, love, &c., are inferred to exist in the actor, though not really present in him, by means of the determinants, &c., cleverly exhibited in his acting; the emotion thus inferred, being sensed by the audience, through its exquisite beauty, adds to itself a peculiar charm and thus finally develops into the state of a sentiment in the spectator. This view, however, is open to the fatal objection that it is commonly admitted that it is not inference, or any other derivative mode of knowledge, which produces charm, but perception alone, and no adequate ground exists for disregarding this general truth in this case.[317]In Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka69we find yet a different point of view, which denies either the production (utpatti) of sentiment, its perception or apprehension (pratīti) or its revelation (abhivyakti). If sentiment is perceived as appertaining to another, then it cannot personally affect oneself. But it cannot be perceived as present in oneself as a result of study of a work about Rāma; there are no factors present in the self to produce any such result; it is impossible to hold that an emotion dormant in oneself is called to life by seeing or reading the story of Rāma; experience shows that one’s own beloved does not come up to one’s mind to raise love, nor could a tale of a goddess evoke the picture of a mortal amour; again, such marvellous deeds as Rāma’s have nothing common to mortal efforts so as to be able to awake conceptions of acts of our own. Thus sentiment cannot be apprehended. Nor is it a case of production; if so, no one would go twice to a play of a pathetic type, since one would experience actual misery as the result, in lieu of a pleasant melancholy; again the sight of lovers united does not in real life produce sentiment. Nor is a case of the revelation of something existing potentially (çaktirūpa). If this were so, then, when the potential emotions were let loose, they would occupy their field of action in diverse degrees—thus contradicting the nature of sentiment as one; moreover there would be the same difficulties as in the case of apprehension as to whether revelation applied to the hero or oneself. The true solution, therefore, is to ascribe to a poem a peculiar threefold potency of its own, the power of denotation (abhidhā), which deals with what is expressed, the power of realization (bhāvakatva), which relates to the sentiment, and the power of enjoyment (bhojakatva), which has regard to the audience. If denotation were all, there would be no difference between poetic figures and manuals, there would be absence of the distinctions produced by divergence of literal and metaphorical sense, and the avoidance of harsh sounds would be needless. As it is, we have the second function of realization of sentiment, which causes the expressed sense to serve as the basis of the sentiment, and confers on the determinants, &c., the essential feature of being appropriated by the audience as universal. From this comes the appreciation by the audience[318]of the sentiment, an appreciation consisting in a mental condition made up entirely of the element of goodness or truth (sattva), uninfluenced by the other elements of passion (rajas) and dullness (tamas), that is, entirely free from desire, comparable with meditation on the absolute. This condition is the vital element; the enjoyment ranks above the aesthetic equipment70which renders it possible. To this theory which is sometimes ascribed to the Sāṁkhya,71and called the Bhuktivāda, doctrine of the enjoyment of sentiment, the objection is made that the two powers ascribed to poetry, realization, and enjoyment, have no legitimate foundation.The view finally adopted by the theorists is that defended, but not first enunciated, by Abhinavagupta, based on the general doctrine of suggestion (vyañjanā) as lying at the basis of all poetic pleasure. The spectator’s state of mind must be considered; it is in him that from experience of life there come into being emotional complexes, which lie dormant, ready to be called into activity by the reading of poems or by seeing plays performed. Those whose life has left them barren of impressions of emotions are, accordingly, incapable of relishing dramas, a fate which awaits men whose minds are intent merely on grammar or on the complexities of the Mīmāṅsā. The sentiment thus excited is peculiar, in that it is essentially universal in character; it is common to all other trained spectators, and it has essentially no personal significance. A sentiment is thus something very different from an ordinary emotion; it is generic and disinterested, while an emotion is individual and immediately personal. An emotion again may be pleasant or painful, but a sentiment is marked by that impersonal joy, characteristic of the contemplation of the supreme being by the adept, a bliss which is absolutely without personal feeling. There is in fact a close parallel between the man of taste (sahṛdaya)72and the adept (yogin); both have in them the possibility of attaining this bliss, and, to make it real, the one must investigate the determinants, &c., while the other must apply himself to concentration on the absolute. It is[319]this peculiar nature of sentiment which forbids it being created as the result of denotation or indication by speech, of perception, inference, or recollection. It cannot exist without determinants, &c., but these are not in the normal sense causes; an effect can exist when its causes have disappeared, but sentiment exists only while the determinants, &c., last; the terms used in this regard are one and all distinct from the normal terminology of causation. Sentiment is something supernatural (alaukika); its relations to the factors may be compared with that of a beverage to the black pepper, candied sugar, camphor, &c., which compose it, but of which as such no trace remains in the liquor as produced. This characteristic enables us to understand how it is that the list of sentiments includes that of horror or odium (bībhatsa) and that of fear (bhayānaka), as well as the pathetic sentiment. These are awakened into life by things which cause disgust, fear, and grief in ordinary life, and these emotions in real life are far from pleasant in any sense of that term. But, conveyed as ideal and generic, they produce this supernatural pleasure or happiness, which is not to be compared with normal pleasure, just as the joy of the contemplation of the absolute is not to be described as pleasure in the ordinary sense. Bhānudatta, in hisRasataran̄giṇī, a work composed beforeA.D.1437, distinguishes Rāsa as natural (laukika) and supernatural or transcendental; the former is the emotion experienced in ordinary life—which may more conveniently be distinguished as Bhāva,—the latter includes the emotion experienced in dream experiences, in the building of castles in the air, and in the appreciation of poetry, and he is careful to emphasize the totally different nature of the natural and the transcendental emotion.73The doctrine set out in Abhinavagupta is also that of theDaçarūpa, although it is rendered more obscure there by the brevity of its exposition. The process of transformation of an emotion to a sentiment is formally described; ‘a dominant feeling or emotion becomes a sentiment when it is transformed into an object of enjoyment through the co-operation of the determinants, the consequents, including the involuntary manifestations of feeling, and the transitory feelings’.74The sense is made[320]further precise by the assertion75that the dominant emotion becomes a sentiment, because it is enjoyed by the spectator of taste, and he is actually at present in existence; the sentiment is not located in the hero whose actions are represented, for he belongs to the past, nor does it appertain to the poem, for that is not the object of the poem—its function being to set out the determinants, &c., through which the dominant emotion is brought out and generates the sentiment,—nor is sentiment the apprehension by the spectator of the emotions enacted by the actor, since in that case spectators would feel not sentiment, but an emotion varying in the different individuals, just as in real life from seeing a pair in union those who see them feel according to their nature shame, envy, desire, or aversion. The position of the spectator is compared to that of the child which, when it plays with its clay elephants—the ancient equivalent of our tin soldiers—experiences the sensation of its own energy as pleasant; the deeds of Arjuna arouse a like feeling in the spectator’s mind. This experiencing sentiment is a manifestation of that joy which is innate as the true nature of the self, and this manifestation comes into being as the result of the pervasion of the mind of the spectator with the dominant emotion and the determinants, &c., in combination.An effort is made to describe the precise nature of the mental activity involved in the enjoyment of sentiment, and to base upon it a division of the sentiments. The four sentiments of love, heroism, horror, and fury are taken as primary, and brought into connexion with mental conditions described as the unfolding (vikāsa), expansion (vistara), agitation (kṣobha), and movement to and fro (vikṣepa) of the mind.76These are evidently mental conditions, believed to be reached by introspection, and they have the merit of giving a quasi-psychological rationale for the doctrine of four primary and four secondary sentiments found in theNāṭyaçāstra.77But there was no early agreement on this piece of psychology; Abhinavagupta,78with Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, accepts only three aspects of mental condition as involved, the melting (druti), expansion, and unfolding, a division which is applied also in the theory of poetics to justify the doctrine of the[321]existence of three qualities only of words.79On Dhanaṁjaya’s view the sentiment of calm which he denies for drama,80if it exists at all, must be regarded as combining all the four mental aspects above distinguished.It is now possible to understand clearly the essential relation of the spectator to the actors; we see on the stage, for instance, Rāma and Sītā, who excites his affection, aided by suitable circumstances of time and place; this affection is intimated by speech and gesture alike, which indicate both the dominant emotion of love and its transient shapes in the various stages of love requited. The spectacle evokes in the mind of the spectator the impressions of the emotion of love which experience has planted there, and this ideal and generic excitation of the emotion produces in him that sense of joy which is known as sentiment. The fullness of the enjoyment depends essentially on the nature and experience of the spectator, to whom it falls to identify himself with the hero or other character, and thus to experience in ideal form his emotions and feelings. He may even succeed in his effort to the extent that he weeps real tears, feels terror and sorrow, but the sentiment is still one of exquisite joy. We may compare the thrill of pleasure which the most terrifying narration excites in us, and we are all conscious of the sweetness of sad tales.Viçvanātha insists very strongly on the necessity of the identification of the spectator with the personages depicted, a process which enables him to accept without any difficulty such episodes of extraordinary character as Hanumant’s leap over the ocean.81He must not treat the emotion of love as his own, for in that case it would never become a sentiment; it would remain a feeling, and in the case of fear, for instance, it would cause pain, not joy. Nor must he regard it as belonging solely to the hero, for then it would remain his feeling, and in no wise affect the spectator or become a sentiment. Similarly, the determinants, &c., are not to be treated as pertaining to the hero alone; they must be felt as generic. This generic action (sādhāraṇī kṛti) is the essential feature, replacing the generic power which Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka attributes to poetry. We can now[322]see clearly the position of the actor; theNāṭyaçāstra82bids him as far as possible to assume the emotions of the person whom he represents, and to depict them by costume, speech, movements, and gestures as his own, but Viçvanātha83is more anxious to insist that the sentiment is not necessarily to be found in the actor, who often merely performs mechanically his part according to rote and rule; if he actually does experience the feelings he portrays, then he becomes in so far a spectator.84Further, he points out the simultaneous presence of all the factors is by no means essential, for the existence of one will revive the others by force of the association of ideas. He insists also on the necessity of experience and cultivation of the power of imagination in one who seeks to enjoy sentiment; as we are by virtue of the doctrine of transmigration—or if we prefer to modernize, by heredity—endowed with the germs of the capacity of appreciation, we can normally by study of poetical works develop the capacity, but, if we devote ourselves to the study of grammar or philosophy, we shall certainly deaden our susceptibilities. The difficult problem, why much study of poetry leaves some still unable to relish the sentiment, is explained by the convenient hypothesis that demerit in a previous birth intervenes to frustrate present effort. He refutes at length the effort of Mahiman Bhaṭṭa85to destroy the whole doctrine of suggestion in poetry by the doctrine of inference; doubtless by inference we could arrive at a belief in the existence of an emotion in the hero’s mind but that inference would not produce any effect in us or arouse sentiment; a logician might make the inference and draw the correct conclusion, but would remain cold and unmoved. Suggestiveness, he shows, is absolutely essential as a function of words and as the characteristic of poetry, giving it power to create sentiment. What is expressed may be understood by every one; the man of taste alone appreciates the suggestion and enjoys the flavour resulting.Now sentiment is one, it is a single, ineffable, transcendental joy, but it can be subdivided, not according to its own nature,[323]but according to the emotions which evoke it. Thus theNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes the existence of eight emotions or dominant feelings; love (rati), mirth (hāsa), anger (krodha), sorrow (çoka), energy (utsāha), terror (bhaya), disgust (jugupsā), and astonishment (vismaya), and corresponding to these eight emotions we have eight forms of sentiment. The erotic sentiment (çṛn̄gārarasa) is of two kinds, the union (sambhoga) or sundering (vipralambha) of two lovers, according to the Çāstra and the great mass of theorists, but theDaçarūpa86distinguishes three cases, privation (ayoga), sundering (viprayoga), and union. Privation denotes the inability of two young hearts to secure union, because of obstacles to their marriage; such love passes through ten stages,87longing, anxiety, recollection, enumeration of the loved one’s merits, distress, raving, insanity, fever, stupor, and death. Sundering may be due to absence or resentment, and this in its turn may be caused by a quarrel between two determined lovers, or indignation at finding out, by sight, hearing or inference, that one’s lover is devoted to another. The hero may counteract anger by conciliation, by winning over her friends, by gifts, by humility, by indifference, and by distracting her attention. Absence again may be due to business, to accident, or a curse; if the reason is death the love sentiment cannot, in Dhanaṁjaya’s view, be present, though others allow of a pathetic variety of this sentiment.88In union the lover should avoid vulgarity or annoyance.The heroic (vīra) sentiment corresponds to the emotion of energy; it may take the three forms of courage in battle as in Rāma; compassion as in Jīmūtavāhana; and liberality as in Paraçurāma. Assurance, contentment, arrogance, and joy are the transitory states connected with it. The sentiment of fury (raudra) is based on anger; its transitory states are indignation, intoxication, recollection, inconstancy, envy, cruelty, agitation, and the like. The comic (hāsya) sentiment depends on mirth, which is caused by one’s own or another’s strange appearance, speech, or attire.89The transitory states in connexion with it are[324]sleeping, indolence, weariness, weakness, and stupor. The sentiment of wonder (adbhuta) is based on astonishment; the transitory states are usually joy, agitation, and contentment. The sentiment of terror (bhayānaka) is based on terror; the states associated with it are depression, agitation, distraction, fright, and the like. The pathetic (karuṇa) sentiment is based on sorrow; its associated states are sleeping, epilepsy, depression, sickness, death, indolence, agitation, despair, stupor, insanity, anxiety, and so forth. The sentiment of horror or odium (bībhatsa) is based on disgust; its associated states are agitation, sickness, apprehension, and the like. In each case the theorists give in full the determinants and the consequents of each emotion, which becomes a sentiment, and a special colour is ascribed to each; it is not surprising to find that red is associated with fury, black with fear; whiteness may, in association with the comic sentiment, be explained by the flashing teeth of a laughing maiden, and the dark (çyāma) colour of the erotic sentiment is a reflex of the favoured hue of the beloved; grey accords with pathos, but the connexion of yellow with wonder, dark blue with horror, and orange with heroism is not obvious. It is also artificial to find four primary and four secondary sentiments laid down; the erotic, the furious, the heroic, and that of horror, whence in order are supposed to develop the comic, the pathetic, that of wonder and that of terror. TheNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes these eight only,90but later authorities add the sentiment of calm (çānta) based on indifference to worldly things (nirveda), although this is in the Çāstra merely a transitory feeling. Those who follow the Çāstra contend that there is no such sentiment, for it is impossible to destroy utterly love, hatred, and other feelings, which have been operative from time without beginning; others admit the existence of the sentiment, as does Mammaṭa, but not in drama, on the ground that indifference to all worldly things is incapable of being represented. But this also is erroneous; the actor’s power of representing indifference is not in point, as it is the spectator who is to feel the sentiment, and the fact that the Çāstra places it first in the list of transitory states, though that would normally be an inauspicious beginning, indicates that it was meant to serve both as an emotion and a transitory feeling,[325]and it is fully recognized by Vidyādhara, Viçvanātha, and Jagannātha, though Dhanaṁjaya barely admits it.91The interrelations of the sentiments, their possible combinations, their harmonies and conflicts, are detailed at length.The sentiments may all be employed in drama, but there are rules affecting their use. In each play there should be a dominant sentiment; in the Nāṭaka it should be the erotic or the heroic; other sentiments are merely auxiliary, but that of wonder is especially appropriate in thedénouement; indeed something in the way of supernatural intervention is often convenient to extricate the plot. An excess of sentiments is as bad as a defect; if there are too many they destroy the unity of the whole and detach it into a series of ill-connected fragments, while the excessive use of action and of rhetorical display is equally destructive to the merit of a piece.TheÇakuntalāillustrates excellently the sentiment of love as the ruling motive of the play; the heroic sentiment appears in the verses in Act II in which the hermits extol the king; the horrible in Act VI in the scene in which Mātali menaces the Vidūṣaka; terror is evoked by the description of the dusk at the close of Act III; the whole play from the arrival of Kaṇva in Act IV to the departure of Çakuntalā produces the sentiment of pathos, while that of fury is called into being by the close of Act VI from the despairing cries of the Vidūṣaka to the entry of Mātali; finally wonder is aroused by the strange incident at the close when the king picks up the bracelet fallen from the arm of the child which, unknown to him, is his own son by the wife whom he has in ignorance repudiated. The Nāṭikās afford excellent examples of the erotic sentiment; Harṣa, in complete accord with the rules of the drama, helps out his plot in both theRatnāvalīand thePriyadarçikāby the use of incidents evoking the sentiment of wonder; the imprisonment of Sāgarikā in the former play evokes the sentiment of pathos, while terror is excited by the description in Act II of the wild confusion caused by the monkey’s escape from the royal mews. The sentiment of fury is frequently evoked in theMahāvīracaritaand the[326]Veṇīsaṁhāra; theMālatīmādhavaaffords excellent illustrations evoking horror, while theMahāvīracaritais permeated by the sentiment of heroism. TheNāgānandareveals heroism in another aspect, that of the perfection of compassion and nobility, for, as we have seen, Jīmūtavāhana is not to be regarded as a hero in whom calm prevails.There is doubtless pedantry in the theory of sentiment; the choice of eight emotions, the subordination to them of transitory states, the enumeration of determinants and consequents, are largely dominated by empiricism, and not explained or justified. But in its essentials the theory may be admitted to be a bold and by no means negligible attempt to indicate the essential character of the emotional effect of drama.
