A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, so far as it illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans c6.205

c6.205

The modern literature of India, though not yet grouped in chronological order, will find in the literature of the Vedic age something like a past, some testimony to prove that it did not spring up in a day, but clings by its roots to the earliest strata of Indian thought. The Laws of the Mânavas, though no longer the composition of a primeval sage, will at least be safe against the charge of being the invention of some unemployed Indian lawgiver. Plays like Śakuntala and Urvaśî, though no longer regarded as the productions of a Periclean age, will be classed among the productions of what may properly be called the Alexandrian period of Sanskrit literature. But whatever we may have to surrender with regard to the antiquity claimed by these and other Sanskrit works, that portion of the literature of India which alone can claim a place in the history of the world, and which alone can command the attention of those who survey the summits of human intellect, not only in the East but over the whole civilised world, will, we hope, for the future, be safe against the doubts which I myself have shared for many years. It is difficult, no doubt, to believe that the most ancient literary work of the Aryan race, a work more ancient than the Zendavesta and Homer, should, after a lapse of at least three thousand years, have been discovered, and for the first time published in its entirety, not in one of the Parishads on the borders of the Ganges, but in one of the colleges of an English University. It is difficult to believe that sufficient MSS. should have been preserved, in spite of the perishable nature of the material on which they are written, to enable an editor to publish the collection of the Vedic hymns in exactly that form in which they existed at least 800 years before the Christian era; and, still more, that this collection, which was completed at the time of Lycurgus, should contain the poetical relics of a pre-Homeric age; an age in which the names of the Greek gods and heroes had not yet lost their original sense, and in which the simple worship of the Divine powers of nature was not yet supplanted by a worship of personal gods. It is difficult to believe this; and we have a right to be sceptical. But it is likewise our duty to inquire into the value of what has been preserved for us in so extraordinary a manner, and to extract from it those lessons which the study of mankind was intended to teach to man.