The strong hand lifted, rebellion broke out, and for awhile it looked as if Chu Hia must sink into the beast again. His feeble son got rid of Meng-tien, poisoned Li Ssu, offered the feeblest resistance to the rebels, and then poisoned himself. After four years of fighting,--what you might call "unpleasantness all round,"--one Liu Pang achieved the throne. He had started life as a beadle; joined Ts"in Shi Hw.a.n.gti"s army, and risen to be a general; created himself after the emperor"s death Prince of Han; and now had the honor to inaugurate, as Emperor Kaotsu, the greatest of the Chinese dynasties.
In the two-fifties strong barbarous Ts"in had swallowed unmanly worn-out China, and for half a century had been digesting the feast. Then--to mix my metaphors a little--China flopped up to the surface again, pale, but smiling blandly. In the sunlight she gathered strength and cohesion, and proceeded presently to swallow Ts"in and everything else in sight; and emerged soon young, strong, vigorous, and glowing-hearted to the conquest of many worlds in the unknown. What was Ts"in, now is Shensi Province, the very Heart of Han: the Shensi man today is the Son of Han, _Ts"in_ Englished; but in Shensi, the old Ts"in, in their tenderest moods, they call it _Han_ still,--the proudest most patriotic name there is for it.
Not at once was the Golden Age of Han to dawn: half a thirteen-decade cycle from the opening of the manvantara in the two-forties had to pa.s.s first. Ts"in Shi Hw.a.n.gti had mapped out a great empire; it fell to the Hans to consolidate it.
Han Kaotsu followed somewhat in the footsteps of his predecessor, less the cruelty and barbarism, and most of the strength.
The sentiment of the empire was Chinese, not Ts"innish; so, though not a brilliant or always a fortunate soldier, he was able to a.s.sert his sway over the greater part of China Proper. Chinesism had spread over territories never before Chinese, and wherever it had spread, the people were glad of a Chinese dynasty; besides, his rule was tactful and kindly. They were glad that the G.o.ds of the Soil of Han were to be worshipped now, and those of Ts"in disthroned; and that the Ts"in edicts were annulled;--as they were with one important exception: those relating to literature. A cultureless son of the proletariat himself. Han Kaotsu felt no urge towards resurrecting that; and perhaps it was as well that the sleeping dogs should be let lie awhile. The wonder is that the old nationalities did not rea.s.sert themselves; but they did not, to any extent worth mentioning; and perhaps this is the best proof of Han Kaotsu"s real strength. Ts"in Shi Hw.a.n.gti had dealt soundly with the everlasting Hun in his time; but when he died, the Hun recovered. They kept Han Kaotsu busy, so that his saddle, as he said, was his throne. They raided past the capital and down into Ssechuan; once very nearly captured the emperor; and had to be brought out at last with a Chinese princess for the Hun king. Generally speaking, the Hans would have lived at peace with them if they could, and were ready to try better means of solving the problem than war. But it certainly was a problem; for in these Huns we find little traces of human nature that you could work upon. But China was a big country by that time, and only a part of it, comparatively small, suffered from the Huns. For the rest, Han Kaotsu was popular, his people were happy, and his reign of twelve years was a breathing-time in which they gathered strength. He kept a hundred thousand workmen busy on public works, largely road- and bridge-building: a suspension bridge that he built, a hundred and fifty yards long, and crossing a valley five hundred feet below, is still in use,--or was during the last century. He died in 194.
He was succeeded, nominally, by his son Han Hweiti; really by his widow, the empress Liu Chi: one of the three great women who have ruled China. At this time the Huns, under their great Khan Mehteh, were at the height of their power. Khan Mehteh made advances to the Empress: "I should like," said he, "to exchange what I have for what I have not." You and I may think he meant merely a suggestion for mutual trade; but she interpreted it differently, thanked him kindly, but declined the flattering proposal on the score of her age and ugliness. Her hair and teeth, she begged him to believe, were quite inadequate, and made it impossible for her to think of changing her condition.--I do not know whether it was vanity or policy.
