Sacontala replies, weeping, “My poor little fawn, dost thou ask to follow an unhappy wretch who hesitates not to desert her companions? When thy mother died, soon after thy birth, I supplied her place and reared thee with my own hands, and now that thy second mother is about to leave thee, who will care for thee? My father, be thou a mother to her. My child, go back and be a daughter to my father!”
It is the fatality of the dramatist that he cannot stamp with truth sentiments which are not sure of a response from his audience: he must strike the keyboard of his race. We can imagine how thoroughly an Indian audience would enter into the sentiment of this charming scene. To the little Indian girl, who was still only a child of thirteen or fourteen, the favourite animal did not appear as a toy, or even as a simple playmate. It was the object of grave and thoughtful care, and it received the first outpouring of what would one day be maternal love.
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THE last age of antiquity was an age of yeast. Ideas were in fermentation; religious questions came to be regarded as “interesting”—just as they are now. The spirit of inquiry took the place of placid acceptance on the one hand, and placid indifference on the other. It was natural that there should be a rebound from the effort of Augustus to re-order religion on an Imperial, conventional, and unemotional basis. Then, too, Rome, which had never been really Italian except in the sublime previsions of Virgil, grew every day more cosmopolitan: the denizens of the discovered world found their way thither on business, for pleasure, as slaves—the influence of these last not being the least important factor, though its extent and character are not easy to define. Everything tended to foment a religious unrest which took the form of one of those “returns to the East” that are ever destined to recur: the spiritual sense of the Western world became Orientalised. The worship of Isis and Serapis and much more of Mithra proved to be more exciting than the worship of the Greek and Roman gods which represented Nature and law, while the new cults proposed to raise the veil on what transcends natural perception. No doubt the atmosphere of the East itself favoured their rapid development; the traveller in North Africa must be struck by the extraordinary frequency with which the symbols of Mithraism recur in the sculpture and mosaics of that once great Roman dependency. Evidently the birthland of St. Augustine bred in the matter-of-fact Roman colonist the same nostalgia for the Unknowable which even now a lonely night under the stars of the Sahara awakes in the dullest European soul. Personal immortality as a paramount doctrine; a further life more real than this one; ritual purification, redemption by sacrifice, mystical union with deity; these were among the un-Roman and even anti-Roman conceptions which lay behind the new, strange propaganda, and prepared the way for the diffusion of Christianity. With the Italian peasants who clung to the unmixed older faith no progress was made till persecution could be called in as an auxiliary.