[Contents]5.The SentimentsThe most original and interesting part of dramatic theory is the gradual definition of the nature of the sentiment which it is the aim of the performance to evoke in the mind of the audience.66[315]The statement of theNāṭyaçāstrais simple. Sentiment is produced from the union of the determinants (vibhāva), the consequents (anubhāva), and the transitory feelings (vyabhicārin). The determinants fall in the later classification into two divisions, the fundamental determinants (ālambana) and the excitant determinants (uddīpana); fundamental determinants comprise such things as the heroine or the hero, for without them there can be no creation of sentiment in the audience; excitant determinants are such conditions of place and time and circumstance as serve to foster sentiment when it has arisen, for instance the moon, the cry of the cuckoo, the soft breeze from Malaya, all things which foster the erotic sentiment. The consequents are the external manifestations of feeling, by which the actors exhibit to the audience the minds and hearts of the persons of the drama, such as sidelong glances, a smile, a movement of the arm, and—though this is but slightly indicated in later texts—his words.67A special class is later made of those consequents, which are the involuntary product of sympathetic realization of the feeling of the person portrayed, and hence are called Sāttvika, as arising from a heart which is ready to appreciate the sorrows or joys of another (sattva); these are paralysis, fainting, horripilation, perspiration, change of colour, trembling, weeping, and change of voice. The transitory or evanescent feelings are given as thirty-three; they are discouragement, weakness, apprehension, weariness, contentment, stupor, joy, depression, cruelty, anxiety, fright, envy, indignation, arrogance, recollection, death, intoxication, dreaming, sleeping, awakening, shame, epilepsy, distraction, assurance, indolence, agitation, deliberation, dissimulation, sickness, insanity, despair, impatience, and inconstancy. But these factors are not sufficient to account for sentiment, nor does theNāṭyaçāstraintend this. It recognizes that an essential element in the production of sentiment is the dominant emotion (sthāyibhāva) which persists throughout the drama amid the variations of the transitory feelings; it stands to the other factors in the position of the king to his subjects or a master to his pupils, as the Çāstra says; it is, says theDaçarūpa, the source of delight, and brings into harmony with itself the transitory states of feeling.[316]It is the dominant emotions which in some fashion determine or become sentiments even in the view of theNāṭyaçāstra, though in it there is clearly difficulty in conceiving the precise signification of the process, a fact revealed in a tendency to confuse the terms emotion and sentiment, Bhāva and Rasa. In Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa68we have a determined effort to make clear the implication of the doctrine. The dominant emotion of love, for instance, generated by a fundamental determinant such as a maiden, inflamed by an excitant determinant such as a pleasant garden, made cognizable by consequents such as sidelong glances and embraces, and strengthened by transitory feelings such as desire, becomes the erotic sentiment first of all in the hero of the drama, e.g. Rāma. The sentiment is subsequently attributed to the actor who imitates the hero in form, dress, and action, and so it becomes the source of charm to the audience. The fatal objection to this theory is clear; it fails to recognize that the sentiment must be that of the spectator himself; he cannot have enjoyment of a sentiment which exists merely in the actor as a secondary outcome of its existence in Rāma. Moreover, the actor whose chief aim is to please the audience and earn money need not feel at all the emotions of Rāma, while, if he does so, he is then in the same position as a spectator.The view of Lollaṭa, which is classed as one of the production (utpatti) of sentiment and regarded as that of the Mīmāṅsā school, is opposed by the doctrine of Çrīçan̄kuka, regarded as the Naiyāyika view, which interprets the manifestation of sentiment as a process of inference. The emotions, love, &c., are inferred to exist in the actor, though not really present in him, by means of the determinants, &c., cleverly exhibited in his acting; the emotion thus inferred, being sensed by the audience, through its exquisite beauty, adds to itself a peculiar charm and thus finally develops into the state of a sentiment in the spectator. This view, however, is open to the fatal objection that it is commonly admitted that it is not inference, or any other derivative mode of knowledge, which produces charm, but perception alone, and no adequate ground exists for disregarding this general truth in this case.[317]In Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka69we find yet a different point of view, which denies either the production (utpatti) of sentiment, its perception or apprehension (pratīti) or its revelation (abhivyakti). If sentiment is perceived as appertaining to another, then it cannot personally affect oneself. But it cannot be perceived as present in oneself as a result of study of a work about Rāma; there are no factors present in the self to produce any such result; it is impossible to hold that an emotion dormant in oneself is called to life by seeing or reading the story of Rāma; experience shows that one’s own beloved does not come up to one’s mind to raise love, nor could a tale of a goddess evoke the picture of a mortal amour; again, such marvellous deeds as Rāma’s have nothing common to mortal efforts so as to be able to awake conceptions of acts of our own. Thus sentiment cannot be apprehended. Nor is it a case of production; if so, no one would go twice to a play of a pathetic type, since one would experience actual misery as the result, in lieu of a pleasant melancholy; again the sight of lovers united does not in real life produce sentiment. Nor is a case of the revelation of something existing potentially (çaktirūpa). If this were so, then, when the potential emotions were let loose, they would occupy their field of action in diverse degrees—thus contradicting the nature of sentiment as one; moreover there would be the same difficulties as in the case of apprehension as to whether revelation applied to the hero or oneself. The true solution, therefore, is to ascribe to a poem a peculiar threefold potency of its own, the power of denotation (abhidhā), which deals with what is expressed, the power of realization (bhāvakatva), which relates to the sentiment, and the power of enjoyment (bhojakatva), which has regard to the audience. If denotation were all, there would be no difference between poetic figures and manuals, there would be absence of the distinctions produced by divergence of literal and metaphorical sense, and the avoidance of harsh sounds would be needless. As it is, we have the second function of realization of sentiment, which causes the expressed sense to serve as the basis of the sentiment, and confers on the determinants, &c., the essential feature of being appropriated by the audience as universal. From this comes the appreciation by the audience[318]of the sentiment, an appreciation consisting in a mental condition made up entirely of the element of goodness or truth (sattva), uninfluenced by the other elements of passion (rajas) and dullness (tamas), that is, entirely free from desire, comparable with meditation on the absolute. This condition is the vital element; the enjoyment ranks above the aesthetic equipment70which renders it possible. To this theory which is sometimes ascribed to the Sāṁkhya,71and called the Bhuktivāda, doctrine of the enjoyment of sentiment, the objection is made that the two powers ascribed to poetry, realization, and enjoyment, have no legitimate foundation.The view finally adopted by the theorists is that defended, but not first enunciated, by Abhinavagupta, based on the general doctrine of suggestion (vyañjanā) as lying at the basis of all poetic pleasure. The spectator’s state of mind must be considered; it is in him that from experience of life there come into being emotional complexes, which lie dormant, ready to be called into activity by the reading of poems or by seeing plays performed. Those whose life has left them barren of impressions of emotions are, accordingly, incapable of relishing dramas, a fate which awaits men whose minds are intent merely on grammar or on the complexities of the Mīmāṅsā. The sentiment thus excited is peculiar, in that it is essentially universal in character; it is common to all other trained spectators, and it has essentially no personal significance. A sentiment is thus something very different from an ordinary emotion; it is generic and disinterested, while an emotion is individual and immediately personal. An emotion again may be pleasant or painful, but a sentiment is marked by that impersonal joy, characteristic of the contemplation of the supreme being by the adept, a bliss which is absolutely without personal feeling. There is in fact a close parallel between the man of taste (sahṛdaya)72and the adept (yogin); both have in them the possibility of attaining this bliss, and, to make it real, the one must investigate the determinants, &c., while the other must apply himself to concentration on the absolute. It is[319]this peculiar nature of sentiment which forbids it being created as the result of denotation or indication by speech, of perception, inference, or recollection. It cannot exist without determinants, &c., but these are not in the normal sense causes; an effect can exist when its causes have disappeared, but sentiment exists only while the determinants, &c., last; the terms used in this regard are one and all distinct from the normal terminology of causation. Sentiment is something supernatural (alaukika); its relations to the factors may be compared with that of a beverage to the black pepper, candied sugar, camphor, &c., which compose it, but of which as such no trace remains in the liquor as produced. This characteristic enables us to understand how it is that the list of sentiments includes that of horror or odium (bībhatsa) and that of fear (bhayānaka), as well as the pathetic sentiment. These are awakened into life by things which cause disgust, fear, and grief in ordinary life, and these emotions in real life are far from pleasant in any sense of that term. But, conveyed as ideal and generic, they produce this supernatural pleasure or happiness, which is not to be compared with normal pleasure, just as the joy of the contemplation of the absolute is not to be described as pleasure in the ordinary sense. Bhānudatta, in hisRasataran̄giṇī, a work composed beforeA.D.1437, distinguishes Rāsa as natural (laukika) and supernatural or transcendental; the former is the emotion experienced in ordinary life—which may more conveniently be distinguished as Bhāva,—the latter includes the emotion experienced in dream experiences, in the building of castles in the air, and in the appreciation of poetry, and he is careful to emphasize the totally different nature of the natural and the transcendental emotion.73The doctrine set out in Abhinavagupta is also that of theDaçarūpa, although it is rendered more obscure there by the brevity of its exposition. The process of transformation of an emotion to a sentiment is formally described; ‘a dominant feeling or emotion becomes a sentiment when it is transformed into an object of enjoyment through the co-operation of the determinants, the consequents, including the involuntary manifestations of feeling, and the transitory feelings’.74The sense is made[320]further precise by the assertion75that the dominant emotion becomes a sentiment, because it is enjoyed by the spectator of taste, and he is actually at present in existence; the sentiment is not located in the hero whose actions are represented, for he belongs to the past, nor does it appertain to the poem, for that is not the object of the poem—its function being to set out the determinants, &c., through which the dominant emotion is brought out and generates the sentiment,—nor is sentiment the apprehension by the spectator of the emotions enacted by the actor, since in that case spectators would feel not sentiment, but an emotion varying in the different individuals, just as in real life from seeing a pair in union those who see them feel according to their nature shame, envy, desire, or aversion. The position of the spectator is compared to that of the child which, when it plays with its clay elephants—the ancient equivalent of our tin soldiers—experiences the sensation of its own energy as pleasant; the deeds of Arjuna arouse a like feeling in the spectator’s mind. This experiencing sentiment is a manifestation of that joy which is innate as the true nature of the self, and this manifestation comes into being as the result of the pervasion of the mind of the spectator with the dominant emotion and the determinants, &c., in combination.An effort is made to describe the precise nature of the mental activity involved in the enjoyment of sentiment, and to base upon it a division of the sentiments. The four sentiments of love, heroism, horror, and fury are taken as primary, and brought into connexion with mental conditions described as the unfolding (vikāsa), expansion (vistara), agitation (kṣobha), and movement to and fro (vikṣepa) of the mind.76These are evidently mental conditions, believed to be reached by introspection, and they have the merit of giving a quasi-psychological rationale for the doctrine of four primary and four secondary sentiments found in theNāṭyaçāstra.77But there was no early agreement on this piece of psychology; Abhinavagupta,78with Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, accepts only three aspects of mental condition as involved, the melting (druti), expansion, and unfolding, a division which is applied also in the theory of poetics to justify the doctrine of the[321]existence of three qualities only of words.79On Dhanaṁjaya’s view the sentiment of calm which he denies for drama,80if it exists at all, must be regarded as combining all the four mental aspects above distinguished.It is now possible to understand clearly the essential relation of the spectator to the actors; we see on the stage, for instance, Rāma and Sītā, who excites his affection, aided by suitable circumstances of time and place; this affection is intimated by speech and gesture alike, which indicate both the dominant emotion of love and its transient shapes in the various stages of love requited. The spectacle evokes in the mind of the spectator the impressions of the emotion of love which experience has planted there, and this ideal and generic excitation of the emotion produces in him that sense of joy which is known as sentiment. The fullness of the enjoyment depends essentially on the nature and experience of the spectator, to whom it falls to identify himself with the hero or other character, and thus to experience in ideal form his emotions and feelings. He may even succeed in his effort to the extent that he weeps real tears, feels terror and sorrow, but the sentiment is still one of exquisite joy. We may compare the thrill of pleasure which the most terrifying narration excites in us, and we are all conscious of the sweetness of sad tales.Viçvanātha insists very strongly on the necessity of the identification of the spectator with the personages depicted, a process which enables him to accept without any difficulty such episodes of extraordinary character as Hanumant’s leap over the ocean.81He must not treat the emotion of love as his own, for in that case it would never become a sentiment; it would remain a feeling, and in the case of fear, for instance, it would cause pain, not joy. Nor must he regard it as belonging solely to the hero, for then it would remain his feeling, and in no wise affect the spectator or become a sentiment. Similarly, the determinants, &c., are not to be treated as pertaining to the hero alone; they must be felt as generic. This generic action (sādhāraṇī kṛti) is the essential feature, replacing the generic power which Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka attributes to poetry. We can now[322]see clearly the position of the actor; theNāṭyaçāstra82bids him as far as possible to assume the emotions of the person whom he represents, and to depict them by costume, speech, movements, and gestures as his own, but Viçvanātha83is more anxious to insist that the sentiment is not necessarily to be found in the actor, who often merely performs mechanically his part according to rote and rule; if he actually does experience the feelings he portrays, then he becomes in so far a spectator.84Further, he points out the simultaneous presence of all the factors is by no means essential, for the existence of one will revive the others by force of the association of ideas. He insists also on the necessity of experience and cultivation of the power of imagination in one who seeks to enjoy sentiment; as we are by virtue of the doctrine of transmigration—or if we prefer to modernize, by heredity—endowed with the germs of the capacity of appreciation, we can normally by study of poetical works develop the capacity, but, if we devote ourselves to the study of grammar or philosophy, we shall certainly deaden our susceptibilities. The difficult problem, why much study of poetry leaves some still unable to relish the sentiment, is explained by the convenient hypothesis that demerit in a previous birth intervenes to frustrate present effort. He refutes at length the effort of Mahiman Bhaṭṭa85to destroy the whole doctrine of suggestion in poetry by the doctrine of inference; doubtless by inference we could arrive at a belief in the existence of an emotion in the hero’s mind but that inference would not produce any effect in us or arouse sentiment; a logician might make the inference and draw the correct conclusion, but would remain cold and unmoved. Suggestiveness, he shows, is absolutely essential as a function of words and as the characteristic of poetry, giving it power to create sentiment. What is expressed may be understood by every one; the man of taste alone appreciates the suggestion and enjoys the flavour resulting.Now sentiment is one, it is a single, ineffable, transcendental joy, but it can be subdivided, not according to its own nature,[323]but according to the emotions which evoke it. Thus theNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes the existence of eight emotions or dominant feelings; love (rati), mirth (hāsa), anger (krodha), sorrow (çoka), energy (utsāha), terror (bhaya), disgust (jugupsā), and astonishment (vismaya), and corresponding to these eight emotions we have eight forms of sentiment. The erotic sentiment (çṛn̄gārarasa) is of two kinds, the union (sambhoga) or sundering (vipralambha) of two lovers, according to the Çāstra and the great mass of theorists, but theDaçarūpa86distinguishes three cases, privation (ayoga), sundering (viprayoga), and union. Privation denotes the inability of two young hearts to secure union, because of obstacles to their marriage; such love passes through ten stages,87longing, anxiety, recollection, enumeration of the loved one’s merits, distress, raving, insanity, fever, stupor, and death. Sundering may be due to absence or resentment, and this in its turn may be caused by a quarrel between two determined lovers, or indignation at finding out, by sight, hearing or inference, that one’s lover is devoted to another. The hero may counteract anger by conciliation, by winning over her friends, by gifts, by humility, by indifference, and by distracting her attention. Absence again may be due to business, to accident, or a curse; if the reason is death the love sentiment cannot, in Dhanaṁjaya’s view, be present, though others allow of a pathetic variety of this sentiment.88In union the lover should avoid vulgarity or annoyance.The heroic (vīra) sentiment corresponds to the emotion of energy; it may take the three forms of courage in battle as in Rāma; compassion as in Jīmūtavāhana; and liberality as in Paraçurāma. Assurance, contentment, arrogance, and joy are the transitory states connected with it. The sentiment of fury (raudra) is based on anger; its transitory states are indignation, intoxication, recollection, inconstancy, envy, cruelty, agitation, and the like. The comic (hāsya) sentiment depends on mirth, which is caused by one’s own or another’s strange appearance, speech, or attire.89The transitory states in connexion with it are[324]sleeping, indolence, weariness, weakness, and stupor. The sentiment of wonder (adbhuta) is based on astonishment; the transitory states are usually joy, agitation, and contentment. The sentiment of terror (bhayānaka) is based on terror; the states associated with it are depression, agitation, distraction, fright, and the like. The pathetic (karuṇa) sentiment is based on sorrow; its associated states are sleeping, epilepsy, depression, sickness, death, indolence, agitation, despair, stupor, insanity, anxiety, and so forth. The sentiment of horror or odium (bībhatsa) is based on disgust; its associated states are agitation, sickness, apprehension, and the like. In each case the theorists give in full the determinants and the consequents of each emotion, which becomes a sentiment, and a special colour is ascribed to each; it is not surprising to find that red is associated with fury, black with fear; whiteness may, in association with the comic sentiment, be explained by the flashing teeth of a laughing maiden, and the dark (çyāma) colour of the erotic sentiment is a reflex of the favoured hue of the beloved; grey accords with pathos, but the connexion of yellow with wonder, dark blue with horror, and orange with heroism is not obvious. It is also artificial to find four primary and four secondary sentiments laid down; the erotic, the furious, the heroic, and that of horror, whence in order are supposed to develop the comic, the pathetic, that of wonder and that of terror. TheNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes these eight only,90but later authorities add the sentiment of calm (çānta) based on indifference to worldly things (nirveda), although this is in the Çāstra merely a transitory feeling. Those who follow the Çāstra contend that there is no such sentiment, for it is impossible to destroy utterly love, hatred, and other feelings, which have been operative from time without beginning; others admit the existence of the sentiment, as does Mammaṭa, but not in drama, on the ground that indifference to all worldly things is incapable of being represented. But this also is erroneous; the actor’s power of representing indifference is not in point, as it is the spectator who is to feel the sentiment, and the fact that the Çāstra places it first in the list of transitory states, though that would normally be an inauspicious beginning, indicates that it was meant to serve both as an emotion and a transitory feeling,[325]and it is fully recognized by Vidyādhara, Viçvanātha, and Jagannātha, though Dhanaṁjaya barely admits it.91The interrelations of the sentiments, their possible combinations, their harmonies and conflicts, are detailed at length.The sentiments may all be employed in drama, but there are rules affecting their use. In each play there should be a dominant sentiment; in the Nāṭaka it should be the erotic or the heroic; other sentiments are merely auxiliary, but that of wonder is especially appropriate in thedénouement; indeed something in the way of supernatural intervention is often convenient to extricate the plot. An excess of sentiments is as bad as a defect; if there are too many they destroy the unity of the whole and detach it into a series of ill-connected fragments, while the excessive use of action and of rhetorical display is equally destructive to the merit of a piece.TheÇakuntalāillustrates excellently the sentiment of love as the ruling motive of the play; the heroic sentiment appears in the verses in Act II in which the hermits extol the king; the horrible in Act VI in the scene in which Mātali menaces the Vidūṣaka; terror is evoked by the description of the dusk at the close of Act III; the whole play from the arrival of Kaṇva in Act IV to the departure of Çakuntalā produces the sentiment of pathos, while that of fury is called into being by the close of Act VI from the despairing cries of the Vidūṣaka to the entry of Mātali; finally wonder is aroused by the strange incident at the close when the king picks up the bracelet fallen from the arm of the child which, unknown to him, is his own son by the wife whom he has in ignorance repudiated. The Nāṭikās afford excellent examples of the erotic sentiment; Harṣa, in complete accord with the rules of the drama, helps out his plot in both theRatnāvalīand thePriyadarçikāby the use of incidents evoking the sentiment of wonder; the imprisonment of Sāgarikā in the former play evokes the sentiment of pathos, while terror is excited by the description in Act II of the wild confusion caused by the monkey’s escape from the royal mews. The sentiment of fury is frequently evoked in theMahāvīracaritaand the[326]Veṇīsaṁhāra; theMālatīmādhavaaffords excellent illustrations evoking horror, while theMahāvīracaritais permeated by the sentiment of heroism. TheNāgānandareveals heroism in another aspect, that of the perfection of compassion and nobility, for, as we have seen, Jīmūtavāhana is not to be regarded as a hero in whom calm prevails.There is doubtless pedantry in the theory of sentiment; the choice of eight emotions, the subordination to them of transitory states, the enumeration of determinants and consequents, are largely dominated by empiricism, and not explained or justified. But in its essentials the theory may be admitted to be a bold and by no means negligible attempt to indicate the essential character of the emotional effect of drama.
