RECENSION OF THE MAHABHARATA 201
poets, in accordance with that amelioration of taste and manners which is inseparable from a great and long-established civilisation, and also doubtless with that high development of religious ideals which will always take place in India in periods of prosperity and power. We feel it artistically wrong that Koli (कलि) should be allowed to depart, and Pushkara should be forgiven. But the subjects of the Gupta emperors had been for ages accustomed to peace and wealth, and in the general refinement of the period reconciliation was desired as the dramatic climax, not revenge. The story of Savitri shows the same trend of popular taste in somewhat different fashion. She triumphs over death—not by the heroic methods of the earlier maiden, who could appeal to the honour of the gods and meet with jovial and thoroughly benevolent treatment in return, but by sheer force of the spiritual ideal. Born of prayer itself, prepared for the supreme encounter by vigil and fast, Savitri is no Vedic princess, but a tender, modern, Hindu woman. She belongs almost unconsciously to the coming era of subjective soul-staying faiths. The boisterous days of storm and fire and forest worships are now far behind.
Between these two ages, however, of the Vedic gods on the one hand, and the theological systems of Vishnu and Shiva on the other, there is in the Mahabharata and also in the Puranas to a less extent one anomalous figure. It is that of