But it was she, or perhaps her puppet son the emperor, who started the great Renaissance. A commission was appointed for restoring the literature: among its members, K"ung An-kuo, twelfth in descent from Confucius. Books were found, that devotion had hidden in dry wells and in the walls of houses; one Fu Sheng, ninety years old, repeated the Cla.s.sics word for word to the Commissioner, all from his memory. The restrictions gone, a mighty reaction set in; and China was on fire to be her literary self again. A great ball was set rolling; learning went forward by leaps and bounds. The enthusiasm, it must be said, took directions legitimate and the reverse;--bless you, why should any written page at all be considered lost, when there were men in Han with inventive genius of their own, and a pretty skill at forgery? The Son of Heaven was paying well; to it, then, minds and calligraphic fingers!
So there are false chapters of Chw.a.n.gtse, while many true ones have been lost. And I can never feel sure of Confucius" own _Spring and Autumn Annals,_ wherein he thought lay his highest claim to human grat.i.tude, and the composition of which the really brilliant-minded Mencius considered equal to the work of Ta Yu in bridling China"s Sorrow;--but which, as they come down to us, are not impressive.--The tide rolled on under Han Wenti, from 179 to 156: a poet himself, a man of peace, and a reformer of the laws in the direction of mercy. Another prosperous reign followed; then came the culmination of the age in the Golden Reign of Han Wuti, from 140 to 86.
The cyclic impulse had been working mainly on spiritual and intellectual planes: Ssema Tsien, the Father of Chinese History, gives gloomy pictures of things economic.*
"When the House of Han arose," says Ssema, "the evils of their predecessors had not pa.s.sed away. Husbands still went off to the wars; old and young were employed in transporting food, production was almost at a standstill, and money was scarce. The Son of Heaven had not even carriage horses of the same color; the highest civil and military authorities rode in bullock carts; the people at large knew not where to lay their heads. The coinage was so heavy and c.u.mbersome that the people themselves started a new issue at a fixed standard of value. But the laws were lax, and it was impossible to prevent the grasping from coining largely, buying largely, and then holding for a rise in the market. Prices went up enormously:"--it sounds quite modern and civilized, doesn"t it?--"rice sold at a thousand cash per picul; a horse cost a hundred ounces of silver."
------ * The pa.s.sages quoted are taken from Dr. Giles"s work on _Chinese Literature._ ------
Under the Empress Liu Chi and her successors these conditions were bettered; until, when a half cycle had run its course, and Han Wuti had been some twenty years on the throne, prosperity came to a culmination. Says Ssema Tsien:
"The public granaries were well-stocked; the government treasuries full... The streets were thronged with the horses of the people, and on the highroads, whole droves were to be seen, so that it became necessary to forbid the public use of mares.
Village elders ate meat and drank wine. Petty government clerkships lapsed from father to son, and the higher offices of state were treated as family heirlooms. For a spirit of self-respect and reverence for the law had gone abroad, and a sense of charity and duty towards one"s neighbor kept men aloof from disgrace and crime."
There had been in Kansuh, the north-westernmost province of China Proper, a people called the Yueh Chi or White Scythians, whom the Huns had driven into the far west; by this time they were carving themselves an empire out of the domains of the Parthians, and penetrating into north-west India, but Han Wuti knew nothing of that. All that was known of them was, that somewhere on the limits of the world they existed, and were likely to be still at loggerheads with their ancient foes the Huns. Han Wuti had now been on the throne seven years, and was and had been much troubled by the Hun problem: he thought it might help to solve it if those lost Yueh Chi could be raked up out of the unknown and made active allies. To show the spirit of the age, I will tell you the story of Chang Ch"ien, the general whom he sent to find them.
Chang Ch"ien set out in 139; traversed the desert, and was duly captured by the Huns. Ten years they held him prisoner; then he escaped. During those ten years he had heard no news from home: a new emperor might be reigning, for aught he knew; or Han Wuti might have changed his plans. Such questions, however, never troubled him: he was out to find the Yueh Chi for his master, and find them he would. He simply went forward; came presently to the kingdom of Tawan, in the neighborhood of Yarkand; and there preached a crusade against the Huns. Unsuccessfully: the men of Tawn knew the Huns, but not Han wuti, who was too far away for a safe ally; and they proposed to do nothing in the matter.