[Contents]5.The SentimentsThe most original and interesting part of dramatic theory is the gradual definition of the nature of the sentiment which it is the aim of the performance to evoke in the mind of the audience.66[315]The statement of theNāṭyaçāstrais simple. Sentiment is produced from the union of the determinants (vibhāva), the consequents (anubhāva), and the transitory feelings (vyabhicārin). The determinants fall in the later classification into two divisions, the fundamental determinants (ālambana) and the excitant determinants (uddīpana); fundamental determinants comprise such things as the heroine or the hero, for without them there can be no creation of sentiment in the audience; excitant determinants are such conditions of place and time and circumstance as serve to foster sentiment when it has arisen, for instance the moon, the cry of the cuckoo, the soft breeze from Malaya, all things which foster the erotic sentiment. The consequents are the external manifestations of feeling, by which the actors exhibit to the audience the minds and hearts of the persons of the drama, such as sidelong glances, a smile, a movement of the arm, and—though this is but slightly indicated in later texts—his words.67A special class is later made of those consequents, which are the involuntary product of sympathetic realization of the feeling of the person portrayed, and hence are called Sāttvika, as arising from a heart which is ready to appreciate the sorrows or joys of another (sattva); these are paralysis, fainting, horripilation, perspiration, change of colour, trembling, weeping, and change of voice. The transitory or evanescent feelings are given as thirty-three; they are discouragement, weakness, apprehension, weariness, contentment, stupor, joy, depression, cruelty, anxiety, fright, envy, indignation, arrogance, recollection, death, intoxication, dreaming, sleeping, awakening, shame, epilepsy, distraction, assurance, indolence, agitation, deliberation, dissimulation, sickness, insanity, despair, impatience, and inconstancy. But these factors are not sufficient to account for sentiment, nor does theNāṭyaçāstraintend this. It recognizes that an essential element in the production of sentiment is the dominant emotion (sthāyibhāva) which persists throughout the drama amid the variations of the transitory feelings; it stands to the other factors in the position of the king to his subjects or a master to his pupils, as the Çāstra says; it is, says theDaçarūpa, the source of delight, and brings into harmony with itself the transitory states of feeling.[316]It is the dominant emotions which in some fashion determine or become sentiments even in the view of theNāṭyaçāstra, though in it there is clearly difficulty in conceiving the precise signification of the process, a fact revealed in a tendency to confuse the terms emotion and sentiment, Bhāva and Rasa. In Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa68we have a determined effort to make clear the implication of the doctrine. The dominant emotion of love, for instance, generated by a fundamental determinant such as a maiden, inflamed by an excitant determinant such as a pleasant garden, made cognizable by consequents such as sidelong glances and embraces, and strengthened by transitory feelings such as desire, becomes the erotic sentiment first of all in the hero of the drama, e.g. Rāma. The sentiment is subsequently attributed to the actor who imitates the hero in form, dress, and action, and so it becomes the source of charm to the audience. The fatal objection to this theory is clear; it fails to recognize that the sentiment must be that of the spectator himself; he cannot have enjoyment of a sentiment which exists merely in the actor as a secondary outcome of its existence in Rāma. Moreover, the actor whose chief aim is to please the audience and earn money need not feel at all the emotions of Rāma, while, if he does so, he is then in the same position as a spectator.The view of Lollaṭa, which is classed as one of the production (utpatti) of sentiment and regarded as that of the Mīmāṅsā school, is opposed by the doctrine of Çrīçan̄kuka, regarded as the Naiyāyika view, which interprets the manifestation of sentiment as a process of inference. The emotions, love, &c., are inferred to exist in the actor, though not really present in him, by means of the determinants, &c., cleverly exhibited in his acting; the emotion thus inferred, being sensed by the audience, through its exquisite beauty, adds to itself a peculiar charm and thus finally develops into the state of a sentiment in the spectator. This view, however, is open to the fatal objection that it is commonly admitted that it is not inference, or any other derivative mode of knowledge, which produces charm, but perception alone, and no adequate ground exists for disregarding this general truth in this case.[317]In Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka69we find yet a different point of view, which denies either the production (utpatti) of sentiment, its perception or apprehension (pratīti) or its revelation (abhivyakti). If sentiment is perceived as appertaining to another, then it cannot personally affect oneself. But it cannot be perceived as present in oneself as a result of study of a work about Rāma; there are no factors present in the self to produce any such result; it is impossible to hold that an emotion dormant in oneself is called to life by seeing or reading the story of Rāma; experience shows that one’s own beloved does not come up to one’s mind to raise love, nor could a tale of a goddess evoke the picture of a mortal amour; again, such marvellous deeds as Rāma’s have nothing common to mortal efforts so as to be able to awake conceptions of acts of our own. Thus sentiment cannot be apprehended. Nor is it a case of production; if so, no one would go twice to a play of a pathetic type, since one would experience actual misery as the result, in lieu of a pleasant melancholy; again the sight of lovers united does not in real life produce sentiment. Nor is a case of the revelation of something existing potentially (çaktirūpa). If this were so, then, when the potential emotions were let loose, they would occupy their field of action in diverse degrees—thus contradicting the nature of sentiment as one; moreover there would be the same difficulties as in the case of apprehension as to whether revelation applied to the hero or oneself. The true solution, therefore, is to ascribe to a poem a peculiar threefold potency of its own, the power of denotation (abhidhā), which deals with what is expressed, the power of realization (bhāvakatva), which relates to the sentiment, and the power of enjoyment (bhojakatva), which has regard to the audience. If denotation were all, there would be no difference between poetic figures and manuals, there would be absence of the distinctions produced by divergence of literal and metaphorical sense, and the avoidance of harsh sounds would be needless. As it is, we have the second function of realization of sentiment, which causes the expressed sense to serve as the basis of the sentiment, and confers on the determinants, &c., the essential feature of being appropriated by the audience as universal. From this comes the appreciation by the audience[318]of the sentiment, an appreciation consisting in a mental condition made up entirely of the element of goodness or truth (sattva), uninfluenced by the other elements of passion (rajas) and dullness (tamas), that is, entirely free from desire, comparable with meditation on the absolute. This condition is the vital element; the enjoyment ranks above the aesthetic equipment70which renders it possible. To this theory which is sometimes ascribed to the Sāṁkhya,71and called the Bhuktivāda, doctrine of the enjoyment of sentiment, the objection is made that the two powers ascribed to poetry, realization, and enjoyment, have no legitimate foundation.The view finally adopted by the theorists is that defended, but not first enunciated, by Abhinavagupta, based on the general doctrine of suggestion (vyañjanā) as lying at the basis of all poetic pleasure. The spectator’s state of mind must be considered; it is in him that from experience of life there come into being emotional complexes, which lie dormant, ready to be called into activity by the reading of poems or by seeing plays performed. Those whose life has left them barren of impressions of emotions are, accordingly, incapable of relishing dramas, a fate which awaits men whose minds are intent merely on grammar or on the complexities of the Mīmāṅsā. The sentiment thus excited is peculiar, in that it is essentially universal in character; it is common to all other trained spectators, and it has essentially no personal significance. A sentiment is thus something very different from an ordinary emotion; it is generic and disinterested, while an emotion is individual and immediately personal. An emotion again may be pleasant or painful, but a sentiment is marked by that impersonal joy, characteristic of the contemplation of the supreme being by the adept, a bliss which is absolutely without personal feeling. There is in fact a close parallel between the man of taste (sahṛdaya)72and the adept (yogin); both have in them the possibility of attaining this bliss, and, to make it real, the one must investigate the determinants, &c., while the other must apply himself to concentration on the absolute. It is[319]this peculiar nature of sentiment which forbids it being created as the result of denotation or indication by speech, of perception, inference, or recollection. It cannot exist without determinants, &c., but these are not in the normal sense causes; an effect can exist when its causes have disappeared, but sentiment exists only while the determinants, &c., last; the terms used in this regard are one and all distinct from the normal terminology of causation. Sentiment is something supernatural (alaukika); its relations to the factors may be compared with that of a beverage to the black pepper, candied sugar, camphor, &c., which compose it, but of which as such no trace remains in the liquor as produced. This characteristic enables us to understand how it is that the list of sentiments includes that of horror or odium (bībhatsa) and that of fear (bhayānaka), as well as the pathetic sentiment. These are awakened into life by things which cause disgust, fear, and grief in ordinary life, and these emotions in real life are far from pleasant in any sense of that term. But, conveyed as ideal and generic, they produce this supernatural pleasure or happiness, which is not to be compared with normal pleasure, just as the joy of the contemplation of the absolute is not to be described as pleasure in the ordinary sense. Bhānudatta, in hisRasataran̄giṇī, a work composed beforeA.D.1437, distinguishes Rāsa as natural (laukika) and supernatural or transcendental; the former is the emotion experienced in ordinary life—which may more conveniently be distinguished as Bhāva,—the latter includes the emotion experienced in dream experiences, in the building of castles in the air, and in the appreciation of poetry, and he is careful to emphasize the totally different nature of the natural and the transcendental emotion.73The doctrine set out in Abhinavagupta is also that of theDaçarūpa, although it is rendered more obscure there by the brevity of its exposition. The process of transformation of an emotion to a sentiment is formally described; ‘a dominant feeling or emotion becomes a sentiment when it is transformed into an object of enjoyment through the co-operation of the determinants, the consequents, including the involuntary manifestations of feeling, and the transitory feelings’.74The sense is made[320]further precise by the assertion75that the dominant emotion becomes a sentiment, because it is enjoyed by the spectator of taste, and he is actually at present in existence; the sentiment is not located in the hero whose actions are represented, for he belongs to the past, nor does it appertain to the poem, for that is not the object of the poem—its function being to set out the determinants, &c., through which the dominant emotion is brought out and generates the sentiment,—nor is sentiment the apprehension by the spectator of the emotions enacted by the actor, since in that case spectators would feel not sentiment, but an emotion varying in the different individuals, just as in real life from seeing a pair in union those who see them feel according to their nature shame, envy, desire, or aversion. The position of the spectator is compared to that of the child which, when it plays with its clay elephants—the ancient equivalent of our tin soldiers—experiences the sensation of its own energy as pleasant; the deeds of Arjuna arouse a like feeling in the spectator’s mind. This experiencing sentiment is a manifestation of that joy which is innate as the true nature of the self, and this manifestation comes into being as the result of the pervasion of the mind of the spectator with the dominant emotion and the determinants, &c., in combination.An effort is made to describe the precise nature of the mental activity involved in the enjoyment of sentiment, and to base upon it a division of the sentiments. The four sentiments of love, heroism, horror, and fury are taken as primary, and brought into connexion with mental conditions described as the unfolding (vikāsa), expansion (vistara), agitation (kṣobha), and movement to and fro (vikṣepa) of the mind.76These are evidently mental conditions, believed to be reached by introspection, and they have the merit of giving a quasi-psychological rationale for the doctrine of four primary and four secondary sentiments found in theNāṭyaçāstra.77But there was no early agreement on this piece of psychology; Abhinavagupta,78with Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, accepts only three aspects of mental condition as involved, the melting (druti), expansion, and unfolding, a division which is applied also in the theory of poetics to justify the doctrine of the[321]existence of three qualities only of words.79On Dhanaṁjaya’s view the sentiment of calm which he denies for drama,80if it exists at all, must be regarded as combining all the four mental aspects above distinguished.It is now possible to understand clearly the essential relation of the spectator to the actors; we see on the stage, for instance, Rāma and Sītā, who excites his affection, aided by suitable circumstances of time and place; this affection is intimated by speech and gesture alike, which indicate both the dominant emotion of love and its transient shapes in the various stages of love requited. The spectacle evokes in the mind of the spectator the impressions of the emotion of love which experience has planted there, and this ideal and generic excitation of the emotion produces in him that sense of joy which is known as sentiment. The fullness of the enjoyment depends essentially on the nature and experience of the spectator, to whom it falls to identify himself with the hero or other character, and thus to experience in ideal form his emotions and feelings. He may even succeed in his effort to the extent that he weeps real tears, feels terror and sorrow, but the sentiment is still one of exquisite joy. We may compare the thrill of pleasure which the most terrifying narration excites in us, and we are all conscious of the sweetness of sad tales.Viçvanātha insists very strongly on the necessity of the identification of the spectator with the personages depicted, a process which enables him to accept without any difficulty such episodes of extraordinary character as Hanumant’s leap over the ocean.81He must not treat the emotion of love as his own, for in that case it would never become a sentiment; it would remain a feeling, and in the case of fear, for instance, it would cause pain, not joy. Nor must he regard it as belonging solely to the hero, for then it would remain his feeling, and in no wise affect the spectator or become a sentiment. Similarly, the determinants, &c., are not to be treated as pertaining to the hero alone; they must be felt as generic. This generic action (sādhāraṇī kṛti) is the essential feature, replacing the generic power which Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka attributes to poetry. We can now[322]see clearly the position of the actor; theNāṭyaçāstra82bids him as far as possible to assume the emotions of the person whom he represents, and to depict them by costume, speech, movements, and gestures as his own, but Viçvanātha83is more anxious to insist that the sentiment is not necessarily to be found in the actor, who often merely performs mechanically his part according to rote and rule; if he actually does experience the feelings he portrays, then he becomes in so far a spectator.84Further, he points out the simultaneous presence of all the factors is by no means essential, for the existence of one will revive the others by force of the association of ideas. He insists also on the necessity of experience and cultivation of the power of imagination in one who seeks to enjoy sentiment; as we are by virtue of the doctrine of transmigration—or if we prefer to modernize, by heredity—endowed with the germs of the capacity of appreciation, we can normally by study of poetical works develop the capacity, but, if we devote ourselves to the study of grammar or philosophy, we shall certainly deaden our susceptibilities. The difficult problem, why much study of poetry leaves some still unable to relish the sentiment, is explained by the convenient hypothesis that demerit in a previous birth intervenes to frustrate present effort. He refutes at length the effort of Mahiman Bhaṭṭa85to destroy the whole doctrine of suggestion in poetry by the doctrine of inference; doubtless by inference we could arrive at a belief in the existence of an emotion in the hero’s mind but that inference would not produce any effect in us or arouse sentiment; a logician might make the inference and draw the correct conclusion, but would remain cold and unmoved. Suggestiveness, he shows, is absolutely essential as a function of words and as the characteristic of poetry, giving it power to create sentiment. What is expressed may be understood by every one; the man of taste alone appreciates the suggestion and enjoys the flavour resulting.Now sentiment is one, it is a single, ineffable, transcendental joy, but it can be subdivided, not according to its own nature,[323]but according to the emotions which evoke it. Thus theNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes the existence of eight emotions or dominant feelings; love (rati), mirth (hāsa), anger (krodha), sorrow (çoka), energy (utsāha), terror (bhaya), disgust (jugupsā), and astonishment (vismaya), and corresponding to these eight emotions we have eight forms of sentiment. The erotic sentiment (çṛn̄gārarasa) is of two kinds, the union (sambhoga) or sundering (vipralambha) of two lovers, according to the Çāstra and the great mass of theorists, but theDaçarūpa86distinguishes three cases, privation (ayoga), sundering (viprayoga), and union. Privation denotes the inability of two young hearts to secure union, because of obstacles to their marriage; such love passes through ten stages,87longing, anxiety, recollection, enumeration of the loved one’s merits, distress, raving, insanity, fever, stupor, and death. Sundering may be due to absence or resentment, and this in its turn may be caused by a quarrel between two determined lovers, or indignation at finding out, by sight, hearing or inference, that one’s lover is devoted to another. The hero may counteract anger by conciliation, by winning over her friends, by gifts, by humility, by indifference, and by distracting her attention. Absence again may be due to business, to accident, or a curse; if the reason is death the love sentiment cannot, in Dhanaṁjaya’s view, be present, though others allow of a pathetic variety of this sentiment.88In union the lover should avoid vulgarity or annoyance.The heroic (vīra) sentiment corresponds to the emotion of energy; it may take the three forms of courage in battle as in Rāma; compassion as in Jīmūtavāhana; and liberality as in Paraçurāma. Assurance, contentment, arrogance, and joy are the transitory states connected with it. The sentiment of fury (raudra) is based on anger; its transitory states are indignation, intoxication, recollection, inconstancy, envy, cruelty, agitation, and the like. The comic (hāsya) sentiment depends on mirth, which is caused by one’s own or another’s strange appearance, speech, or attire.89The transitory states in connexion with it are[324]sleeping, indolence, weariness, weakness, and stupor. The sentiment of wonder (adbhuta) is based on astonishment; the transitory states are usually joy, agitation, and contentment. The sentiment of terror (bhayānaka) is based on terror; the states associated with it are depression, agitation, distraction, fright, and the like. The pathetic (karuṇa) sentiment is based on sorrow; its associated states are sleeping, epilepsy, depression, sickness, death, indolence, agitation, despair, stupor, insanity, anxiety, and so forth. The sentiment of horror or odium (bībhatsa) is based on disgust; its associated states are agitation, sickness, apprehension, and the like. In each case the theorists give in full the determinants and the consequents of each emotion, which becomes a sentiment, and a special colour is ascribed to each; it is not surprising to find that red is associated with fury, black with fear; whiteness may, in association with the comic