The style similarly is explained and justified by the end of suggesting sentiment. The lyric stanzas, at first sight strangely undramatic, [585] find their full explanation when it is remembered how effective each is in exciting the appropriate emotion in the mind of the audience, which, deeply versed in Sanskrit poetry, is keen to appreciate the effect of each stanza. The simplicity or even negligence of the prose of the drama is thus also explained and excused. It is not necessary to excite sentiment; it serves merely as the mode of communicating facts, and of enabling the audience to follow the action, until an opportunity is afforded to excite feeling by the melody of a verse, all the more effective from its sudden emergence from the flatness of its environment. The same consideration explains the importance of those elements of which we can form so faint an impression, the dance, music, song, and the mimetic art. The elaborate code of gestures laid down in the theory, and unquestionably bulking large in practice, was all intended to produce in cultivated spirits the sentiments appropriate to the play. The ideal character of the heroic drama extends itself even to the Nāṭikā, where a closer approach to real life might be expected. The dramatists, however, make no attempt at realism; they choose their subjects from the legend, and they cast over the trivial amourettes of their heroes the glamour derived from the assurance that the winning in marriage of a maiden will assure them universal rule. The action of the play is thus not suffered to degenerate into a portrayal of the domestic difficulties of the harem system under polygamic conditions; the dramatists do not seek realism, but are content to reproduce a stereotyped scheme of love, jealousy, parting, and reunion, a sequence well calculated to evoke the sentiment of love in the mind of the audience. Even in the Prakaraṇa, in which realism might be expected, seeing that it condescends to heroes of less than royal or divine status, there is no actual exception: though the author of the Mṛcchakaṭikā has had the power to infuse a semblance of life and actuality into his characters, Bhavabhūti shows us in the Mālatīmādhava nothing but types suggesting the erotic sentiment. Equally ideal is the Vyāyoga with its suggestion of heroism and its deliberate selection of its subject from the epic tradition. Tragedy proper is denied us by these conditions of Indian thought, and comedy in any of its higher forms is also difficult; it might legitimately be expected to prevail in the Nāṭikā or the Prakaraṇa, but it is unduly subordinated to the erotic sentiment and, though not absent, is comparatively undeveloped. The Prahasana and the Bhāṇa indeed appeal to the comic sentiment, but only in an inferior and degraded form, a fact expressed in the failure of the classical drama to preserve a single specimen of either form of composition.