Chang Ch"ien considered. Go back to China?--Oh dear no! there must be real Yueh C"hi somewhere, even if these Tawanians were not they. On he went, and searched that lonely world until he did find them. They liked the idea of Hun-hurting; but again, considered China too far away for practical purposes. He struck down into Tibet; was captured again; held prisoner a year; escaped again,--and got back to Changan in 126. A sadder and a wiser man, you might suppose; but nothing of the kind! Full, on the contrary, of brilliant schemes; full of the wonder and rumor of the immense west. These he poured into Han Wuti"s most sympathetic ears; and the emperor started now in real earnest upon his Napoleonic career.
The frontier was no longer at the Great Wall. Only the other day Sir Aurel Stein discovered, in the far west, the long straight furrows traced by the feet of Han Wuti"s sentinels on guard; the piles of reed-stalks, at regular intervals, set along the road for fire-signals; doc.u.ments giving details as to the encampments, the clothes and arrows served out to the soldiers, the provisions made for transforming armies of conquest into peaceful colonies. All these things the sands covered and preserved.
And behind these outposts was a wide empire full of splendor outward and inward; full of immense activities, in literature, in engineering, in commerce. New things and ideas came in from the west: international influences to reinforce the flaming up of Chinese life.
The moving force was still Taoism; the Blue Pearl, sunk deep in the now sunlit waters of the common consciousness, was flashing its rainbows. Ts"in Shi Hw.a.n.gti, for all his greatness, had been an uncouth barbarian; Han Wuti was a very cultured gentleman of literary tastes,--a poet, and no mean one. He too was a Taoist; an initiate of the Taoism of the day; which might mean in part that he had an eye to the Elixir of Life; but it also meant (at least) that he had a restless, exorbitant, and gorgeous imagination. Such, indeed, inflamed the whole nation; which was rich, prosperous, energetic, progressive, and happy. Ts"in ideas of bigness in architecture had taken on refinement in Chinese hands; the palaces and temples of Han Wuti are of course all lost, but by all accounts they must have been wonderful and splendid. Very little of the art comes down: there are some bas-reliefs of horses, fine and strong work, realistic, but with redeeming n.o.bleness. How literature had revived may be gathered from this: in Han Wuti"s Imperial Library there were 3123 volumes of the Cla.s.sics and commentaries thereupon; 2705 on Philosophy; 1318 of Poetry; 2528 on Mathematics; 868 on Medicine; 790 on the Science of War. His gardens at Changan were famous; he had collectors wandering the world for new and ornamental things to stock them; very likely we owe many of our garden plants and shrubs to him. He consecrated mountains and magnificent ceremonies; and for the sake of the G.o.ds and genii appeared as flaming splendors over Tai-hsing and the other sacred heights. For the light of Romance falls on him; he is a shining half faery figure.--Outwardly there was pomp, stately manners, pageantry, high magnificence; inwardly, a burning-up of the national imagination to ensoul it. The Unseen, with all its mystery and awe or loveliness, was the very nearly visible: not a pa.s.s nor lake nor moor nor forest but was crowded with the things of which wonder is made. Muh w.a.n.g, the Chow king, eight centuries before, had ridden into the West and found the garden of that Faery Queen whose Azure Birds of Compa.s.sion fly out into this world to sweeten the thoughts of men. Bless you, Han Wuti married the lady, and had her to abide peaceably in his palace, and to watch with him
"The lanterns glow vermeil and gold, Azure and green, the Spring nights through, When loud the pageant galeons drew To clash in mimic combating, And their dark shooting flames to strew Over the lake at Kouen Ming."
From about 130 to 110 Han Wuti was Napoleonizing: bringing in the north-west; giving the Huns a long quietus in 119; conquering the south with Tonquin; the southern coast provinces, and the lands towards Tibet. Ssema Tsien tells us that "mountains were hewn through for many miles to establish a trade-route through the south-west and open up those remote regions"; that was a scheme of Chang Ch"ien"s, who had ever an eye to penetrating to India.