sentiment, be explained by the flashing teeth of a laughing maiden, and the dark (çyāma) colour of the erotic sentiment is a reflex of the favoured hue of the beloved; grey accords with pathos, but the connexion of yellow with wonder, dark blue with horror, and orange with heroism is not obvious. It is also artificial to find four primary and four secondary sentiments laid down; the erotic, the furious, the heroic, and that of horror, whence in order are supposed to develop the comic, the pathetic, that of wonder and that of terror. TheNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes these eight only,90but later authorities add the sentiment of calm (çānta) based on indifference to worldly things (nirveda), although this is in the Çāstra merely a transitory feeling. Those who follow the Çāstra contend that there is no such sentiment, for it is impossible to destroy utterly love, hatred, and other feelings, which have been operative from time without beginning; others admit the existence of the sentiment, as does Mammaṭa, but not in drama, on the ground that indifference to all worldly things is incapable of being represented. But this also is erroneous; the actor’s power of representing indifference is not in point, as it is the spectator who is to feel the sentiment, and the fact that the Çāstra places it first in the list of transitory states, though that would normally be an inauspicious beginning, indicates that it was meant to serve both as an emotion and a transitory feeling,[325]and it is fully recognized by Vidyādhara, Viçvanātha, and Jagannātha, though Dhanaṁjaya barely admits it.91The interrelations of the sentiments, their possible combinations, their harmonies and conflicts, are detailed at length.The sentiments may all be employed in drama, but there are rules affecting their use. In each play there should be a dominant sentiment; in the Nāṭaka it should be the erotic or the heroic; other sentiments are merely auxiliary, but that of wonder is especially appropriate in thedénouement; indeed something in the way of supernatural intervention is often convenient to extricate the plot. An excess of sentiments is as bad as a defect; if there are too many they destroy the unity of the whole and detach it into a series of ill-connected fragments, while the excessive use of action and of rhetorical display is equally destructive to the merit of a piece.TheÇakuntalāillustrates excellently the sentiment of love as the ruling motive of the play; the heroic sentiment appears in the verses in Act II in which the hermits extol the king; the horrible in Act VI in the scene in which Mātali menaces the Vidūṣaka; terror is evoked by the description of the dusk at the close of Act III; the whole play from the arrival of Kaṇva in Act IV to the departure of Çakuntalā produces the sentiment of pathos, while that of fury is called into being by the close of Act VI from the despairing cries of the Vidūṣaka to the entry of Mātali; finally wonder is aroused by the strange incident at the close when the king picks up the bracelet fallen from the arm of the child which, unknown to him, is his own son by the wife whom he has in ignorance repudiated. The Nāṭikās afford excellent examples of the erotic sentiment; Harṣa, in complete accord with the rules of the drama, helps out his plot in both theRatnāvalīand thePriyadarçikāby the use of incidents evoking the sentiment of wonder; the imprisonment of Sāgarikā in the former play evokes the sentiment of pathos, while terror is excited by the description in Act II of the wild confusion caused by the monkey’s escape from the royal mews. The sentiment of fury is frequently evoked in theMahāvīracaritaand the[326]Veṇīsaṁhāra; theMālatīmādhavaaffords excellent illustrations evoking horror, while theMahāvīracaritais permeated by the sentiment of heroism. TheNāgānandareveals heroism in another aspect, that of the perfection of compassion and nobility, for, as we have seen, Jīmūtavāhana is not to be regarded as a hero in whom calm prevails.There is doubtless pedantry in the theory of sentiment; the choice of eight emotions, the subordination to them of transitory states, the enumeration of determinants and consequents, are largely dominated by empiricism, and not explained or justified. But in its essentials the theory may be admitted to be a bold and by no means negligible attempt to indicate the essential character of the emotional effect of drama.
[Contents]5.The SentimentsThe most original and interesting part of dramatic theory is the gradual definition of the nature of the sentiment which it is the aim of the performance to evoke in the mind of the audience.66[315]The statement of theNāṭyaçāstrais simple. Sentiment is produced from the union of the determinants (vibhāva), the consequents (anubhāva), and the transitory feelings (vyabhicārin). The determinants fall in the later classification into two divisions, the fundamental determinants (ālambana) and the excitant determinants (uddīpana); fundamental determinants comprise such things as the heroine or the hero, for without them there can be no creation of sentiment in the audience; excitant determinants are such conditions of place and time and circumstance as serve to foster sentiment when it has arisen, for instance the moon, the cry of the cuckoo, the soft breeze from Malaya, all things which foster the erotic sentiment. The consequents are the external manifestations of feeling, by which the actors exhibit to the audience the minds and hearts of the persons of the drama, such as sidelong glances, a smile, a movement of the arm, and—though this is but slightly indicated in later texts—his words.67A special class is later made of those consequents, which are the involuntary product of sympathetic realization of the feeling of the person portrayed, and hence are called Sāttvika, as arising from a heart which is ready to appreciate the sorrows or joys of another (sattva); these are paralysis, fainting, horripilation, perspiration, change of colour, trembling, weeping, and change of voice. The transitory or evanescent feelings are given as thirty-three; they are discouragement, weakness, apprehension, weariness, contentment, stupor, joy, depression, cruelty, anxiety, fright, envy, indignation, arrogance, recollection, death, intoxication, dreaming, sleeping, awakening, shame, epilepsy, distraction, assurance, indolence, agitation, deliberation, dissimulation, sickness, insanity, despair, impatience, and inconstancy. But these factors are not sufficient to account for sentiment, nor does theNāṭyaçāstraintend this. It recognizes that an essential element in the production of sentiment is the dominant emotion (sthāyibhāva) which persists throughout the drama amid the variations of the transitory feelings; it stands to the other factors in the position of the king to his subjects or a master to his pupils, as the Çāstra says; it is, says theDaçarūpa, the source of delight, and brings into harmony with itself the transitory states of feeling.[316]It is the dominant emotions which in some fashion determine or become sentiments even in the view of theNāṭyaçāstra, though in it there is clearly difficulty in conceiving the precise signification of the process, a fact revealed in a tendency to confuse the terms emotion and sentiment, Bhāva and Rasa. In Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa68we have a determined effort to make clear the implication of the doctrine. The dominant emotion of love, for instance, generated by a fundamental determinant such as a maiden, inflamed by an excitant determinant such as a pleasant garden, made cognizable by consequents such as sidelong glances and embraces, and strengthened by transitory feelings such as desire, becomes the erotic sentiment first of all in the hero of the drama, e.g. Rāma. The sentiment is subsequently attributed to the actor who imitates the hero in form, dress, and action, and so it becomes the source of charm to the audience. The fatal objection to this theory is clear; it fails to recognize that the sentiment must be that of the spectator himself; he cannot have enjoyment of a sentiment which exists merely in the actor as a secondary outcome of its existence in Rāma. Moreover, the actor whose chief aim is to please the audience and earn money need not feel at all the emotions of Rāma, while, if he does so, he is then in the same position as a spectator.The view of Lollaṭa, which is classed as one of the production (utpatti) of sentiment and regarded as that of the Mīmāṅsā school, is opposed by the doctrine of Çrīçan̄kuka, regarded as the Naiyāyika view, which interprets the manifestation of sentiment as a process of inference. The emotions, love, &c., are inferred to exist in the actor, though not really present in him, by means of the determinants, &c., cleverly exhibited in his acting; the emotion thus inferred, being sensed by the audience, through its exquisite beauty, adds to itself a peculiar charm and thus finally develops into the state of a sentiment in the spectator. This view, however, is open to the fatal objection that it is commonly admitted that it is not inference, or any other derivative mode of knowledge, which produces charm, but perception alone, and no adequate ground exists for disregarding this general truth in this case.[317]In Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka69we find yet a different point of view, which denies either the production (utpatti) of sentiment, its perception or apprehension (pratīti) or its revelation (abhivyakti). If sentiment is perceived as appertaining to another, then it cannot personally affect oneself. But it cannot be perceived as present in oneself as a result of study of a work about Rāma; there are no factors present in the self to produce any such result; it is impossible to hold that an emotion dormant in oneself is called to life by seeing or reading the story of Rāma; experience shows that one’s own beloved does not come up to one’s mind to raise love, nor could a tale of a goddess evoke the picture of a mortal amour; again, such marvellous deeds as Rāma’s have nothing common to mortal efforts so as to be able to awake conceptions of acts of our own. Thus sentiment cannot be apprehended. Nor is it a case of production; if so, no one would go twice to a play of a pathetic type, since one would experience actual misery as the result, in lieu of a pleasant melancholy; again the sight of lovers united does not in real life produce sentiment. Nor is a case of the revelation of something existing potentially (çaktirūpa). If this were so, then, when the potential emotions were let loose, they would occupy their field of action in diverse degrees—thus contradicting the nature of sentiment as one; moreover there would be the same difficulties as in the case of apprehension as to whether revelation applied to the hero or oneself. The true solution, therefore, is to ascribe to a poem a peculiar threefold potency of its own, the power of denotation (abhidhā), which deals with what is expressed, the power of realization (bhāvakatva), which relates to the sentiment, and the power of enjoyment (bhojakatva), which has regard to the audience. If denotation were all, there would be no difference between poetic figures and manuals, there would be absence of the distinctions produced by divergence of literal and metaphorical sense, and the avoidance of harsh sounds would be needless. As it is, we have the second function of realization of sentiment, which causes the expressed sense to serve as the basis of the sentiment, and confers on the determinants, &c., the essential feature of being appropriated by the audience as universal. From this comes the appreciation by the audience[318]of the sentiment, an appreciation consisting in a mental condition made up entirely of the element of goodness or truth (sattva), uninfluenced by the other elements of passion (rajas) and dullness (tamas), that is, entirely free from desire, comparable with meditation on the absolute. This condition is the vital element; the enjoyment ranks above the aesthetic equipment70which renders it possible. To this theory which is sometimes ascribed to the Sāṁkhya,71and called the Bhuktivāda, doctrine of the enjoyment of sentiment, the objection is made that the two powers ascribed to poetry, realization, and enjoyment, have no legitimate foundation.The view finally adopted by the theorists is that defended, but not first enunciated, by Abhinavagupta, based on the general doctrine of suggestion (vyañjanā) as lying at the basis of all poetic pleasure. The spectator’s state of mind must be considered; it is in him that from experience of life there come into being emotional complexes, which lie dormant, ready to be called into activity by the reading of poems or by seeing plays performed. Those whose life has left them barren of impressions of emotions are, accordingly, incapable of relishing dramas, a fate which awaits men whose minds are intent merely on grammar or on the complexities of the Mīmāṅsā. The sentiment thus excited is peculiar, in that it is essentially universal in character; it is common to all other trained spectators, and it has essentially no personal significance. A sentiment is thus something very different from an ordinary emotion; it is generic and disinterested, while an emotion is individual and immediately personal. An emotion again may be pleasant or painful, but a sentiment is marked by that impersonal joy, characteristic of the contemplation of the supreme being by the adept, a bliss which is absolutely without personal feeling. There is in fact a close parallel between the man of taste (sahṛdaya)72and the adept (yogin); both have in them the possibility of attaining this bliss, and, to make it real, the one must investigate the determinants, &c., while the other must apply himself to concentration on the absolute. It is[319]this peculiar nature of sentiment which forbids it being created as the result of denotation or indication by speech, of perception, inference, or recollection. It cannot exist without determinants, &c., but these are not in the normal sense causes; an effect can exist when its causes have disappeared, but sentiment exists only while the determinants, &c., last; the terms used in this regard are one and all distinct from the normal terminology of causation. Sentiment is something supernatural (alaukika); its relations to the factors may be compared with that of a beverage to the black pepper, candied sugar, camphor, &c., which compose it, but of which as such no trace remains in the liquor as produced. This characteristic enables us to understand how it is that the list of sentiments includes that of horror or odium (bībhatsa) and that of fear (bhayānaka), as well as the pathetic sentiment. These are awakened into life by things which cause disgust, fear, and grief in ordinary life, and these emotions in real life are far from pleasant in any sense of that term. But, conveyed as ideal and generic, they produce this supernatural pleasure or happiness, which is not to be compared with normal pleasure, just as the joy of the contemplation of the absolute is not to be described as pleasure in the ordinary sense. Bhānudatta, in hisRasataran̄giṇī, a work composed beforeA.D.1437, distinguishes Rāsa as natural (laukika) and supernatural or transcendental; the former is the emotion experienced in ordinary life—which may more conveniently be distinguished as Bhāva,—the latter includes the emotion experienced in dream experiences, in the building of castles in the air, and in the appreciation of poetry, and he is careful to emphasize the totally different nature of the natural and the transcendental emotion.73The doctrine set out in Abhinavagupta is also that of theDaçarūpa, although it is rendered more obscure there by the brevity of its exposition. The process of transformation of an emotion to a sentiment is formally described; ‘a dominant feeling or emotion becomes a sentiment when it is transformed into an object of enjoyment through the co-operation of the determinants, the consequents, including the involuntary manifestations of feeling, and the transitory feelings’.74The sense is made[320]further precise by the assertion75that the dominant emotion becomes a sentiment, because it is enjoyed by the spectator of taste, and he is actually at present in existence; the sentiment is not located in the hero whose actions are represented, for he belongs to the past, nor does it appertain to the poem, for that is not the object of the poem—its function being to set out the determinants, &c., through which the dominant emotion is brought out and generates the sentiment,—nor is sentiment the apprehension by the spectator of the emotions enacted by the actor, since in that case spectators would feel not sentiment, but an emotion varying in the different individuals, just as in real life from seeing a pair in union those who see them feel according to their nature shame, envy, desire, or aversion. The position of the spectator is compared to that of the child which, when it plays with its clay elephants—the ancient equivalent of our tin soldiers—experiences the sensation of its own energy as pleasant; the deeds of Arjuna arouse a like feeling in the spectator’s mind. This experiencing sentiment is a manifestation of that joy which is innate as the true nature of the self, and this manifestation comes into being as the result of the pervasion of the mind of the spectator with the dominant emotion and the determinants, &c., in combination.An effort is made to describe the precise nature of the mental activity involved in the enjoyment of sentiment, and to base upon it a division of the sentiments. The four sentiments of love, heroism, horror, and fury are taken as primary, and brought into connexion with mental conditions described as the unfolding (vikāsa), expansion (vistara), agitation (kṣobha), and movement to and fro (vikṣepa) of the mind.76These are evidently mental conditions, believed to be reached by introspection, and they have the merit of giving a quasi-psychological rationale for the doctrine of four primary and four secondary sentiments found in theNāṭyaçāstra.77But there was no early agreement on this piece of psychology; Abhinavagupta,78with Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, accepts only three aspects of mental condition as involved, the melting (druti), expansion, and unfolding, a division which is applied also in the theory of poetics to justify the doctrine of the[321]existence of three qualities only of words.79On Dhanaṁjaya’s view the sentiment of calm which he denies for drama,80if it exists at all, must be regarded as combining all the four mental aspects above distinguished.It is now possible to understand clearly the essential relation of the spectator to the actors; we see on the stage, for instance, Rāma and Sītā, who excites his affection, aided by suitable circumstances of time and place; this affection is intimated by speech and gesture alike, which indicate both the dominant emotion of love and its transient shapes in the various stages of love requited. The spectacle evokes in the mind of the spectator the impressions of the emotion of love which experience has planted there, and this ideal and generic excitation of the emotion produces in him that sense of joy which is known as sentiment. The fullness of the enjoyment depends essentially on the nature and experience of the spectator, to whom it falls to identify himself with the hero or other character, and thus to experience in ideal form his emotions and feelings. He may even succeed in his effort to the extent that he weeps real tears, feels terror and sorrow, but the sentiment is still one of exquisite joy. We may compare the thrill of pleasure which the most terrifying narration excites in us, and we are all conscious of the sweetness of sad tales.Viçvanātha insists very strongly on the necessity of the identification of the spectator with the personages depicted, a process which enables him to accept without any difficulty such episodes of extraordinary character as Hanumant’s leap over the ocean.81He must not treat the emotion of love as his own, for in that case it would never become a sentiment; it would remain a feeling, and in the case of fear, for instance, it would cause pain, not joy. Nor must he regard it as belonging solely to the hero, for then it would remain his feeling, and in no wise affect the spectator or become a sentiment. Similarly, the determinants, &c., are not to be treated as pertaining to the hero alone; they must be felt as generic. This generic action (sādhāraṇī kṛti) is the essential feature, replacing the generic power which Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka attributes to poetry. We can now[322]see clearly the position of the actor; theNāṭyaçāstra82bids him as far as possible to assume the emotions of the person whom he represents, and to depict them by costume, speech, movements, and gestures as his own, but Viçvanātha83is more anxious to insist that the sentiment is not necessarily to be found in the actor, who often merely performs mechanically his part according to rote and rule; if he actually does experience the feelings he portrays, then he becomes in so far a spectator.84Further, he points out the simultaneous presence of all the factors is by no means essential, for the existence of one will revive the others by force of the association of ideas. He insists also on the necessity of experience and cultivation of the power of imagination in one who seeks to enjoy sentiment; as we are by virtue of the doctrine of transmigration—or