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"Had I been a writer of love-poetry," he is reported to have said, "it would have been natural to me to write it with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by my principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader."
Although fidelity had been demanded in marriage, romantic liaisons had not been entirely excluded and thus there was a sense in which the love-poetry of the early Indian middle ages had been partly paralleled by actual courtly or village practice.
The only love-poetry that stands through all time and appeals to all hearts is that which is founded on either or both the species of love natural to all men, the love of the senses, and the love of custom.
Yet the need for romance remained and we can see in the prevalence of love-poetry a substitute for wishes repressed in actual life. It is precisely this role which the story of Krishna the cowherd lover now came to perform. Krishna, being God, had been beyond morals and hence had practised conduct which, if indulged in by men, might well have been wrong.
It utters the same moods of triumph in the beloved's beauty, of despair, of desire, of boastfulness of the poet's immortality, that we find in the love-poetry of other ages. But here are new images, almost a new language. Sometimes we have an image which fills the mind like the image in some little Chinese lyric, as in the poem He Reproves the Curlew:
Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memory with an unjustifiable history. And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetry consider this matter. These are the love-poets who have no reluctance in adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not even been introduced.
Perfect humanity, verging upon, but never entering the breathless region of the Divinity, is the real subject of all true love-poetry; but in all love-poetry hitherto, an "ideal" and not a reality has been the subject, more or less.
In love-poetry of the Middle Age the allegorical personage named "Danger" plays a considerable part, and it is to be feared that Danger too often signified a husband. In Wimpole Street that alarming personage always meant a father.
It is of interest mainly on account of the prolific information given about Radha, the fact that it sets her firmly in the centre, dethroning the hapless Rukmini, and its baroque descriptions of sexual union. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a parallel situation seems to have arisen in feudal France and Germany where local love-poetry also treated adultery as a sine qua non of romance.
Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of assumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were thus true, and whose pudeur of personality thus simple and inviolate. This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither love nor remember in public.
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