There was a dark side to it. Vast sums of money were eaten up, and estravagance in private life was encouraged. Says Ssema:
"From the highest to the lowest, everyone vied with his neighbor in lavishing money on houses and appointments and apparel, altogether beyond his means. Such is the everlasting law of the sequence of prosperity and decay.... Merit had to give way to money; shame and scruples of conscience were laid aside; laws and punishments were administered with severer hand."
It is a very common thing to see signs of decline and darkness in one"s own age; and Ssema himself had no cause to love the administration of Han Wuti; under which he had been punished rather severely for some offense. Still, what he says is more or less what you would expect the truth to be. And you will note him historian of the life of the people; not mere recounter of court scandals and chronicler of wars: conscious, too, of the law of cycles;--all told, something a truer historian than we have seen too much of in the West.--Where, indeed, we are wedded to politics, and must have our annalists chronicle above all things what we call political growth; not seeing that it is but a circle, and squirreling round valiantly in a cage to get perpetually in high triumph to the place you started from; a foolish externality at best. But real History mirrors for us the motions of the Human Spirit and the Eternal.
I said that what Ssema tells us is what you would expect the truth to be; this way:--After half a cycle of that adventurous and imaginative spirit, eyes jaundiced a little would surely find excuse enough for querulous vision. There is, is there not, something Elizabethan in that Chang Ch"ien, taking the vast void so gaily, and not to be quenched by all those fusty years imprisoned among the Huns, but returning only the more fired and heady of imagination? If he was a type of Han Wuti"s China, we may guess Ssema was not far out, and that vaulting ambition was overleaping itself a little; that men were buying automobiles who by good rights should have ridden in a wheelbarrow. Things did not go quite so well with the great emperor after his twenty flaming Napoleonic years; his vast mountain-cleaving schemes were left unfinished; Central Asia grew more troublesome again, and he had to call off Chang Ch"ien from an expedition into India by way of Yunnan and Tibet and the half-cleaved mountains, to fight the old enemy in the north-west. But until the thirteen decades were pa.s.sed, and Han Chaoti, his successor, had died in 63 B.C., the vast designs were still upspringing; high and daring enterprise was still the characteristic of the Chinese mind. The thirteen decades, that is, from the accession of Han Hueiti and the beginning of the Revival of Literature in 194.
XV. SOME POSSIBLE EPOCHS IN SANSKRIT LITERATURE
Han Chaoti died in 63 B.C.; his successor is described as a "boor of low tastes";--from that time the great Han impetus goes slowing down and quieting. China was recuperating after Han Wuti"s flare of splendor; we may leave her to recuperate, and look meanwhile elsewhere.
And first to that most tantalizing of human regions, India; where you would expect something just now from the cyclic backwash. As soon as you touch this country, in the domain of history and chronology, you are certain, as they say, to get "hoodooed." Kali-Yuga began there in 3102 B.C., and ever since that unfortunate event, not a single soul in the country seems to have had an idea of keeping track of the calendar. So-and-so, you read, reigned. When?--Oh, in 1000 A.D. Or in 213 A.D. Or in 78 A.D. Or in a few million B.C., or 2100 A.D. Or he did not reign at all. After all, what does it matter?--this is Kali-Yuga, and nothing can go right.--You fix your eyes on a certain spot in time, which, according to your guesses at the cycles, should be important. Nothing doing there, as we say. Oh no, nothing at all: this is Kali-Yuga, and what should be doing? .... Well, if you press the point, no doubt somebody was reigning, somewhere.--But, pardon my insistence, if seems--. Quite so, quite so! as I said, somebody must have been reigning.--You scrutinze; you bring your lenses to bear; and the somebody begins to emerge. And proves to be, say, the great Samundragupta, emperor of all India (nearly); for power and splendor, almost to be mentioned with Asoka. And it was the Golden Age of Music, and perhaps some other things.--Yes, certainly; the Guptas were reigning then, I forgot. But why bother about it? This is Kali-Yuga, and what does anything matter?--And you come away with the impression that your non-informant could reveal enough and plenty, if he had a mind to.