if we prefer to modernize, by heredity—endowed with the germs of the capacity of appreciation, we can normally by study of poetical works develop the capacity, but, if we devote ourselves to the study of grammar or philosophy, we shall certainly deaden our susceptibilities. The difficult problem, why much study of poetry leaves some still unable to relish the sentiment, is explained by the convenient hypothesis that demerit in a previous birth intervenes to frustrate present effort. He refutes at length the effort of Mahiman Bhaṭṭa85to destroy the whole doctrine of suggestion in poetry by the doctrine of inference; doubtless by inference we could arrive at a belief in the existence of an emotion in the hero’s mind but that inference would not produce any effect in us or arouse sentiment; a logician might make the inference and draw the correct conclusion, but would remain cold and unmoved. Suggestiveness, he shows, is absolutely essential as a function of words and as the characteristic of poetry, giving it power to create sentiment. What is expressed may be understood by every one; the man of taste alone appreciates the suggestion and enjoys the flavour resulting.Now sentiment is one, it is a single, ineffable, transcendental joy, but it can be subdivided, not according to its own nature,[323]but according to the emotions which evoke it. Thus theNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes the existence of eight emotions or dominant feelings; love (rati), mirth (hāsa), anger (krodha), sorrow (çoka), energy (utsāha), terror (bhaya), disgust (jugupsā), and astonishment (vismaya), and corresponding to these eight emotions we have eight forms of sentiment. The erotic sentiment (çṛn̄gārarasa) is of two kinds, the union (sambhoga) or sundering (vipralambha) of two lovers, according to the Çāstra and the great mass of theorists, but theDaçarūpa86distinguishes three cases, privation (ayoga), sundering (viprayoga), and union. Privation denotes the inability of two young hearts to secure union, because of obstacles to their marriage; such love passes through ten stages,87longing, anxiety, recollection, enumeration of the loved one’s merits, distress, raving, insanity, fever, stupor, and death. Sundering may be due to absence or resentment, and this in its turn may be caused by a quarrel between two determined lovers, or indignation at finding out, by sight, hearing or inference, that one’s lover is devoted to another. The hero may counteract anger by conciliation, by winning over her friends, by gifts, by humility, by indifference, and by distracting her attention. Absence again may be due to business, to accident, or a curse; if the reason is death the love sentiment cannot, in Dhanaṁjaya’s view, be present, though others allow of a pathetic variety of this sentiment.88In union the lover should avoid vulgarity or annoyance.The heroic (vīra) sentiment corresponds to the emotion of energy; it may take the three forms of courage in battle as in Rāma; compassion as in Jīmūtavāhana; and liberality as in Paraçurāma. Assurance, contentment, arrogance, and joy are the transitory states connected with it. The sentiment of fury (raudra) is based on anger; its transitory states are indignation, intoxication, recollection, inconstancy, envy, cruelty, agitation, and the like. The comic (hāsya) sentiment depends on mirth, which is caused by one’s own or another’s strange appearance, speech, or attire.89The transitory states in connexion with it are[324]sleeping, indolence, weariness, weakness, and stupor. The sentiment of wonder (adbhuta) is based on astonishment; the transitory states are usually joy, agitation, and contentment. The sentiment of terror (bhayānaka) is based on terror; the states associated with it are depression, agitation, distraction, fright, and the like. The pathetic (karuṇa) sentiment is based on sorrow; its associated states are sleeping, epilepsy, depression, sickness, death, indolence, agitation, despair, stupor, insanity, anxiety, and so forth. The sentiment of horror or odium (bībhatsa) is based on disgust; its associated states are agitation, sickness, apprehension, and the like. In each case the theorists give in full the determinants and the consequents of each emotion, which becomes a sentiment, and a special colour is ascribed to each; it is not surprising to find that red is associated with fury, black with fear; whiteness may, in association with the comic sentiment, be explained by the flashing teeth of a laughing maiden, and the dark (çyāma) colour of the erotic sentiment is a reflex of the favoured hue of the beloved; grey accords with pathos, but the connexion of yellow with wonder, dark blue with horror, and orange with heroism is not obvious. It is also artificial to find four primary and four secondary sentiments laid down; the erotic, the furious, the heroic, and that of horror, whence in order are supposed to develop the comic, the pathetic, that of wonder and that of terror. TheNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes these eight only,90but later authorities add the sentiment of calm (çānta) based on indifference to worldly things (nirveda), although this is in the Çāstra merely a transitory feeling. Those who follow the Çāstra contend that there is no such sentiment, for it is impossible to destroy utterly love, hatred, and other feelings, which have been operative from time without beginning; others admit the existence of the sentiment, as does Mammaṭa, but not in drama, on the ground that indifference to all worldly things is incapable of being represented. But this also is erroneous; the actor’s power of representing indifference is not in point, as it is the spectator who is to feel the sentiment, and the fact that the Çāstra places it first in the list of transitory states, though that would normally be an inauspicious beginning, indicates that it was meant to serve both as an emotion and a transitory feeling,[325]and it is fully recognized by Vidyādhara, Viçvanātha, and Jagannātha, though Dhanaṁjaya barely admits it.91The interrelations of the sentiments, their possible combinations, their harmonies and conflicts, are detailed at length.The sentiments may all be employed in drama, but there are rules affecting their use. In each play there should be a dominant sentiment; in the Nāṭaka it should be the erotic or the heroic; other sentiments are merely auxiliary, but that of wonder is especially appropriate in thedénouement; indeed something in the way of supernatural intervention is often convenient to extricate the plot. An excess of sentiments is as bad as a defect; if there are too many they destroy the unity of the whole and detach it into a series of ill-connected fragments, while the excessive use of action and of rhetorical display is equally destructive to the merit of a piece.TheÇakuntalāillustrates excellently the sentiment of love as the ruling motive of the play; the heroic sentiment appears in the verses in Act II in which the hermits extol the king; the horrible in Act VI in the scene in which Mātali menaces the Vidūṣaka; terror is evoked by the description of the dusk at the close of Act III; the whole play from the arrival of Kaṇva in Act IV to the departure of Çakuntalā produces the sentiment of pathos, while that of fury is called into being by the close of Act VI from the despairing cries of the Vidūṣaka to the entry of Mātali; finally wonder is aroused by the strange incident at the close when the king picks up the bracelet fallen from the arm of the child which, unknown to him, is his own son by the wife whom he has in ignorance repudiated. The Nāṭikās afford excellent examples of the erotic sentiment; Harṣa, in complete accord with the rules of the drama, helps out his plot in both theRatnāvalīand thePriyadarçikāby the use of incidents evoking the sentiment of wonder; the imprisonment of Sāgarikā in the former play evokes the sentiment of pathos, while terror is excited by the description in Act II of the wild confusion caused by the monkey’s escape from the royal mews. The sentiment of fury is frequently evoked in theMahāvīracaritaand the[326]Veṇīsaṁhāra; theMālatīmādhavaaffords excellent illustrations evoking horror, while theMahāvīracaritais permeated by the sentiment of heroism. TheNāgānandareveals heroism in another aspect, that of the perfection of compassion and nobility, for, as we have seen, Jīmūtavāhana is not to be regarded as a hero in whom calm prevails.There is doubtless pedantry in the theory of sentiment; the choice of eight emotions, the subordination to them of transitory states, the enumeration of determinants and consequents, are largely dominated by empiricism, and not explained or justified. But in its essentials the theory may be admitted to be a bold and by no means negligible attempt to indicate the essential character of the emotional effect of drama.
[Contents]5.The SentimentsThe most original and interesting part of dramatic theory is the gradual definition of the nature of the sentiment which it is the aim of the performance to evoke in the mind of the audience.66[315]The statement of theNāṭyaçāstrais simple. Sentiment is produced from the union of the determinants (vibhāva), the consequents (anubhāva), and the transitory feelings (vyabhicārin). The determinants fall in the later classification into two divisions, the fundamental determinants (ālambana) and the excitant determinants (uddīpana); fundamental determinants comprise such things as the heroine or the hero, for without them there can be no creation of sentiment in the audience; excitant determinants are such conditions of place and time and circumstance as serve to foster sentiment when it has arisen, for instance the moon, the cry of the cuckoo, the soft breeze from Malaya, all things which foster the erotic sentiment. The consequents are the external manifestations of feeling, by which the actors exhibit to the audience the minds and hearts of the persons of the drama, such as sidelong glances, a smile, a movement of the arm, and—though this is but slightly indicated in later texts—his words.67A special class is later made of those consequents, which are the involuntary product of sympathetic realization of the feeling of the person portrayed, and hence are called Sāttvika, as arising from a heart which is ready to appreciate the sorrows or joys of another (sattva); these are paralysis, fainting, horripilation, perspiration, change of colour, trembling, weeping, and change of voice. The transitory or evanescent feelings are given as thirty-three; they are discouragement, weakness, apprehension, weariness, contentment, stupor, joy, depression, cruelty, anxiety, fright, envy, indignation, arrogance, recollection, death, intoxication, dreaming, sleeping, awakening, shame, epilepsy, distraction, assurance, indolence, agitation, deliberation, dissimulation, sickness, insanity, despair, impatience, and inconstancy. But these factors are not sufficient to account for sentiment, nor does theNāṭyaçāstraintend this. It recognizes that an essential element in the production of sentiment is the dominant emotion (sthāyibhāva) which persists throughout the drama amid the variations of the transitory feelings; it stands to the other factors in the position of the king to his subjects or a master to his pupils, as the Çāstra says; it is, says theDaçarūpa, the source of delight, and brings into harmony with itself the transitory states of feeling.[316]It is the dominant emotions which in some fashion determine or become sentiments even in the view of theNāṭyaçāstra, though in it there is clearly difficulty in conceiving the precise signification of the process, a fact revealed in a tendency to confuse the terms emotion and sentiment, Bhāva and Rasa. In Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa68we have a determined effort to make clear the implication of the doctrine. The dominant emotion of love, for instance, generated by a fundamental determinant such as a maiden, inflamed by an excitant determinant such as a pleasant garden, made cognizable by consequents such as sidelong glances and embraces, and strengthened by transitory feelings such as desire, becomes the erotic sentiment first of all in the hero of the drama, e.g. Rāma. The sentiment is subsequently attributed to the actor who imitates the hero in form, dress, and action, and so it becomes the source of charm to the audience. The fatal objection to this theory is clear; it fails to recognize that the sentiment must be that of the spectator himself; he cannot have enjoyment of a sentiment which exists merely in the actor as a secondary outcome of its existence in Rāma. Moreover, the actor whose chief aim is to please the audience and earn money need not feel at all the emotions of Rāma, while, if he does so, he is then in the same position as a spectator.The view of Lollaṭa, which is classed as one of the production (utpatti) of sentiment and regarded as that of the Mīmāṅsā school, is opposed by the doctrine of Çrīçan̄kuka, regarded as the Naiyāyika view, which interprets the manifestation of sentiment as a process of inference. The emotions, love, &c., are inferred to exist in the actor, though not really present in him, by means of the determinants, &c., cleverly exhibited in his acting; the emotion thus inferred, being sensed by the audience, through its exquisite beauty, adds to itself a peculiar charm and thus finally develops into the state of a sentiment in the spectator. This view, however, is open to the fatal objection that it is commonly admitted that it is not inference, or any other derivative mode of knowledge, which produces charm, but perception alone, and no adequate ground exists for disregarding this general truth in this case.[317]In Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka69we find yet a different point of view, which denies either the production (utpatti) of sentiment, its perception or apprehension (pratīti) or its revelation (abhivyakti). If sentiment is perceived as appertaining to another, then it cannot personally affect oneself. But it cannot be perceived as present in oneself as a result of study of a work about Rāma; there are no factors present in the self to produce any such result; it is impossible to hold that an emotion dormant in oneself is called to life by seeing or reading the story of Rāma; experience shows that one’s own beloved does not come up to one’s mind to raise love, nor could a tale of a goddess evoke the picture of a mortal amour; again, such marvellous deeds as Rāma’s have nothing common to mortal efforts so as to be able to awake conceptions of acts of our own. Thus sentiment cannot be apprehended. Nor is it a case of production; if so, no one would go twice to a play of a pathetic type, since one would experience actual misery as the result, in lieu of a pleasant melancholy; again the sight of lovers united does not in real life produce sentiment. Nor is a case of the revelation of something existing potentially (çaktirūpa). If this were so, then, when the potential emotions were let loose, they would occupy their field of action in diverse degrees—thus contradicting the nature of sentiment as one; moreover there would be the same difficulties as in the case of apprehension as to whether revelation applied to the hero or oneself. The true solution, therefore, is to ascribe to a poem a peculiar threefold potency of its own, the power of denotation (abhidhā), which deals with what is expressed, the power of realization (bhāvakatva), which relates to the sentiment, and the power of enjoyment (bhojakatva), which has regard to the audience. If denotation were all, there would be no difference between poetic figures and manuals, there would be absence of the distinctions produced by divergence of literal and metaphorical sense, and the avoidance of harsh sounds would be needless. As it is, we have the second function of realization of sentiment, which causes the expressed sense to serve as the basis of the sentiment, and confers on the determinants, &c., the essential feature of being appropriated by the audience as universal. From this comes the appreciation by the audience[318]of the sentiment, an appreciation consisting in a mental condition made up entirely of the element of goodness or truth (sattva), uninfluenced by the other elements of passion (rajas) and dullness (tamas), that is, entirely free from desire, comparable with meditation on the absolute. This condition is the vital element; the enjoyment ranks above the aesthetic equipment70which renders it possible. To this theory which is sometimes ascribed to the Sāṁkhya,71and called the Bhuktivāda, doctrine of the enjoyment of sentiment, the objection is made that the two powers ascribed to poetry, realization, and enjoyment, have no legitimate foundation.The view finally adopted by the theorists is that defended, but not first enunciated, by Abhinavagupta, based on the general doctrine of suggestion (vyañjanā) as lying at the basis of all poetic pleasure. The spectator’s state of mind must be considered; it is in him that from experience of life there come into being emotional complexes, which lie dormant, ready to be called into activity by the reading of poems or by seeing plays performed. Those whose life has left them barren of impressions of emotions are, accordingly, incapable of relishing dramas, a fate which awaits men whose minds are intent merely on grammar or on the complexities of the Mīmāṅsā. The sentiment thus excited is peculiar, in that it is essentially universal in character; it is common to all other trained spectators, and it has essentially no personal significance. A sentiment is thus something very different from an ordinary emotion; it is generic and disinterested, while an emotion is individual and immediately personal. An emotion again may be pleasant or painful, but a sentiment is marked by that impersonal joy, characteristic of the contemplation of the supreme being by the adept, a bliss which is absolutely without personal feeling. There is in fact a close parallel between the man of taste (sahṛdaya)72and the adept (yogin); both have in them the possibility of attaining this bliss, and, to make it real, the one must investigate the determinants, &c., while the other must apply himself to concentration on the absolute. It is[319]this peculiar nature of sentiment which forbids it being created as the result of denotation or indication by speech, of perception, inference, or recollection. It cannot exist without determinants, &c., but these are not in the normal sense causes; an effect can exist when its causes have disappeared, but sentiment exists only while the determinants, &c., last; the terms used in this regard are one and all distinct from the normal terminology of causation. Sentiment is something supernatural (alaukika); its relations to the factors may be compared with that of a beverage to the black pepper, candied sugar, camphor, &c., which compose it, but of which as such no trace remains in the liquor as produced. This characteristic enables us to understand how it is that the list of sentiments includes that of horror or odium (bībhatsa) and that of fear (bhayānaka), as well as the pathetic sentiment. These are awakened into life by things which cause disgust, fear, and grief in ordinary life, and these emotions in real life are far from pleasant in any sense of that term. But, conveyed as ideal and generic, they produce this supernatural pleasure or happiness, which is not to be compared with normal pleasure, just as the joy of the contemplation of the absolute is not to be described as pleasure in the ordinary sense. Bhānudatta, in hisRasataran̄giṇī, a work composed beforeA.D.1437, distinguishes Rāsa as natural (laukika) and supernatural or transcendental; the former is the emotion experienced in ordinary life—which may more conveniently be distinguished as Bhāva,—the latter includes the emotion experienced in dream experiences, in the building of castles in the air, and in the appreciation of poetry, and he is careful to emphasize the totally different nature of the natural and the transcendental emotion.73The doctrine set out in Abhinavagupta is also that of theDaçarūpa, although it is rendered more obscure there by the brevity of its exposition. The process of transformation of an emotion to a sentiment is formally described; ‘a dominant feeling or emotion becomes a sentiment when it is transformed into an object of enjoyment through the co-operation of the determinants, the consequents, including the involuntary manifestations of feeling, and the transitory feelings’.74The sense is made[320]further precise by the assertion75that the dominant emotion becomes a sentiment, because it is enjoyed by the spectator of taste, and he is actually at present in existence; the sentiment is not located in the hero whose actions are represented, for he belongs to the past, nor does it appertain to the poem, for that is not the object of the poem—its function being to set out the determinants, &c., through which the dominant emotion is brought out and generates the sentiment,—nor is sentiment the apprehension by the spectator of the emotions enacted by the actor, since in that case spectators would feel not sentiment, but an emotion varying in the different individuals, just as in real life from seeing a pair in union those who see them feel according to their nature shame, envy, desire, or aversion. The position of the spectator is compared to that of the child which, when it plays with its clay elephants—the ancient equivalent of our tin soldiers—experiences the sensation of its own energy as pleasant; the deeds of