"with their vasculums across their shoulders, are out looking for the blue flower of universal peace." Most telling of all, however, and quite final is the number of June 5, 1915, which says:

The war between England and ourselves is not concerned with such. narrow geographical ends, as are at issue between France and Germany. It is concerned with the control of the seas and with the invaluable treasures which depend therefrom. And a co-existence of both States, whereof many Utopists dream, is in this case as absolutely out of the question as was the coexistence of Rome and Carthage.

The opposition between England and Germany will therefore continue until finally one or other has been flung to the ground. And whether we shall in this war already succeed in such a curbing down of England, would at present, to say the least, seem doubtful.

It is these italicised words which cause the peaceable Herr Herzog to exclaim: "After the first Punic War followed, ten years later, the second."

All previous" prognostications prognostications" of the PanGermanists have come true. Then justified in treating this latter lightly?.

are we

Will England at last understand that even if victorious this time, she will not have rid herself from German aggression?

Will she understand that either Rome or Car thage must disappear entirely?

Will she understand that as long as Germany is left with an atom of strength in her, England never will be at rest a single day?

Will she understand that her only safety lies in the thorough destruction and annihilation of Germany's power?

This does not seem idealistic. But, after all, it is not England who has desired this struggle, nor England who has sought the annihilation of her opponent.

Then if annihilation there must be by the other party's express desire, it is best that this should be the fate of the aggressor.

There has been too much unpractical hesitation, too much abstract idealism already. For it is the very idealists, the Democratic Controllers and that

ilk, who have brought us to this pass, and would, if they could, bring us to the next and worse.

In theory there is nothing more admirable, nothing more desirable, than their scheme of internal disarmament. No one is satisfied with the ruinous expense of an armed peace. If all States could disarm on one and the same day, and if all arsenals and wharfs could be placed under the control of an international committee, Utopia, or something very near it, would indeed be at hand.

In practice however it is these very pacifists who are co-operating with the foes of Carthage for the city's destruction. In Germany, the Democratic Controllers are highly popular with the founders of the new league "Neues Vaterland," which is of somewhat the same tendency. But they are equally popular with the opposite side, the Pan-Germanist League. This is ominous. The Pan-Germanists, indeed, are anything but afraid of international pacifism. What they prognosticate is, that when the pacifist doctrines are preached throughout the world by Democratic Controllers, Neu-Vaterlanders, and the like, they will take a much firmer and more extensive hold of the people of England and France and America than of the people of Germany. And even if their German adherents were to be as ardent and as numerous as those of England and France and America, the influence of the latter upon a sensitive public opinion and a democratic government would be great, whereas the influence of the former on a militaristic and hierarchical state would be nil. According to the admirable precepts of the honest pacifists, the peaceful States would then begin to disarm wholly or in part trusting to the influence of their good example. That would be Der Tag for Germany.

Therefore, let us keep in mind that "after the first Punic War followed, ten years later, the second."

Ceterum censes Germaniam delendam esse,

have been for some time engaged in preparing for the Harvard Oriental Series an edition of Bhavabhutis' Uttara-Rama Charita. The work is to be in three parts. The first which contains a general introduction and an English translation, and which is printed at the University Press, Oxford, was out a few weeks ago. The second contains-besides the text in Sanskrit and Prakrit (which is already in type), an index to first lines, and a glossary of Prakrit words with their Sanskrit equivalents— some five appendices giving, among other things, the results of an application of certain verse tests to the three extant plays of Bhavabhuti with a view to determine their chronological sequence. The last volume is devoted to notes, variant readings and critical apparatus, together with a few more appendices discussing topics such 'text-traditions of the play,' 'stage-conditions in Ancient India,' and so forth. The last two volumes are being printed at the Nirnayasagar Press, Bombay. The subject-matter of following paper is taken from two appendices in the third part.

as

Aufrecht's Catalogus Catalogorum lists some eighty-five manuscripts of text and commentaries on the Uttara-Rama Charita, and in the lists of manuscripts published since 1903, I have noted some thirty new manuscripts; so that, even after allowing for repetitions in the lists and loss of manuscripts, the extent of available manuscript material for constituting the text of the play is well over a hundred. Of course not all these manuscripts would be ultimately valuable, but it at least necessary to examine them, if it be

merely to discard them later; and I meant to do this before actually publishing my edition. However this is a task that may easily take years, and since, strangely enough, in spite of the fact that there are some fifteen Indian editions of the play, no Occidental edition of it has so far appeared, I was advised to put forth, at first, a tentative edition of the play, going back to it and preparing a second definitive edition as early as I could. The present edition, accordingly, is based on only eight manuscripts.