Which is, indeed, probably the case. All this nonchalant indefiniteness means nothing more, one suspects, than that the Brahmans have elected to keep the history of their country unknown to us poor Mlechhas. Then there are Others, too: the Guardians of Esotericism in a greater sense; who have not chosen so far that Indian history should be known. So we can only take dim foreshadowings, and make guesses.
We saw the Maurya dynasty,--that one seemingly firm patch to set your feet on in the whole mora.s.s of the Indian past,--occupy the thirteen decades from 320 to 190 B.C., (or we thought we did); now the question is, from that _pied-a-terre_ whither shall we jump? If you could be sure that the ebb of the wave would be equal in length to its inrush,--the night to the day:--that the minor pralaya would be no longer or shorter than the little manvantara that preceded it--why, then you might leap out securely for 60 B.C., with a comfortable feeling that there would be some kind of turning-point in Indian history there or thereabouts. Sometimes things do happen so, beautifully, as if arranged by the clock. But unfortunately, enough mischief may be done in thirteen decades to take a much longer period to disentangle; and again, it is only when you strike an average for the whole year, that you can say the nights are equal to the days. We are trying to see through to the pattern of history; not to dogmatize on such details as we may find, nor claim on the petty strength of them to be certain of the whole. So, our present leap (for we shall make it), while not quite in the dark, must be made in the dusk of an hour or so after sunset. There must be an element of faith in it: very likely we shall splash and sink gruesomely.
Well, here goes then! From 190 B.C. thirteen decades forward to 60 B.C., and,--squish! But, courage! throw out your arm and clutch--at this trailing root, _57 B. C.,_ here within easy reach; and haul yourself out. So; and see, now you are standing on something. What it is, _Dios lo sabe!_ But there is an Indian era that begins in 57 B.C.; for a long time, dates were counted from that year. That era rises in undefined legendary splendor, and peters out ineffectually you don"t just know where. There is nothing to go upon but legends, with never a coin nor monument found to back them;--never mind; dates you count eras from are generally those in which important cycles begin. The legends relate to Vikramaditya king of Ujjain,--which kingdom is towards the western side of the peninsula, and about where Hindoostan and the Deccan join. He is the Arthur-Charlemain of India, the Golden Monarch of Romance. In the lakes of his palace gardens the very swans sang his praises daily--
"Glory be to Vikramajeet Who always gives us pearls to eat";
and when he died, the four pillars that supported his throne rose up, and wandered away through the fields and jungle disconsolate: they would not support the dignity of any lesser man.* Such tales are told about him by every Indian mother to her children at this present day, and have been, presumably, any time these last two thousand years.
------ * _India through the Ages,_ by Mrs. Flora Annie Steel.
Of his real existence Historical Research cannot satisfy itself at all;--or it half guesses it may have discovered his probable original wandering in disguise through the centuries of a thousand years or so later. But you must expect that sort of thing in India.
At his court, says tradition, lived the "Nine Gems of Literature,"
--chief among them the poet-dramatist Kalidasa; whom Historical Research (western) rather infers lived at several widely separated epochs much nearer our own day. Well; for the time being let us leave Historical Research (western) to stew in its own (largely poisonous) juices, and see how it likes it,--and say that there are good cyclic chances of something large here, in the half-cycle between the Ages of Han Wuti and Augustus.
We may note that things Indian must be dealt with differently from things elsewhere. You take, for example, the old story about the Moslem conquerors of Egypt burning the Alexandrian Library. The fact that this is mentioned for the first time by a Christian who lived six hundred years after the supposed event, while we have many histories written during those six hundred years which say nothing about it at all,--is evidence amounting to proof that it never happened; especially when you take into account the known fact that the Alexandrian Library had already been thoroughly burnt several times. But you can derive no such negativing certainty, in India, from the fact that Vikramaditya and Ujjain and Kalidasa may never have been mentioned together, not a.s.sociated with the era of 57 B.C., in any extant writing known to the west that comes from before several centuries later.