Arjuna arouse a like feeling in the spectator’s mind. This experiencing sentiment is a manifestation of that joy which is innate as the true nature of the self, and this manifestation comes into being as the result of the pervasion of the mind of the spectator with the dominant emotion and the determinants, &c., in combination.An effort is made to describe the precise nature of the mental activity involved in the enjoyment of sentiment, and to base upon it a division of the sentiments. The four sentiments of love, heroism, horror, and fury are taken as primary, and brought into connexion with mental conditions described as the unfolding (vikāsa), expansion (vistara), agitation (kṣobha), and movement to and fro (vikṣepa) of the mind.76These are evidently mental conditions, believed to be reached by introspection, and they have the merit of giving a quasi-psychological rationale for the doctrine of four primary and four secondary sentiments found in theNāṭyaçāstra.77But there was no early agreement on this piece of psychology; Abhinavagupta,78with Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, accepts only three aspects of mental condition as involved, the melting (druti), expansion, and unfolding, a division which is applied also in the theory of poetics to justify the doctrine of the[321]existence of three qualities only of words.79On Dhanaṁjaya’s view the sentiment of calm which he denies for drama,80if it exists at all, must be regarded as combining all the four mental aspects above distinguished.It is now possible to understand clearly the essential relation of the spectator to the actors; we see on the stage, for instance, Rāma and Sītā, who excites his affection, aided by suitable circumstances of time and place; this affection is intimated by speech and gesture alike, which indicate both the dominant emotion of love and its transient shapes in the various stages of love requited. The spectacle evokes in the mind of the spectator the impressions of the emotion of love which experience has planted there, and this ideal and generic excitation of the emotion produces in him that sense of joy which is known as sentiment. The fullness of the enjoyment depends essentially on the nature and experience of the spectator, to whom it falls to identify himself with the hero or other character, and thus to experience in ideal form his emotions and feelings. He may even succeed in his effort to the extent that he weeps real tears, feels terror and sorrow, but the sentiment is still one of exquisite joy. We may compare the thrill of pleasure which the most terrifying narration excites in us, and we are all conscious of the sweetness of sad tales.Viçvanātha insists very strongly on the necessity of the identification of the spectator with the personages depicted, a process which enables him to accept without any difficulty such episodes of extraordinary character as Hanumant’s leap over the ocean.81He must not treat the emotion of love as his own, for in that case it would never become a sentiment; it would remain a feeling, and in the case of fear, for instance, it would cause pain, not joy. Nor must he regard it as belonging solely to the hero, for then it would remain his feeling, and in no wise affect the spectator or become a sentiment. Similarly, the determinants, &c., are not to be treated as pertaining to the hero alone; they must be felt as generic. This generic action (sādhāraṇī kṛti) is the essential feature, replacing the generic power which Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka attributes to poetry. We can now[322]see clearly the position of the actor; theNāṭyaçāstra82bids him as far as possible to assume the emotions of the person whom he represents, and to depict them by costume, speech, movements, and gestures as his own, but Viçvanātha83is more anxious to insist that the sentiment is not necessarily to be found in the actor, who often merely performs mechanically his part according to rote and rule; if he actually does experience the feelings he portrays, then he becomes in so far a spectator.84Further, he points out the simultaneous presence of all the factors is by no means essential, for the existence of one will revive the others by force of the association of ideas. He insists also on the necessity of experience and cultivation of the power of imagination in one who seeks to enjoy sentiment; as we are by virtue of the doctrine of transmigration—or if we prefer to modernize, by heredity—endowed with the germs of the capacity of appreciation, we can normally by study of poetical works develop the capacity, but, if we devote ourselves to the study of grammar or philosophy, we shall certainly deaden our susceptibilities. The difficult problem, why much study of poetry leaves some still unable to relish the sentiment, is explained by the convenient hypothesis that demerit in a previous birth intervenes to frustrate present effort. He refutes at length the effort of Mahiman Bhaṭṭa85to destroy the whole doctrine of suggestion in poetry by the doctrine of inference; doubtless by inference we could arrive at a belief in the existence of an emotion in the hero’s mind but that inference would not produce any effect in us or arouse sentiment; a logician might make the inference and draw the correct conclusion, but would remain cold and unmoved. Suggestiveness, he shows, is absolutely essential as a function of words and as the characteristic of poetry, giving it power to create sentiment. What is expressed may be understood by every one; the man of taste alone appreciates the suggestion and enjoys the flavour resulting.Now sentiment is one, it is a single, ineffable, transcendental joy, but it can be subdivided, not according to its own nature,[323]but according to the emotions which evoke it. Thus theNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes the existence of eight emotions or dominant feelings; love (rati), mirth (hāsa), anger (krodha), sorrow (çoka), energy (utsāha), terror (bhaya), disgust (jugupsā), and astonishment (vismaya), and corresponding to these eight emotions we have eight forms of sentiment. The erotic sentiment (çṛn̄gārarasa) is of two kinds, the union (sambhoga) or sundering (vipralambha) of two lovers, according to the Çāstra and the great mass of theorists, but theDaçarūpa86distinguishes three cases, privation (ayoga), sundering (viprayoga), and union. Privation denotes the inability of two young hearts to secure union, because of obstacles to their marriage; such love passes through ten stages,87longing, anxiety, recollection, enumeration of the loved one’s merits, distress, raving, insanity, fever, stupor, and death. Sundering may be due to absence or resentment, and this in its turn may be caused by a quarrel between two determined lovers, or indignation at finding out, by sight, hearing or inference, that one’s lover is devoted to another. The hero may counteract anger by conciliation, by winning over her friends, by gifts, by humility, by indifference, and by distracting her attention. Absence again may be due to business, to accident, or a curse; if the reason is death the love sentiment cannot, in Dhanaṁjaya’s view, be present, though others allow of a pathetic variety of this sentiment.88In union the lover should avoid vulgarity or annoyance.The heroic (vīra) sentiment corresponds to the emotion of energy; it may take the three forms of courage in battle as in Rāma; compassion as in Jīmūtavāhana; and liberality as in Paraçurāma. Assurance, contentment, arrogance, and joy are the transitory states connected with it. The sentiment of fury (raudra) is based on anger; its transitory states are indignation, intoxication, recollection, inconstancy, envy, cruelty, agitation, and the like. The comic (hāsya) sentiment depends on mirth, which is caused by one’s own or another’s strange appearance, speech, or attire.89The transitory states in connexion with it are[324]sleeping, indolence, weariness, weakness, and stupor. The sentiment of wonder (adbhuta) is based on astonishment; the transitory states are usually joy, agitation, and contentment. The sentiment of terror (bhayānaka) is based on terror; the states associated with it are depression, agitation, distraction, fright, and the like. The pathetic (karuṇa) sentiment is based on sorrow; its associated states are sleeping, epilepsy, depression, sickness, death, indolence, agitation, despair, stupor, insanity, anxiety, and so forth. The sentiment of horror or odium (bībhatsa) is based on disgust; its associated states are agitation, sickness, apprehension, and the like. In each case the theorists give in full the determinants and the consequents of each emotion, which becomes a sentiment, and a special colour is ascribed to each; it is not surprising to find that red is associated with fury, black with fear; whiteness may, in association with the comic sentiment, be explained by the flashing teeth of a laughing maiden, and the dark (çyāma) colour of the erotic sentiment is a reflex of the favoured hue of the beloved; grey accords with pathos, but the connexion of yellow with wonder, dark blue with horror, and orange with heroism is not obvious. It is also artificial to find four primary and four secondary sentiments laid down; the erotic, the furious, the heroic, and that of horror, whence in order are supposed to develop the comic, the pathetic, that of wonder and that of terror. TheNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes these eight only,90but later authorities add the sentiment of calm (çānta) based on indifference to worldly things (nirveda), although this is in the Çāstra merely a transitory feeling. Those who follow the Çāstra contend that there is no such sentiment, for it is impossible to destroy utterly love, hatred, and other feelings, which have been operative from time without beginning; others admit the existence of the sentiment, as does Mammaṭa, but not in drama, on the ground that indifference to all worldly things is incapable of being represented. But this also is erroneous; the actor’s power of representing indifference is not in point, as it is the spectator who is to feel the sentiment, and the fact that the Çāstra places it first in the list of transitory states, though that would normally be an inauspicious beginning, indicates that it was meant to serve both as an emotion and a transitory feeling,[325]and it is fully recognized by Vidyādhara, Viçvanātha, and Jagannātha, though Dhanaṁjaya barely admits it.91The interrelations of the sentiments, their possible combinations, their harmonies and conflicts, are detailed at length.The sentiments may all be employed in drama, but there are rules affecting their use. In each play there should be a dominant sentiment; in the Nāṭaka it should be the erotic or the heroic; other sentiments are merely auxiliary, but that of wonder is especially appropriate in thedénouement; indeed something in the way of supernatural intervention is often convenient to extricate the plot. An excess of sentiments is as bad as a defect; if there are too many they destroy the unity of the whole and detach it into a series of ill-connected fragments, while the excessive use of action and of rhetorical display is equally destructive to the merit of a piece.TheÇakuntalāillustrates excellently the sentiment of love as the ruling motive of the play; the heroic sentiment appears in the verses in Act II in which the hermits extol the king; the horrible in Act VI in the scene in which Mātali menaces the Vidūṣaka; terror is evoked by the description of the dusk at the close of Act III; the whole play from the arrival of Kaṇva in Act IV to the departure of Çakuntalā produces the sentiment of pathos, while that of fury is called into being by the close of Act VI from the despairing cries of the Vidūṣaka to the entry of Mātali; finally wonder is aroused by the strange incident at the close when the king picks up the bracelet fallen from the arm of the child which, unknown to him, is his own son by the wife whom he has in ignorance repudiated. The Nāṭikās afford excellent examples of the erotic sentiment; Harṣa, in complete accord with the rules of the drama, helps out his plot in both theRatnāvalīand thePriyadarçikāby the use of incidents evoking the sentiment of wonder; the imprisonment of Sāgarikā in the former play evokes the sentiment of pathos, while terror is excited by the description in Act II of the wild confusion caused by the monkey’s escape from the royal mews. The sentiment of fury is frequently evoked in theMahāvīracaritaand the[326]Veṇīsaṁhāra; theMālatīmādhavaaffords excellent illustrations evoking horror, while theMahāvīracaritais permeated by the sentiment of heroism. TheNāgānandareveals heroism in another aspect, that of the perfection of compassion and nobility, for, as we have seen, Jīmūtavāhana is not to be regarded as a hero in whom calm prevails.There is doubtless pedantry in the theory of sentiment; the choice of eight emotions, the subordination to them of transitory states, the enumeration of determinants and consequents, are largely dominated by empiricism, and not explained or justified. But in its essentials the theory may be admitted to be a bold and by no means negligible attempt to indicate the essential character of the emotional effect of drama.
5.The Sentiments
The most original and interesting part of dramatic theory is the gradual definition of the nature of the sentiment which it is the aim of the performance to evoke in the mind of the audience.66[315]The statement of theNāṭyaçāstrais simple. Sentiment is produced from the union of the determinants (vibhāva), the consequents (anubhāva), and the transitory feelings (vyabhicārin). The determinants fall in the later classification into two divisions, the fundamental determinants (ālambana) and the excitant determinants (uddīpana); fundamental determinants comprise such things as the heroine or the hero, for without them there can be no creation of sentiment in the audience; excitant determinants are such conditions of place and time and circumstance as serve to foster sentiment when it has arisen, for instance the moon, the cry of the cuckoo, the soft breeze from Malaya, all things which foster the erotic sentiment. The consequents are the external manifestations of feeling, by which the actors exhibit to the audience the minds and hearts of the persons of the drama, such as sidelong glances, a smile, a movement of the arm, and—though this is but slightly indicated in later texts—his words.67A special class is later made of those consequents, which are the involuntary product of sympathetic realization of the feeling of the person portrayed, and hence are called Sāttvika, as arising from a heart which is ready to appreciate the sorrows or joys of another (sattva); these are paralysis, fainting, horripilation, perspiration, change of colour, trembling, weeping, and change of voice. The transitory or evanescent feelings are given as thirty-three; they are discouragement, weakness, apprehension, weariness, contentment, stupor, joy, depression, cruelty, anxiety, fright, envy, indignation, arrogance, recollection, death, intoxication, dreaming, sleeping, awakening, shame, epilepsy, distraction, assurance, indolence, agitation, deliberation, dissimulation, sickness, insanity, despair, impatience, and inconstancy. But these factors are not sufficient to account for sentiment, nor does theNāṭyaçāstraintend this. It recognizes that an essential element in the production of sentiment is the dominant emotion (sthāyibhāva) which persists throughout the drama amid the variations of the transitory feelings; it stands to the other factors in the position of the king to his subjects or a master to his pupils, as the Çāstra says; it is, says theDaçarūpa, the source of delight, and brings into harmony with itself the transitory states of feeling.[316]It is the dominant emotions which in some fashion determine or become sentiments even in the view of theNāṭyaçāstra, though in it there is clearly difficulty in conceiving the precise signification of the process, a fact revealed in a tendency to confuse the terms emotion and sentiment, Bhāva and Rasa. In Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa68we have a determined effort to make clear the implication of the doctrine. The dominant emotion of love, for instance, generated by a fundamental determinant such as a maiden, inflamed by an excitant determinant such as a pleasant garden, made cognizable by consequents such as sidelong glances and embraces, and strengthened by transitory feelings such as desire, becomes the erotic sentiment first of all in the hero of the drama, e.g. Rāma. The sentiment is subsequently attributed to the actor who imitates the hero in form, dress, and action, and so it becomes the source of charm to the audience. The fatal objection to this theory is clear; it fails to recognize that the sentiment must be that of the spectator himself; he cannot have enjoyment of a sentiment which exists merely in the actor as a secondary outcome of its existence in Rāma. Moreover, the actor whose chief aim is to please the audience and earn money need not feel at all the emotions of Rāma, while, if he does so, he is then in the same position as a spectator.The view of Lollaṭa, which is classed as one of the production (utpatti) of sentiment and regarded as that of the Mīmāṅsā school, is opposed by the doctrine of Çrīçan̄kuka, regarded as the Naiyāyika view, which interprets the manifestation of sentiment as a process of inference. The emotions, love, &c., are inferred to exist in the actor, though not really present in him, by means of the determinants, &c., cleverly exhibited in his acting; the emotion thus inferred, being sensed by the audience, through its exquisite beauty, adds to itself a peculiar charm and thus finally develops into the state of a sentiment in the spectator. This view, however, is open to the fatal objection that it is commonly admitted that it is not inference, or any other derivative mode of knowledge, which produces charm, but perception alone, and no adequate ground exists for disregarding this general truth in this case.[317]In Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka69we find yet a different point of view, which denies either the production (utpatti) of sentiment, its perception or apprehension (pratīti) or its revelation (abhivyakti). If sentiment is perceived as appertaining to another, then it cannot personally affect oneself. But it cannot be perceived as present in oneself as a result of study of a work about Rāma; there are no factors present in the self to produce any such result; it is impossible to hold that an emotion dormant in oneself is called to life by seeing or reading the story of Rāma; experience shows that one’s own beloved does not come up to one’s mind to raise love, nor could a tale of a goddess evoke the picture of a mortal amour; again, such marvellous deeds as Rāma’s have nothing common to mortal efforts so as to be able to awake conceptions of acts of our own. Thus sentiment cannot be apprehended. Nor is it a case of production; if so, no one would go twice to a play of a pathetic type, since one would experience actual misery as the result, in lieu of a pleasant melancholy; again the sight of lovers united does not in real life produce sentiment. Nor is a case of the revelation of something existing potentially (çaktirūpa). If this were so, then, when the potential emotions were let loose, they would occupy their field of action in diverse degrees—thus contradicting the nature of sentiment as one; moreover there would be the same difficulties as in the case of apprehension as to whether revelation applied to the hero or oneself. The true solution, therefore, is to ascribe to a poem a peculiar threefold potency of its own, the power of denotation (abhidhā), which deals with what is expressed, the power of realization (bhāvakatva), which relates to the sentiment, and the power of enjoyment (bhojakatva), which has regard to the audience. If denotation were all, there would be no difference between poetic figures and manuals, there would be absence of the distinctions produced by divergence of literal and metaphorical sense, and the avoidance of harsh sounds would be needless. As it is, we have the second function of realization of sentiment, which causes the expressed sense to serve as the basis of the sentiment, and confers on the determinants, &c., the essential feature of being appropriated by the audience as universal. From this comes the appreciation by the audience[318]of the sentiment, an appreciation consisting in a mental condition made up entirely of the element of goodness or truth (sattva), uninfluenced by the other elements of passion (rajas) and dullness (tamas), that is, entirely free from desire, comparable with meditation on the absolute. This condition is the vital element; the enjoyment ranks above the aesthetic equipment70which renders it possible. To this theory which is sometimes ascribed to the Sāṁkhya,71and called the Bhuktivāda, doctrine of the enjoyment of sentiment, the objection is made that the two powers ascribed to poetry, realization, and enjoyment, have no legitimate foundation.The view finally adopted by the theorists is that defended, but not first enunciated, by Abhinavagupta, based on the general doctrine of suggestion (vyañjanā) as lying at the basis of all poetic pleasure. The spectator’s state of mind must be considered; it is in him that from experience of life there come into being emotional complexes, which lie dormant, ready to be called into activity by the reading of poems or by seeing plays