[270] Journal of the National Indian Assoc., 1881, 624-30.
[271] Ploss-Bartels, I., 385-87; Lamairesse, 18, 95, XX., etc.
[272] Here again we must guard against the naive error of benevolent observers of confounding chastity with an assumption of modest behavior. In describing the streets of Delhi Ida Pfeiffer says (L.V.R.W., 148):
“The prettiest girlish faces peep modestly out of these curtained bailis, and did one not know that in India an unveiled face is never an innocent one, the fact certainly could not be divined from their looks or behavior.” It happens to be the fashion even for bayaderes to preserve an appearance of great propriety in public.
[273] Pp. 143 and 160 of Kellner’s edition of this drama (Reclam). The extent to which indifference to chastity is sometimes carried in India may be inferred from the facts that in the famous city of Vasali “marriage was forbidden, and high rank attached to the lady who held office as the chief of courtesans;” and that the same condition prevails in British India to this day in a town in North Canara (Balfour, Cyclop. of India, II., 873).
[274] Hala’s date is somewhat uncertain, but he flourished between the third and fourth centuries A.D. Professor Weber’s translation of his seven hundred poems, with the professor’s comments, takes up no fewer than 1,023 pages of the Abhandlungen fuer die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Vols. V. and VII. I have selected all those which throw light on the Hindoo conception of love, and translated them carefully from Weber’s version. Hala’s anthology served as prototype, about the twelfth century, to a similar collection of arya verses, the erotic Saptacati of Govardhana, also seven hundred in number, but written in Sanskrit. Of these I have not been able to find a version in a language that I can read, but the other collection is copious and varied enough to cover all the phases of Hindoo love. The verses were intended, as already indicated, to be sung, for the Hindoos, too, knew the power of music as a pastime and a feeder of the emotions. “If music be the food of love, play on,” says the English Shakespere, and the “Hindoo Shakespere” wrote more than a thousand years before him:
“Oh, how beautifully our master Rebhila has sung! Yes, indeed, the zither is a pearl, only it does not come from the depths of the sea. How its tones accord with the heart that longs for love, how it helps to while away time at a rendezvous, how it assuages the grief of separation, and augments the delights of the lovers!” (Vasantasena, Act III., 2.)
[275] The disadvantage of arguing against the believers in primitive, Oriental, and ancient amorous sentiment is that some of the strongest evidence against them cannot be cited in a book intended for general reading. Professor Weber declares in his introduction to Hala’s anthology that these poems take us through all phases