Because the Brahman were a close corporation that kept the records of history, and kept them secret; and gave out bits when it suited them. Say that in 1400 (or whenever else it may have been) they first allowed it to be published that Kalidasa flourished at Vikrmaditya"s court:--they may have been consciously lying, but at least they were talking about what they knew. They were not guessing, or using their head-gear wrongfully, their lying was intentional, or their truth warranted by knowledge. And no motive for lying is apparent here.--It would be very satisfactory, of course, were a coin discovered with King Vikrmaditya"s image and superscription nicely engraved thereon: _Vikramaditya De Gratia: Uj. Imp.; Fid. Def.; 57 B.C._ But in this wicked world you cannot have everything; you must be thankful for what you can get.
You may remember that Han Wuti, to solve the Hun problem, sent Chang Ch"ien out through the desert to discover the Yueh Chi"
and that Chang found them at last in Bactria, which they had conquered from Greeks who had held it since Alexander"s time. He found them settled and with some fair degree of civilization; spoke of Bactria under their sway as a "land of a thousand cities";--they had learned much since they were nomads driven out of Kansuh by the Huns. Also they were in the midst of a career of expansion. Within thirty years of his visit to them, or by 100 B.C., they had spread their empire over eastern Persia, at the expense of the Parthians; and thence went down into India conquering. By 60 B.C. they held the Punjab and generally the western parts of Hindoostan; then, since they do not seem to have got down into the Deccan, I take it they were held up. By whom?--Truly this is pure speculation. But the state of Malwa, of which Ujjain was the capital, lay right in their southward path; if held up they were, it would have been, probably, by some king of Ujjain. Was this what happened?--that the peril of these northern invaders roused Malwa to exert its fullest strength; the military effort spurring up national feeling; the national feeling, creative energies spiritual, mental and imaginative;--until a great age in Ujjain had come into being.
It is what we often see. The menace of Spain roused England to Elizabethanism; the Persian peril awakend Athens. So King Vikramaditya leads out his armies, and to victory; and the Nine Gems of Literature sing at his court. It is a backwash from Han Wuti"s China, that goes west with Chang Ch"ien to the Yueh Chi, and south with them into India. And we can look for no apex of literary creation at this time, either in China or Europe. In the Roman literature of that cycle it is the keen creative note we miss: Virgil, the nearest to it, cannot be said to have possessed quite; and Han literature was probably its first culmination under Han Wuti, and its second under the Eastern Hans. One suspects that great creation is generally going on somewhere, and is not displeased to find hints of its presence in India; is inclined to think this may have been, after all, the Golden Age of the Sanskrit Drama.--At which there can be at any rate no harm in taking a glance at this point; and, retrospectively, at Sanskrit literature as a whole;--a desperately inadequate glance, be it said.
I ask you here to remember the three periods of English Poetry, with their characteristics; and you must not mind my using my Welsh G.o.d-names in connexion with them. First, then, there was the Period of Plenydd,--of the beginnings of _Vision;_ when the eyes of Chaucer and his lyricist predecessors were opened to the world out-of-doors; when they began to see that the skies were blue, fields and forests green; that there were flowers in the meadows and woodlands; and that all these things were delectable. Then there was the Period of Gwron, Strength; when Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton evolved the Grand Manner; when they made the great March-Music, unknown in English before, and hardly achieved by anyone since:--the era of the great Warrior-poetry of the Tragedies and of _Paradise Lost._ Then came, with Wordsworth and Keats and Sh.e.l.ley, the Age of Alawn, lasting on until today; when the music of intonation brought with it romance and mystery and Natural Magic with its rich glow and wizard insight. And you will remember how English Poetry, on the uptrend of a major cycle, is a reaching from the material towards the spiritual, a growth toward that. Though Milton and Shakespeare made their grand Soul-Symbols,--by virtue of a cosmic force moving them as it has moved no others in the language,--you cannot find in their works, or in any works of that age, such clear perceptions or statements of spiritual truth as in Swinburne"s _Songs before Sunrise;_ nor was the brain-mind of either of those giants of the Middle Period capable of such conscious mystic thought as Wordsworth"s. There was an evolution upward and inward; from Chaucer"s school-boy vision, to Swinburne"s (in that one book) clear sight of the Soul.
We appear to find in Sanskrit literature,--I speak in a very general sense,--also such great main epochs or cycles. First a reign of Plenydd, of Vision,--in the Age of the Sacred Books.