performed. Those whose life has left them barren of impressions of emotions are, accordingly, incapable of relishing dramas, a fate which awaits men whose minds are intent merely on grammar or on the complexities of the Mīmāṅsā. The sentiment thus excited is peculiar, in that it is essentially universal in character; it is common to all other trained spectators, and it has essentially no personal significance. A sentiment is thus something very different from an ordinary emotion; it is generic and disinterested, while an emotion is individual and immediately personal. An emotion again may be pleasant or painful, but a sentiment is marked by that impersonal joy, characteristic of the contemplation of the supreme being by the adept, a bliss which is absolutely without personal feeling. There is in fact a close parallel between the man of taste (sahṛdaya)72and the adept (yogin); both have in them the possibility of attaining this bliss, and, to make it real, the one must investigate the determinants, &c., while the other must apply himself to concentration on the absolute. It is[319]this peculiar nature of sentiment which forbids it being created as the result of denotation or indication by speech, of perception, inference, or recollection. It cannot exist without determinants, &c., but these are not in the normal sense causes; an effect can exist when its causes have disappeared, but sentiment exists only while the determinants, &c., last; the terms used in this regard are one and all distinct from the normal terminology of causation. Sentiment is something supernatural (alaukika); its relations to the factors may be compared with that of a beverage to the black pepper, candied sugar, camphor, &c., which compose it, but of which as such no trace remains in the liquor as produced. This characteristic enables us to understand how it is that the list of sentiments includes that of horror or odium (bībhatsa) and that of fear (bhayānaka), as well as the pathetic sentiment. These are awakened into life by things which cause disgust, fear, and grief in ordinary life, and these emotions in real life are far from pleasant in any sense of that term. But, conveyed as ideal and generic, they produce this supernatural pleasure or happiness, which is not to be compared with normal pleasure, just as the joy of the contemplation of the absolute is not to be described as pleasure in the ordinary sense. Bhānudatta, in hisRasataran̄giṇī, a work composed beforeA.D.1437, distinguishes Rāsa as natural (laukika) and supernatural or transcendental; the former is the emotion experienced in ordinary life—which may more conveniently be distinguished as Bhāva,—the latter includes the emotion experienced in dream experiences, in the building of castles in the air, and in the appreciation of poetry, and he is careful to emphasize the totally different nature of the natural and the transcendental emotion.73The doctrine set out in Abhinavagupta is also that of theDaçarūpa, although it is rendered more obscure there by the brevity of its exposition. The process of transformation of an emotion to a sentiment is formally described; ‘a dominant feeling or emotion becomes a sentiment when it is transformed into an object of enjoyment through the co-operation of the determinants, the consequents, including the involuntary manifestations of feeling, and the transitory feelings’.74The sense is made[320]further precise by the assertion75that the dominant emotion becomes a sentiment, because it is enjoyed by the spectator of taste, and he is actually at present in existence; the sentiment is not located in the hero whose actions are represented, for he belongs to the past, nor does it appertain to the poem, for that is not the object of the poem—its function being to set out the determinants, &c., through which the dominant emotion is brought out and generates the sentiment,—nor is sentiment the apprehension by the spectator of the emotions enacted by the actor, since in that case spectators would feel not sentiment, but an emotion varying in the different individuals, just as in real life from seeing a pair in union those who see them feel according to their nature shame, envy, desire, or aversion. The position of the spectator is compared to that of the child which, when it plays with its clay elephants—the ancient equivalent of our tin soldiers—experiences the sensation of its own energy as pleasant; the deeds of Arjuna arouse a like feeling in the spectator’s mind. This experiencing sentiment is a manifestation of that joy which is innate as the true nature of the self, and this manifestation comes into being as the result of the pervasion of the mind of the spectator with the dominant emotion and the determinants, &c., in combination.An effort is made to describe the precise nature of the mental activity involved in the enjoyment of sentiment, and to base upon it a division of the sentiments. The four sentiments of love, heroism, horror, and fury are taken as primary, and brought into connexion with mental conditions described as the unfolding (vikāsa), expansion (vistara), agitation (kṣobha), and movement to and fro (vikṣepa) of the mind.76These are evidently mental conditions, believed to be reached by introspection, and they have the merit of giving a quasi-psychological rationale for the doctrine of four primary and four secondary sentiments found in theNāṭyaçāstra.77But there was no early agreement on this piece of psychology; Abhinavagupta,78with Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, accepts only three aspects of mental condition as involved, the melting (druti), expansion, and unfolding, a division which is applied also in the theory of poetics to justify the doctrine of the[321]existence of three qualities only of words.79On Dhanaṁjaya’s view the sentiment of calm which he denies for drama,80if it exists at all, must be regarded as combining all the four mental aspects above distinguished.It is now possible to understand clearly the essential relation of the spectator to the actors; we see on the stage, for instance, Rāma and Sītā, who excites his affection, aided by suitable circumstances of time and place; this affection is intimated by speech and gesture alike, which indicate both the dominant emotion of love and its transient shapes in the various stages of love requited. The spectacle evokes in the mind of the spectator the impressions of the emotion of love which experience has planted there, and this ideal and generic excitation of the emotion produces in him that sense of joy which is known as sentiment. The fullness of the enjoyment depends essentially on the nature and experience of the spectator, to whom it falls to identify himself with the hero or other character, and thus to experience in ideal form his emotions and feelings. He may even succeed in his effort to the extent that he weeps real tears, feels terror and sorrow, but the sentiment is still one of exquisite joy. We may compare the thrill of pleasure which the most terrifying narration excites in us, and we are all conscious of the sweetness of sad tales.Viçvanātha insists very strongly on the necessity of the identification of the spectator with the personages depicted, a process which enables him to accept without any difficulty such episodes of extraordinary character as Hanumant’s leap over the ocean.81He must not treat the emotion of love as his own, for in that case it would never become a sentiment; it would remain a feeling, and in the case of fear, for instance, it would cause pain, not joy. Nor must he regard it as belonging solely to the hero, for then it would remain his feeling, and in no wise affect the spectator or become a sentiment. Similarly, the determinants, &c., are not to be treated as pertaining to the hero alone; they must be felt as generic. This generic action (sādhāraṇī kṛti) is the essential feature, replacing the generic power which Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka attributes to poetry. We can now[322]see clearly the position of the actor; theNāṭyaçāstra82bids him as far as possible to assume the emotions of the person whom he represents, and to depict them by costume, speech, movements, and gestures as his own, but Viçvanātha83is more anxious to insist that the sentiment is not necessarily to be found in the actor, who often merely performs mechanically his part according to rote and rule; if he actually does experience the feelings he portrays, then he becomes in so far a spectator.84Further, he points out the simultaneous presence of all the factors is by no means essential, for the existence of one will revive the others by force of the association of ideas. He insists also on the necessity of experience and cultivation of the power of imagination in one who seeks to enjoy sentiment; as we are by virtue of the doctrine of transmigration—or if we prefer to modernize, by heredity—endowed with the germs of the capacity of appreciation, we can normally by study of poetical works develop the capacity, but, if we devote ourselves to the study of grammar or philosophy, we shall certainly deaden our susceptibilities. The difficult problem, why much study of poetry leaves some still unable to relish the sentiment, is explained by the convenient hypothesis that demerit in a previous birth intervenes to frustrate present effort. He refutes at length the effort of Mahiman Bhaṭṭa85to destroy the whole doctrine of suggestion in poetry by the doctrine of inference; doubtless by inference we could arrive at a belief in the existence of an emotion in the hero’s mind but that inference would not produce any effect in us or arouse sentiment; a logician might make the inference and draw the correct conclusion, but would remain cold and unmoved. Suggestiveness, he shows, is absolutely essential as a function of words and as the characteristic of poetry, giving it power to create sentiment. What is expressed may be understood by every one; the man of taste alone appreciates the suggestion and enjoys the flavour resulting.Now sentiment is one, it is a single, ineffable, transcendental joy, but it can be subdivided, not according to its own nature,[323]but according to the emotions which evoke it. Thus theNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes the existence of eight emotions or dominant feelings; love (rati), mirth (hāsa), anger (krodha), sorrow (çoka), energy (utsāha), terror (bhaya), disgust (jugupsā), and astonishment (vismaya), and corresponding to these eight emotions we have eight forms of sentiment. The erotic sentiment (çṛn̄gārarasa) is of two kinds, the union (sambhoga) or sundering (vipralambha) of two lovers, according to the Çāstra and the great mass of theorists, but theDaçarūpa86distinguishes three cases, privation (ayoga), sundering (viprayoga), and union. Privation denotes the inability of two young hearts to secure union, because of obstacles to their marriage; such love passes through ten stages,87longing, anxiety, recollection, enumeration of the loved one’s merits, distress, raving, insanity, fever, stupor, and death. Sundering may be due to absence or resentment, and this in its turn may be caused by a quarrel between two determined lovers, or indignation at finding out, by sight, hearing or inference, that one’s lover is devoted to another. The hero may counteract anger by conciliation, by winning over her friends, by gifts, by humility, by indifference, and by distracting her attention. Absence again may be due to business, to accident, or a curse; if the reason is death the love sentiment cannot, in Dhanaṁjaya’s view, be present, though others allow of a pathetic variety of this sentiment.88In union the lover should avoid vulgarity or annoyance.The heroic (vīra) sentiment corresponds to the emotion of energy; it may take the three forms of courage in battle as in Rāma; compassion as in Jīmūtavāhana; and liberality as in Paraçurāma. Assurance, contentment, arrogance, and joy are the transitory states connected with it. The sentiment of fury (raudra) is based on anger; its transitory states are indignation, intoxication, recollection, inconstancy, envy, cruelty, agitation, and the like. The comic (hāsya) sentiment depends on mirth, which is caused by one’s own or another’s strange appearance, speech, or attire.89The transitory states in connexion with it are[324]sleeping, indolence, weariness, weakness, and stupor. The sentiment of wonder (adbhuta) is based on astonishment; the transitory states are usually joy, agitation, and contentment. The sentiment of terror (bhayānaka) is based on terror; the states associated with it are depression, agitation, distraction, fright, and the like. The pathetic (karuṇa) sentiment is based on sorrow; its associated states are sleeping, epilepsy, depression, sickness, death, indolence, agitation, despair, stupor, insanity, anxiety, and so forth. The sentiment of horror or odium (bībhatsa) is based on disgust; its associated states are agitation, sickness, apprehension, and the like. In each case the theorists give in full the determinants and the consequents of each emotion, which becomes a sentiment, and a special colour is ascribed to each; it is not surprising to find that red is associated with fury, black with fear; whiteness may, in association with the comic sentiment, be explained by the flashing teeth of a laughing maiden, and the dark (çyāma) colour of the erotic sentiment is a reflex of the favoured hue of the beloved; grey accords with pathos, but the connexion of yellow with wonder, dark blue with horror, and orange with heroism is not obvious. It is also artificial to find four primary and four secondary sentiments laid down; the erotic, the furious, the heroic, and that of horror, whence in order are supposed to develop the comic, the pathetic, that of wonder and that of terror. TheNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes these eight only,90but later authorities add the sentiment of calm (çānta) based on indifference to worldly things (nirveda), although this is in the Çāstra merely a transitory feeling. Those who follow the Çāstra contend that there is no such sentiment, for it is impossible to destroy utterly love, hatred, and other feelings, which have been operative from time without beginning; others admit the existence of the sentiment, as does Mammaṭa, but not in drama, on the ground that indifference to all worldly things is incapable of being represented. But this also is erroneous; the actor’s power of representing indifference is not in point, as it is the spectator who is to feel the sentiment, and the fact that the Çāstra places it first in the list of transitory states, though that would normally be an inauspicious beginning, indicates that it was meant to serve both as an emotion and a transitory feeling,[325]and it is fully recognized by Vidyādhara, Viçvanātha, and Jagannātha, though Dhanaṁjaya barely admits it.91The interrelations of the sentiments, their possible combinations, their harmonies and conflicts, are detailed at length.The sentiments may all be employed in drama, but there are rules affecting their use. In each play there should be a dominant sentiment; in the Nāṭaka it should be the erotic or the heroic; other sentiments are merely auxiliary, but that of wonder is especially appropriate in thedénouement; indeed something in the way of supernatural intervention is often convenient to extricate the plot. An excess of sentiments is as bad as a defect; if there are too many they destroy the unity of the whole and detach it into a series of ill-connected fragments, while the excessive use of action and of rhetorical display is equally destructive to the merit of a piece.TheÇakuntalāillustrates excellently the sentiment of love as the ruling motive of the play; the heroic sentiment appears in the verses in Act II in which the hermits extol the king; the horrible in Act VI in the scene in which Mātali menaces the Vidūṣaka; terror is evoked by the description of the dusk at the close of Act III; the whole play from the arrival of Kaṇva in Act IV to the departure of Çakuntalā produces the sentiment of pathos, while that of fury is called into being by the close of Act VI from the despairing cries of the Vidūṣaka to the entry of Mātali; finally wonder is aroused by the strange incident at the close when the king picks up the bracelet fallen from the arm of the child which, unknown to him, is his own son by the wife whom he has in ignorance repudiated. The Nāṭikās afford excellent examples of the erotic sentiment; Harṣa, in complete accord with the rules of the drama, helps out his plot in both theRatnāvalīand thePriyadarçikāby the use of incidents evoking the sentiment of wonder; the imprisonment of Sāgarikā in the former play evokes the sentiment of pathos, while terror is excited by the description in Act II of the wild confusion caused by the monkey’s escape from the royal mews. The sentiment of fury is frequently evoked in theMahāvīracaritaand the[326]Veṇīsaṁhāra; theMālatīmādhavaaffords excellent illustrations evoking horror, while theMahāvīracaritais permeated by the sentiment of heroism. TheNāgānandareveals heroism in another aspect, that of the perfection of compassion and nobility, for, as we have seen, Jīmūtavāhana is not to be regarded as a hero in whom calm prevails.There is doubtless pedantry in the theory of sentiment; the choice of eight emotions, the subordination to them of transitory states, the enumeration of determinants and consequents, are largely dominated by empiricism, and not explained or justified. But in its essentials the theory may be admitted to be a bold and by no means negligible attempt to indicate the essential character of the emotional effect of drama.
The most original and interesting part of dramatic theory is the gradual definition of the nature of the sentiment which it is the aim of the performance to evoke in the mind of the audience.66[315]The statement of theNāṭyaçāstrais simple. Sentiment is produced from the union of the determinants (vibhāva), the consequents (anubhāva), and the transitory feelings (vyabhicārin). The determinants fall in the later classification into two divisions, the fundamental determinants (ālambana) and the excitant determinants (uddīpana); fundamental determinants comprise such things as the heroine or the hero, for without them there can be no creation of sentiment in the audience; excitant determinants are such conditions of place and time and circumstance as serve to foster sentiment when it has arisen, for instance the moon, the cry of the cuckoo, the soft breeze from Malaya, all things which foster the erotic sentiment. The consequents are the external manifestations of feeling, by which the actors exhibit to the audience the minds and hearts of the persons of the drama, such as sidelong glances, a smile, a movement of the arm, and—though this is but slightly indicated in later texts—his words.67A special class is later made of those consequents, which are the involuntary product of sympathetic realization of the feeling of the person portrayed, and hence are called Sāttvika, as arising from a heart which is ready to appreciate the sorrows or joys of another (sattva); these are paralysis, fainting, horripilation, perspiration, change of colour, trembling, weeping, and change of voice. The transitory or evanescent feelings are given as thirty-three; they are discouragement, weakness, apprehension, weariness, contentment, stupor, joy, depression, cruelty, anxiety, fright, envy, indignation, arrogance, recollection, death, intoxication, dreaming, sleeping, awakening, shame, epilepsy, distraction, assurance, indolence, agitation, deliberation, dissimulation, sickness, insanity, despair, impatience, and inconstancy. But these factors are not sufficient to account for sentiment, nor does theNāṭyaçāstraintend this. It recognizes that an essential element in the production of sentiment is the dominant emotion (sthāyibhāva) which persists throughout the drama amid the variations of the transitory feelings; it stands to the other factors in the position of the king to his subjects or a master to his pupils, as the Çāstra says; it is, says theDaçarūpa, the source of delight, and brings into harmony with itself the transitory states of feeling.[316]
It is the dominant emotions which in some fashion determine or become sentiments even in the view of theNāṭyaçāstra, though in it there is clearly difficulty in conceiving the precise signification of the process, a fact revealed in a tendency to confuse the terms emotion and sentiment, Bhāva and Rasa. In Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa68we have a determined effort to make clear the implication of the doctrine. The dominant emotion of love, for instance, generated by a fundamental determinant such as a maiden, inflamed by an excitant determinant such as a pleasant garden, made cognizable by consequents such as sidelong glances and embraces, and strengthened by transitory feelings such as desire, becomes the erotic sentiment first of all in the hero of the drama, e.g. Rāma. The sentiment is subsequently attributed to the actor who imitates the hero in form, dress, and action, and so it becomes the source of charm to the audience. The fatal objection to this theory is clear; it fails to recognize that the sentiment must be that of the spectator himself; he cannot have enjoyment of a sentiment which exists merely in the actor as a secondary outcome of its existence in Rāma. Moreover, the actor whose chief aim is to please the audience and earn money need not feel at all the emotions of Rāma, while, if he does so, he is then in the same position as a spectator.