The selection of these particular eight manuscripts was made for various reasons. In the first place, I tried to get together manuscripts from parts of India widely different from each other, such as Madras and Nepal, Poona and Calcutta, Guzarat and Vizagapatam. Secondly, the manuscripts are written in four different characters: Nevari, Devanagari, Grantha, and Telugu-only the first two of which slightly resemble one another in the form of their letters. Lastly, the manuscripts belong to different ages, ranging from the twelfth to the ninteenth century, and at least four of these eight manuscripts have independent value. Hence the result yielded by a careful collation of these manuscripts, although admittedly tentative, may in any case be regarded as sufficiently plausible. I shall give a few significant illustrations:

The 27th stanza of the fifth act of the UttaraRama Charita runs as follows:

अजितं पुण्यमूर्जस्वि ककुत्स्थस्येव ते महः ।
श्रेयसे शाश्वती देवो वराहः परिकल्पताम् ॥

Instead, the commentator Viraraghava and three of the eight manuscripts used for my edition give a prose passage identical with the above stanza in the beginning and the end.* One of these three manuscripts is the oldest extant manuscript of the play, being dated Samvat 309 of the Nepal era, which corresponds to the year 1196 of the Christian era. This circumstance therefore gives us a line of manuscripts lineally descended from an original exemplar of the twelfth century or earlier. Owing to a fracture or a peeling off of the leaf at this particular place, this original exemplar apparently had a lacuna which in a conscientious copy would be indicated by a blank. This later came to be filled in by the insertion of a few words which, along with the preserved beginning and the end, would give some sort of a more or less appropriate meaning to the whole passage, such as we find it in the printed editions of the play with Viraraghava's commentary. Manuscripts which give the original stanza intact I call A manuscripts; those which give the substitute prose passage I call B manuscripts.

In addition to the case above described there are a number of other cases-over seventy-fivewhere manuscripts of class A give consistently readings different from those of class B; and while some of these variations can conceivably be explained away as scribal errors, there are others where a deliberate change of some sort seems to be in evidence. I shall cite only one instance, which comes from the prologue at the beginning of the play. All A manuscripts read the first half of the second stanza thus:

यं ब्रह्माणमियं देवी वाग् वश्येवाऽनुवर्तते ।

while the B manuscripts read:

यं ब्रह्माणमियं देवी वाग् वश्येवान्ववर्तत ।

where there is a deliberate change of tense-from anuvartate, present, to anvavartata, imperfect.

*The identical portions are underlined,

The original reading described Bhavabhuti as 'on e on whom the Goddess of Speech attends as a submissive handmaid; while the other reading-presumably introduced after the poet's deathdescribes him as 6 one on whom the Goddess of speech attended as a submissive handmaid.'

Other cases of variation were in the same fashion submitted to a careful scrutiny, and as a result I am able to group the changes under following headings:

1.

Omissions.-I shall mention three of the most significant places where A manuscripts give the passages and B manuscripts omit them. The passages are: act vii, stanza 38; act i, stanza 31, and the three speeches immediately preceding; and act iii, the whole passage beginning from stanza 21 to the end of Rama's speech following stanza 24.* This last omission covers four stanzas and fourteen lines of prose. Now it is of course possible to explain omissions as due to errors of vision, or the accidental loss of an intervening leaf. But this explanation does not readily commend itself in a place where the passages omitted happen to be just the passages that we would like to see omitted, or, at any rate, such as a company of actors wishing to stage the play would inevitably omit as being not necessary to the action of the play. The three cases selected are of this nature.

3. Insertions and modifications in the stagedirections and other minor changes calculated to assist the actor in interpreting his part correctly, or to produce dramatic vividness. Of the former kind I have been able to put together some twenty or twenty-five instances where the B manuscripts usually give a stage-direction or a form of address more precise or more exactly corresponding to the character and the occasion. Of the latter kiud I shall mention just one instance. Act iii, stanza 26, reads as follows. (I give the English translation) :

Thou art my life, my second heart; thou art the moonlight to my eyes, and to my body the immortal ambrosia '-with these and a hundred other words of endearment her simple and loving soul thou didst beguile; and her now-alas! why utter the rest?

At the conclusion of the stanza the speaker, Vasanti, goes into a swoon. Now, if Vasanti is going to swoon at all, the best opportunity for it was of course the word 'alas!' Instead she waits to complete the stanza, saying-'I shall not talk any more (but go quietly into a swoon)'! In a case like this the acting version would certainly omit the last words of the stanza-' why utter the rest?'-and this is just what some manuscripts of class B do.