Then a reign of Gwron,--in the Age of the heroic Epics. Then a reign of Alawn, in the Age of the Drama.
But the direction is all opposite. The cycle is not upward, from the sough of a beastly Iron Age towards the luminance of a coming Golden; but downward from the peaks and splendors of the Age of Gold to where the outlook is on to this latter h.e.l.l"s-gulf of years. Plenydd, when he first touched English eyes, he was Plenydd the Lord of Spiritual vision, the Seer into the Eternities. Wordsworth at his highest only approaches,-- Swinburne in _Hertha_ halts at the portals of, the Upanishads.
Now, what may this indicate? To my mind, this: that you are not to take these Sanskrit Sacred Books as the fruitage of a single literary age. They do not correspond with, say, the Elizabethan, or the Nineteenth-Century, poetry of England; but are rather the cream of the output of a whole period as long (at least) as that of all English literature; the blossoming of a Racial Mind during (at least) a manvantara of fifteen hundred years. I do not doubt that the age that gave birth to the _Katha-Upanishad,_ gave birth to all manner of other things also; flippancies and trivialities among the rest;--just as in the same England, and in the same years, Milton was dictating _Samson Agonistes,_ and Butler was writing the stinging scurrilities of _Hudibras._ But the Sanskrit Hudibrases are lost; as the English one will be, even if it takes millenniums to lose it. Full-flowing time has washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the palaces built upon the rock of the Soul. The Soul made the Upanishads, as it mide _Paradise Lost;_ it made the former in the Golden Age, and the latter in this Age of Iron; the former through men gifted with superlative vision; the latter through a blind old bard. Therein lies the difference: all our bards, our very greatest, have been blind,--Dante and Shakespeare, no less than Milton. Full-flowing Time washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the rock-built palaces of the Soul; and these,--not complete, perhaps;--repaired to a degree by hands more foolish;--a little ruinous in places,--but the ruins grander and brighter than all the pomps, all the new-fangled castles of genii, of later times, --come down to us as the Sacred Books of India, the oldest extant literature in the world. How old? We may put their epoch well before the death of Krishna in 3102 B. C.,--well before the opening of the Kali-Yuga; we may say that it lasted a very long time;--and be content that if all scholarship, all western and modern opinion, laughs at us now,--the laugh will probably be with us when we have been dead a long time. Or perhaps sooner.
They count three stages in this Vedic or pre-cla.s.sical literature, wherefrom also we may infer that it was the output of a great manvantara, not of a mere day of literary creation. These three, they say, are represented by the Vedas, the Brahmanas, and the Upanishads. The Vedas consist of hymns to the G.o.ds; and in a Golden Age you might find simple hymns to the G.o.ds a sufficient expression of religion. Where, say, Reincarnation was common knowledge; where everybody knew it, and no one doubted it; you would not bother to make poems about it: --you do not make poems about going to bed at night and getting up in the morning--or not as a rule. You make poems upon a reaction of surprise at perceptions which seem wonderful and beautiful,-- and in a Golden Age, the things that would seem wonderful and Beautiful would be, precisely, the Sky, the Stars, Earth, Fire, the Winds and Waters. Our senses are dimmed, or we should see in them the eternally startling manifestations of the Lords of Eternal Beauty. It is no use arguing from the Vedic hymns, as some folk do, a "primitive" state of society; we have not the keys now to the background, mental and social, of the people among whom those hymns arose. Poetry in every succeeding age has had to fight harder to proclaim the spiritual truth proper to her native spheres: were all spiritual truth granted, she would need do nothing more than mention the Sky, or the Earth, and all the wonder, all the mystery and delight connoted by them would flood into the minds of her hearers. But now she must labor difficultly to make those things cry through; she gains in glory by the resistance of the material molds she must pierce. So the Vedas tell us little unless we separate ourselves from our preconceptions about "primitive Aryans"; whose civilization may have been at once highly evolved and very spiritual.