The view of Lollaṭa, which is classed as one of the production (utpatti) of sentiment and regarded as that of the Mīmāṅsā school, is opposed by the doctrine of Çrīçan̄kuka, regarded as the Naiyāyika view, which interprets the manifestation of sentiment as a process of inference. The emotions, love, &c., are inferred to exist in the actor, though not really present in him, by means of the determinants, &c., cleverly exhibited in his acting; the emotion thus inferred, being sensed by the audience, through its exquisite beauty, adds to itself a peculiar charm and thus finally develops into the state of a sentiment in the spectator. This view, however, is open to the fatal objection that it is commonly admitted that it is not inference, or any other derivative mode of knowledge, which produces charm, but perception alone, and no adequate ground exists for disregarding this general truth in this case.[317]
In Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka69we find yet a different point of view, which denies either the production (utpatti) of sentiment, its perception or apprehension (pratīti) or its revelation (abhivyakti). If sentiment is perceived as appertaining to another, then it cannot personally affect oneself. But it cannot be perceived as present in oneself as a result of study of a work about Rāma; there are no factors present in the self to produce any such result; it is impossible to hold that an emotion dormant in oneself is called to life by seeing or reading the story of Rāma; experience shows that one’s own beloved does not come up to one’s mind to raise love, nor could a tale of a goddess evoke the picture of a mortal amour; again, such marvellous deeds as Rāma’s have nothing common to mortal efforts so as to be able to awake conceptions of acts of our own. Thus sentiment cannot be apprehended. Nor is it a case of production; if so, no one would go twice to a play of a pathetic type, since one would experience actual misery as the result, in lieu of a pleasant melancholy; again the sight of lovers united does not in real life produce sentiment. Nor is a case of the revelation of something existing potentially (çaktirūpa). If this were so, then, when the potential emotions were let loose, they would occupy their field of action in diverse degrees—thus contradicting the nature of sentiment as one; moreover there would be the same difficulties as in the case of apprehension as to whether revelation applied to the hero or oneself. The true solution, therefore, is to ascribe to a poem a peculiar threefold potency of its own, the power of denotation (abhidhā), which deals with what is expressed, the power of realization (bhāvakatva), which relates to the sentiment, and the power of enjoyment (bhojakatva), which has regard to the audience. If denotation were all, there would be no difference between poetic figures and manuals, there would be absence of the distinctions produced by divergence of literal and metaphorical sense, and the avoidance of harsh sounds would be needless. As it is, we have the second function of realization of sentiment, which causes the expressed sense to serve as the basis of the sentiment, and confers on the determinants, &c., the essential feature of being appropriated by the audience as universal. From this comes the appreciation by the audience[318]of the sentiment, an appreciation consisting in a mental condition made up entirely of the element of goodness or truth (sattva), uninfluenced by the other elements of passion (rajas) and dullness (tamas), that is, entirely free from desire, comparable with meditation on the absolute. This condition is the vital element; the enjoyment ranks above the aesthetic equipment70which renders it possible. To this theory which is sometimes ascribed to the Sāṁkhya,71and called the Bhuktivāda, doctrine of the enjoyment of sentiment, the objection is made that the two powers ascribed to poetry, realization, and enjoyment, have no legitimate foundation.
The view finally adopted by the theorists is that defended, but not first enunciated, by Abhinavagupta, based on the general doctrine of suggestion (vyañjanā) as lying at the basis of all poetic pleasure. The spectator’s state of mind must be considered; it is in him that from experience of life there come into being emotional complexes, which lie dormant, ready to be called into activity by the reading of poems or by seeing plays performed. Those whose life has left them barren of impressions of emotions are, accordingly, incapable of relishing dramas, a fate which awaits men whose minds are intent merely on grammar or on the complexities of the Mīmāṅsā. The sentiment thus excited is peculiar, in that it is essentially universal in character; it is common to all other trained spectators, and it has essentially no personal significance. A sentiment is thus something very different from an ordinary emotion; it is generic and disinterested, while an emotion is individual and immediately personal. An emotion again may be pleasant or painful, but a sentiment is marked by that impersonal joy, characteristic of the contemplation of the supreme being by the adept, a bliss which is absolutely without personal feeling. There is in fact a close parallel between the man of taste (sahṛdaya)72and the adept (yogin); both have in them the possibility of attaining this bliss, and, to make it real, the one must investigate the determinants, &c., while the other must apply himself to concentration on the absolute. It is[319]this peculiar nature of sentiment which forbids it being created as the result of denotation or indication by speech, of perception, inference, or recollection. It cannot exist without determinants, &c., but these are not in the normal sense causes; an effect can exist when its causes have disappeared, but sentiment exists only while the determinants, &c., last; the terms used in this regard are one and all distinct from the normal terminology of causation. Sentiment is something supernatural (alaukika); its relations to the factors may be compared with that of a beverage to the black pepper, candied sugar, camphor, &c., which compose it, but of which as such no trace remains in the liquor as produced. This characteristic enables us to understand how it is that the list of sentiments includes that of horror or odium (bībhatsa) and that of fear (bhayānaka), as well as the pathetic sentiment. These are awakened into life by things which cause disgust, fear, and grief in ordinary life, and these emotions in real life are far from pleasant in any sense of that term. But, conveyed as ideal and generic, they produce this supernatural pleasure or happiness, which is not to be compared with normal pleasure, just as the joy of the contemplation of the absolute is not to be described as pleasure in the ordinary sense. Bhānudatta, in hisRasataran̄giṇī, a work composed beforeA.D.1437, distinguishes Rāsa as natural (laukika) and supernatural or transcendental; the former is the emotion experienced in ordinary life—which may more conveniently be distinguished as Bhāva,—the latter includes the emotion experienced in dream experiences, in the building of castles in the air, and in the appreciation of poetry, and he is careful to emphasize the totally different nature of the natural and the transcendental emotion.73
The doctrine set out in Abhinavagupta is also that of theDaçarūpa, although it is rendered more obscure there by the brevity of its exposition. The process of transformation of an emotion to a sentiment is formally described; ‘a dominant feeling or emotion becomes a sentiment when it is transformed into an object of enjoyment through the co-operation of the determinants, the consequents, including the involuntary manifestations of feeling, and the transitory feelings’.74The sense is made[320]further precise by the assertion75that the dominant emotion becomes a sentiment, because it is enjoyed by the spectator of taste, and he is actually at present in existence; the sentiment is not located in the hero whose actions are represented, for he belongs to the past, nor does it appertain to the poem, for that is not the object of the poem—its function being to set out the determinants, &c., through which the dominant emotion is brought out and generates the sentiment,—nor is sentiment the apprehension by the spectator of the emotions enacted by the actor, since in that case spectators would feel not sentiment, but an emotion varying in the different individuals, just as in real life from seeing a pair in union those who see them feel according to their nature shame, envy, desire, or aversion. The position of the spectator is compared to that of the child which, when it plays with its clay elephants—the ancient equivalent of our tin soldiers—experiences the sensation of its own energy as pleasant; the deeds of Arjuna arouse a like feeling in the spectator’s mind. This experiencing sentiment is a manifestation of that joy which is innate as the true nature of the self, and this manifestation comes into being as the result of the pervasion of the mind of the spectator with the dominant emotion and the determinants, &c., in combination.
An effort is made to describe the precise nature of the mental activity involved in the enjoyment of sentiment, and to base upon it a division of the sentiments. The four sentiments of love, heroism, horror, and fury are taken as primary, and brought into connexion with mental conditions described as the unfolding (vikāsa), expansion (vistara), agitation (kṣobha), and movement to and fro (vikṣepa) of the mind.76These are evidently mental conditions, believed to be reached by introspection, and they have the merit of giving a quasi-psychological rationale for the doctrine of four primary and four secondary sentiments found in theNāṭyaçāstra.77But there was no early agreement on this piece of psychology; Abhinavagupta,78with Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, accepts only three aspects of mental condition as involved, the melting (druti), expansion, and unfolding, a division which is applied also in the theory of poetics to justify the doctrine of the[321]existence of three qualities only of words.79On Dhanaṁjaya’s view the sentiment of calm which he denies for drama,80if it exists at all, must be regarded as combining all the four mental aspects above distinguished.
It is now possible to understand clearly the essential relation of the spectator to the actors; we see on the stage, for instance, Rāma and Sītā, who excites his affection, aided by suitable circumstances of time and place; this affection is intimated by speech and gesture alike, which indicate both the dominant emotion of love and its transient shapes in the various stages of love requited. The spectacle evokes in the mind of the spectator the impressions of the emotion of love which experience has planted there, and this ideal and generic excitation of the emotion produces in him that sense of joy which is known as sentiment. The fullness of the enjoyment depends essentially on the nature and experience of the spectator, to whom it falls to identify himself with the hero or other character, and thus to experience in ideal form his emotions and feelings. He may even succeed in his effort to the extent that he weeps real tears, feels terror and sorrow, but the sentiment is still one of exquisite joy. We may compare the thrill of pleasure which the most terrifying narration excites in us, and we are all conscious of the sweetness of sad tales.
Viçvanātha insists very strongly on the necessity of the identification of the spectator with the personages depicted, a process which enables him to accept without any difficulty such episodes of extraordinary character as Hanumant’s leap over the ocean.81He must not treat the emotion of love as his own, for in that case it would never become a sentiment; it would remain a feeling, and in the case of fear, for instance, it would cause pain, not joy. Nor must he regard it as belonging solely to the hero, for then it would remain his feeling, and in no wise affect the spectator or become a sentiment. Similarly, the determinants, &c., are not to be treated as pertaining to the hero alone; they must be felt as generic. This generic action (sādhāraṇī kṛti) is the essential feature, replacing the generic power which Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka attributes to poetry. We can now[322]see clearly the position of the actor; theNāṭyaçāstra82bids him as far as possible to assume the emotions of the person whom he represents, and to depict them by costume, speech, movements, and gestures as his own, but Viçvanātha83is more anxious to insist that the sentiment is not necessarily to be found in the actor, who often merely performs mechanically his part according to rote and rule; if he actually does experience the feelings he portrays, then he becomes in so far a spectator.84Further, he points out the simultaneous presence of all the factors is by no means essential, for the existence of one will revive the others by force of the association of ideas. He insists also on the necessity of experience and cultivation of the power of imagination in one who seeks to enjoy sentiment; as we are by virtue of the doctrine of transmigration—or if we prefer to modernize, by heredity—endowed with the germs of the capacity of appreciation, we can normally by study of poetical works develop the capacity, but, if we devote ourselves to the study of grammar or philosophy, we shall certainly deaden our susceptibilities. The difficult problem, why much study of poetry leaves some still unable to relish the sentiment, is explained by the convenient hypothesis that demerit in a previous birth intervenes to frustrate present effort. He refutes at length the effort of Mahiman Bhaṭṭa85to destroy the whole doctrine of suggestion in poetry by the doctrine of inference; doubtless by inference we could arrive at a belief in the existence of an emotion in the hero’s mind but that inference would not produce any effect in us or arouse sentiment; a logician might make the inference and draw the correct conclusion, but would remain cold and unmoved. Suggestiveness, he shows, is absolutely essential as a function of words and as the characteristic of poetry, giving it power to create sentiment. What is expressed may be understood by every one; the man of taste alone appreciates the suggestion and enjoys the flavour resulting.
Now sentiment is one, it is a single, ineffable, transcendental joy, but it can be subdivided, not according to its own nature,[323]but according to the emotions which evoke it. Thus theNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes the existence of eight emotions or dominant feelings; love (rati), mirth (hāsa), anger (krodha), sorrow (çoka), energy (utsāha), terror (bhaya), disgust (jugupsā), and astonishment (vismaya), and corresponding to these eight emotions we have eight forms of sentiment. The erotic sentiment (çṛn̄gārarasa) is of two kinds, the union (sambhoga) or sundering (vipralambha) of two lovers, according to the Çāstra and the great mass of theorists, but theDaçarūpa86distinguishes three cases, privation (ayoga), sundering (viprayoga), and union. Privation denotes the inability of two young hearts to secure union, because of obstacles to their marriage; such love passes through ten stages,87longing, anxiety, recollection, enumeration of the loved one’s merits, distress, raving, insanity, fever, stupor, and death. Sundering may be due to absence or resentment, and this in its turn may be caused by a quarrel between two determined lovers, or indignation at finding out, by sight, hearing or inference, that one’s lover is devoted to another. The hero may counteract anger by conciliation, by winning over her friends, by gifts, by humility, by indifference, and by distracting her attention. Absence again may be due to business, to accident, or a curse; if the reason is death the love sentiment cannot, in Dhanaṁjaya’s view, be present, though others allow of a pathetic variety of this sentiment.88In union the lover should avoid vulgarity or annoyance.
The heroic (vīra) sentiment corresponds to the emotion of energy; it may take the three forms of courage in battle as in Rāma; compassion as in Jīmūtavāhana; and liberality as in Paraçurāma. Assurance, contentment, arrogance, and joy are the transitory states connected with it. The sentiment of fury (raudra) is based on anger; its transitory states are indignation, intoxication, recollection, inconstancy, envy, cruelty, agitation, and the like. The comic (hāsya) sentiment depends on mirth, which is caused by one’s own or another’s strange appearance, speech, or attire.89The transitory states in connexion with it are[324]sleeping, indolence, weariness, weakness, and stupor. The sentiment of wonder (adbhuta) is based on astonishment; the transitory states are usually joy, agitation, and contentment. The sentiment of terror (bhayānaka) is based on terror; the states associated with it are depression, agitation, distraction, fright, and the like. The pathetic (karuṇa) sentiment is based on sorrow; its associated states are sleeping, epilepsy, depression, sickness, death, indolence, agitation, despair, stupor, insanity, anxiety, and so forth. The sentiment of horror or odium (bībhatsa) is based on disgust; its associated states are agitation, sickness, apprehension, and the like. In each case the theorists give in full the determinants and the consequents of each emotion, which becomes a sentiment, and a special colour is ascribed to each; it is not surprising to find that red is associated with fury, black with fear; whiteness may, in association with the comic sentiment, be explained by the flashing teeth of a laughing maiden, and the dark (çyāma) colour of the erotic sentiment is a reflex of the favoured hue of the beloved; grey accords with pathos, but the connexion of yellow with wonder, dark blue with horror, and orange with heroism is not obvious. It is also artificial to find four primary and four secondary sentiments laid down; the erotic, the furious, the heroic, and that of horror, whence in order are supposed to develop the comic, the pathetic, that of wonder and that of terror. TheNāṭyaçāstrarecognizes these eight only,90but later authorities add the sentiment of calm (çānta) based on indifference to worldly things (nirveda), although this is in the Çāstra merely a transitory feeling. Those who follow the Çāstra contend that there is no such sentiment, for it is impossible to destroy utterly love, hatred, and other feelings, which have been operative from time without beginning; others admit the existence of the sentiment, as does Mammaṭa, but not in drama, on the ground that indifference to all worldly things is incapable of being represented. But this also is erroneous; the actor’s power of representing indifference is not in point, as it is the spectator who is to feel the sentiment, and the fact that the Çāstra places it first in the list of transitory states, though that would normally be an inauspicious beginning, indicates that it was meant to serve both as an emotion and a transitory feeling,[325]and it is fully recognized by Vidyādhara, Viçvanātha, and Jagannātha, though Dhanaṁjaya barely admits it.91The interrelations of the sentiments, their possible combinations, their harmonies and conflicts, are detailed at length.
The sentiments may all be employed in drama, but there are rules affecting their use. In each play there should be a dominant sentiment; in the Nāṭaka it should be the erotic or the heroic; other sentiments are merely auxiliary, but that of wonder is especially appropriate in thedénouement; indeed something in the way of supernatural intervention is often convenient to extricate the plot. An excess of sentiments is as bad as a defect; if there are too many they destroy the unity of the whole and detach it into a series of ill-connected fragments, while the excessive use of action and of rhetorical display is equally destructive to the merit of a piece.
TheÇakuntalāillustrates excellently the sentiment of love as the ruling motive of the play; the heroic sentiment appears in the verses in Act II in which the hermits extol the king; the horrible in Act VI in the scene in which Mātali menaces the Vidūṣaka; terror is evoked by the description of the dusk at the close of Act III; the whole play from the arrival of Kaṇva in Act IV to the departure of Çakuntalā produces the sentiment of pathos, while that of fury is called into being by the close of Act VI from the despairing cries of the Vidūṣaka to the entry of Mātali; finally wonder is aroused by the strange incident at the close when the king picks up the bracelet fallen from the arm of the child which, unknown to him, is his own son by the wife whom he has in ignorance repudiated. The Nāṭikās afford excellent examples of the erotic sentiment; Harṣa, in complete accord with the rules of the drama, helps out his plot in both theRatnāvalīand thePriyadarçikāby the use of incidents evoking the sentiment of wonder; the imprisonment of Sāgarikā in the former play evokes the sentiment of pathos, while terror is excited by the description in Act II of the wild confusion caused by the monkey’s escape from the royal mews. The sentiment of fury is frequently evoked in theMahāvīracaritaand the[326]Veṇīsaṁhāra; theMālatīmādhavaaffords excellent illustrations evoking horror, while theMahāvīracaritais permeated by the sentiment of heroism. TheNāgānandareveals heroism in another aspect, that of the perfection of compassion and nobility, for, as we have seen, Jīmūtavāhana is not to be regarded as a hero in whom calm prevails.
There is doubtless pedantry in the theory of sentiment; the choice of eight emotions, the subordination to them of transitory states, the enumeration of determinants and consequents, are largely dominated by empiricism, and not explained or justified. But in its essentials the theory may be admitted to be a bold and by no means negligible attempt to indicate the essential character of the emotional effect of drama.