I shall not trouble the reader with any further details, but merely state my conclusion. The Uttara-Rama Charita has come down to us in two sufficiently distinct text-traditions, and one of these gives us a number of characteristic divergences which are best explained as successive stage-emendations, most of them introduced after Bhavabhuti's death and in the course of the later stage-history of the play, although a few of them may well have come from the poet himself. That the Uttara-Rama Charita had a stage-history I infer from a passage in the Prithviraja-Vijaya, a poem of the twelfth century which has survived to us in only one incomplete birch-bark manus

cript, and which I am at present editing for the Bibliotheca Indica series of Calcutta.

Assuming the truth of this result I draw from it two further corollaries. The first I should rather state as a problem. We know that Kalidasa's Sakuntala has come down to us in two or three or four recensions, and scholars are still disputing as to which of them is genuine. Now would it not be possible, I wonder, after a scientific study of all the available manuscript material, to come down to two ultimate and original recensions of the play, the differences between them being not necessarily greater than those between the first and the second Quartos of Hamlet? In that case both would be genuine, one being the acting version of the other, possibly prepared by Kalidasa himself. I have already found out some evidence in support of such a theory; but the whole problem is so intricate as well as interesting that I hope some time to study it in a thorough manner and with the help of all the available manuscript material.

My second corollary is this: If in this manner we find reason to believe in the existence in Ancient India of some sort of regular companies of actors, who gave in a particular locality plays written for them by a more or less limited group of dramatists, then, in the very nature of the case, it is to be expected that the form, history, and development of drama would be different for different localities. A court-poet like Kalidasa, for example, would write dramas exclusively dealing with the life at court and especially in the harem. Open-air performances given at fairs-such as those of Bhavabhuti—would differ from them not only in the theme selected or the nature of its treatment, but also in the stageconditions, by which are to be meant not only the stage-properties but also the make-up of the audience, which would have a deciding influence on the character of the drama. Viewed from

this point of view the ten rupakas of Hindu dramatists, some of which under a more or less disguised form exist in India even to the present day, would acquire quite a new significance. In any case these considerations should at least teach us caution in making any sweeping generalizations regarding the Indian drama. In India, no less than in Greece or in Medieval Europe, the drama as an institution came into existence in answer to a felt demand on the part of the people, and the different forms it probably assumed in the different provinces were due to differences of environment. Hindu drama-I mean the classical Hindu drama-was not, as is sometimes thought, a form of literary exercise in a dead language. Sanskrit for the matter of that is not even now, in any real sense of the term, a dead language. Often it happens to be the only available means of communication

between

scholars in different parts of India. Even now at times there are revivals of old Sanskrit plays, such as the Sakuntala or the Mudra Rakshasa. I have myself seen the former performed by a regular professional company.

To understand a play rightly it is of great importance, therefore, to study the stage-conditions, and this can be done partly with the help of direct statements such as those found in Bharata's Natya-Sastra and partly in the light of such indirect testimony as the extant dramas and manuscripts of dramas afford us. I may announce here, in passing, that I have at present on hand a critical edition of Bharata's Natya-Sastra to be published under the auspices of the Harvard Oriental Series.

For a detailed announcement of this edition, see "Sanskrit Research" for July, 1915.

R. ESME AMARANTH of blessed memory said that to be artistic is to be absurd and to be conscious of one's own absurdity. Perhaps he was right, but probably he meant that conscious absurdity is the easiest way of keeping up a reputation, more or less honestly won in the first instance, for artistic ability. Esme's original was absurd enough in all conscience, but he reached his platform above the heads of the mob by some very solid steps of scholarship and culture. Once on the platform he could easily gain attention by the simple process of standing on his head. In much the same way a writer who can really write may often find his account in the composition of pure futility. We common mortals cannot believe him as banal as

ourselves, and attribute his apparent banality to our own lack of appreciation.

These reflections have occurred to me on reading in rapid succession four books :* "The Dream Doctor" and "Gold of the Gods," by A. B. Reeve, "Prince Otto" and "The Dynamiter," by R. L. Stevensor. Of the first two, which deal with the exploits of Professor Kennedy, a superSherlock Holmes, I can say with all sincerity that if there exist books more inane in the English language I have not met them. The professor,

*Gold of the Gods. A. B. Reeve (Hodder & Stoughton) The Dream Doctor do ( do General John Regan. G A, Bermingham ( do

do

do)