Note 164 — III DRAMATIC THEORY XIII THE THEORY OF THE DRAMATIC ART

To the developed thought of India, as it existed during the vogue of the drama, there was little possibility of a realization of the elements of which Greek tragedy is composed. The conception of human activity striving with circumstance, endeavouring to assert itself in the teeth of forces superhuman in power and uncontrollable, and meeting with utter ruin, but yet maintaining its honour, which affords the spring of tragedy in Greece, is alien to Indian thought. Fate is nothing outside man; he is subject to no alien influences; he is what he has made himself by acts in past lives; if he suffers evil he has deserved it as just retribution, and to sympathize with him, to feel the pathos of his plight, is really unthinkable. Death, therefore, by violence is merely a just punishment of crime, and it is a more refined taste than that of Bhāsa which bids us banish from the stage the spectacle of what is no more than an execution, a scene as ill-suited to the decorum and good taste of the serious drama164 as to the rude merriment of the farce or monologue.