काव्यप्रकाश (आचार्य मम्मट - सम्पूर्ण १० उल्लास सटीक)

x poem, so "recited poetry" and the drama constitute an advance upon the metrical poem, to the musical effects of metre and rhyme which enlist the services of the ear in furthering the pleasures of poetry, the drama adds the scenic effects, which engage the eye also. And hence the dictum काव्येषु नाटकं श्रेष्ठम् (of poems the drama is the highest). Thus it appears that Sāhitya treats of the principles of poetry and it treats of Words and Style only in so far as they express more fitly or otherwise the appropriate emotion. The treatment of the metre form it leaves to Prosody for metre and rhyme, and to Nāṭya Shāstra for dramaturgy. Sanskrit Prosody has little interest for the general English reader; but the science of Mimetics obviously has, and there is no work on the subject yet, for a wonder, in the land of Shakespeare,—the one or two books like Hammerton's "The Actor's Art," that are just beginning to come out, being scarcely entitled to rank as scientific books. If opportunities are favourable, the present writer hopes to bring out some day a translation of Bharata's Nāṭya Shāstra, the oldest work available on the subject. The history of the science of poetry in India, like that of all others, is lost in antiquity. Tradition speaks of original aphorisms by Çauddhodani, by Bharata and by Vāmana. These aphorisms too are lost for the present, except the last which has been recently printed by the enterprising publishers of the Kāvyamālā. Vāmana's Sūtras are not old, that is to say, not much older than 800 A. C. Fragments of the other two are met with in the form of quotations by later writers. It is possible and to be hoped that they may be recovered some day; for not very old authors refer to them as having formed the subject of their studies, before they began their own works; and it is very much to be desired that they may be so recovered, for the Sūtra— literature shows a finality of statement, so far as general principles are concerned, which could result only from a perfect grasp of the completed "circle of knowledge," and it is not likely that any future races will succeed in improving upon these statements of final principles, however much they may and will make fuller the contents of the general ideas in consequence of more varied experience in larger circles of life. Shauddhodani appears to have been one of the first to definitely formulate the view that emotion is the essence of poetry—