Bearing these matters in mind, we can see the course of Kalidasa’s thoughts almost as clearly as if he had expressed them directly.  He was irresistibly driven to write the wonderful story of Rama, as any poet would be who became familiar with it.  At the same time, his modesty prevented him from challenging the old epic directly.  He therefore writes a poem which shall appeal to the hallowed association that cluster round the great name of Rama, but devotes two-thirds of it to themes that permit him greater freedom.  The result is a formless plot.

This is a real weakness, yet not a fatal weakness.  In general, literary critics lay far too much emphasis on plot.  Of the elements that make a great book, two, style and presentation of character, hardly permit critical analysis.  The third, plot, does permit such analysis.  Therefore the analyst overrates its importance.  It is fatal to all claim of greatness in a narrative if it is shown to have a bad style or to be without interesting characters.  It is not fatal if it is shown that the plot is rambling.  In recent literature it is easy to find truly great narratives in which the plot leaves much to be desired.  We may cite the Pickwick Papers, Les Miserables, War and Peace.

We must then regard The Dynasty of Raghu as a poem in which single episodes take a stronger hold upon the reader than does the unfolding of an ingenious plot.  In some degree, this is true of all long poems.  The AEneid itself, the most perfect long poem ever written, has dull passages.  And when this allowance is made, what wonderful passages we have in Kalidasa’s poem!  One hardly knows which of them makes the strongest appeal, so many are they and so varied.  There is the description of the small boy Raghu in the third canto, the choice of the princess in the sixth, the lament of King Aja in the eighth, the story of Dasharatha and the hermit youth in the ninth, the account of the ruined city in the sixteenth.  Besides these, the Rama cantos, ten to fifteen, make an epic within an epic.  And if Kalidasa is not seen at his very best here, yet his second best is of a higher quality than the best of others.  Also, the Rama story is so moving that a mere allusion to it stirs like a sentimental memory of childhood.  It has the usual qualities of a good epic story:  abundance of travel and fighting and adventure and magic interweaving of human with superhuman, but it has more than this.  In both hero and heroine there is real development of character.  Odysseus and AEneas do not grow; they go through adventures.  But King Rama, torn between love for his wife and duty to his subjects, is almost a different person from the handsome, light-hearted prince who won his bride by breaking Shiva’s bow.  Sita, faithful to the husband who rejects her, has made a long, character-forming journey since the day when she left her father’s palace, a youthful bride.  Herein lies the unique beauty of the tale of Rama, that it unites romantic love and moral conflict with a splendid story of wild adventure.  No wonder that the Hindus, connoisseurs of story-telling, have loved the tale of Rama’s deeds better than any other story.