The _Brahmanas_ are priest-books; the _Upanishads,_ it is reasonable to say are Kshattriya-books;--you often find in them Brahmans coming to Kshattriyas to learn the Inner Wisdom. The _Brahmanas_ are books of ritual; the _Upanishads_ came much later that the _Brahmanas:_ that they represent a reaction towards spirituality from the tyranny of a priestly caste. But probably the day of the Kshattriyas was much earlier than that of the priests. The Marlow-Shakespear-Milton time was the Kshattriya period in English poetry; also the period during which the greatest souls incarnated, and produced the greatest work. So, perhaps, in this manvantara of the pre-cla.s.sical Sanskrit literature, the Rig-Veda with its hymns represents the first, the Chaucerian period; but a Golden Age Chaucerian, simple and pure,--a time in which the Mysteries really ruled human life, and when to hymn the G.o.ds was to partic.i.p.ate in the wonder and freeddom of their being. Think, perhaps, as the cycle mounted to its hour of noon, esotericism opened its doors to pour forth an illumination yet stronger and more saving: mighty egos incarnated, and put in writing the marvelous revelations of the _Upanishads:_ there may have been a descent towards matter, to call forth these more explicit declarations of the Spirit. The exclusive caste-system had not been evolved by any means, nor was to be for many ages: the kings are at the head of things; and they, not the priests, the chief custodians of the Deeper Wisdom.--And then, later, the Priest-cast made its contribution, evolving in the _Brahmanas_ the ritual of their order; with an implication, ever growing after the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, that only by this ritual salvation could be attained. Not that it follows that this was the idea at first. Ritual has its place: hymns and chantings, so they be the right ones, performed rightly, have their decided magical value; we can understand that in its inception and first purity, this Brahmana literature may have been a growth or birth, under the aegis of Alawn of the Harmonies, of the magic of chanted song.
And having said all this, and reconsidering it, one feels that to attribute these three branches of literature to a single manvantara is a woeful foreshortening. I suppose the Rig-Veda is as old as the Aryan Sub-race, which, according to our calculations, must have begun some 160,000 years ago.
The _Upanishads_ affect us like poetry; even in Max Muller"s translation, which is poor prose, they do not lose altogether their uplift and quality of song. They sing the philosophy of the divine in Man; I suppose we may easily say they are the highest thing in extant literature. They do not come to us whole or untainted. We may remember what the Swami Dayanand Sarasvati said to H. P. Blavatsky: that he could show the excellent "Moksh Mooller" that "what crossed the Kalapani from India to Europe were only the bits of rejected copies of some pa.s.sages from our sacred books." Again, Madame Blavatsky says that the best part of the Upanishads was taken out at the time Buddha was preaching; the Brahmans took it out, that he might not prove too clearly the truth of his teachings by appeals to their sacred books. Also the Buddha was a Kshattriya; so the ancient eminence of the Kshattriyas had to be obscured a little;--it was the Brahmans, by that time, who were monopolizing the teaching office. And no doubt in the same way from time to time much has been added: the Brahmans could do this, being custodians of the sacred literature. Yet in spite of all we get in them a lark"s song,-- but a spiritual lark"s song, floating and running in the golden glories of the Spiritual Sun; a song whose verve carries us openly up into the realms of pure spirit; a wonderful radiance and sweetness of dawn, of dawn in its fresh purity, its holiness,--haunted with no levity or boisterousness of youth, but with a wisdom gay and ancient,--eternal, laughter-laden, triumphant,--at once h.o.a.ry and young,--like the sparkle of snows on Himalaya, like the amber glow in the eastern sky. Here almost alone in literature we get long draughts of the Golden Age: not a Golden Age fought for and brought down into our perceptions (which all true poetry gives us), but one actually existing, open and free;--and not merely the color and atmosphere of it, but the wisdom. One need not wonder that Madame Blavatsky drew so freely on India for the nexus of her teachings. That country has performed a marvelous function, taking all its ages together, in the life of humanity; in preserving for us the poetry and wisdom of an age before the Mysteries had declined; in keeping open for us, in a semi-accessible literature, a kind of window into the Golden Age.--Well; each of the races has some function to fulfil. And it is not modern India that has done this; she has not done it of her own good will,--has had no good will to do it.
It is the Akbars the Anquetil Duperrons and Sir William Joneses, --and above all, and far above all, H. P. Blavatsky,--whom we have to thank.