THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

Vyasa: Some CharacteristicsTHE Mahabharata, although neither thegreatest nor the richest masterpiece of the secular literature ofIndia, is at the same time its most considerable and importantbody of poetry. Being so, it is the pivot on which the history ofSanskrit literature and incidentally the history of Aryan civilisationin India, must perforce turn. To the great discredit of Europeanscholarship the problem of this all-important work is onethat remains not only unsolved, but untouched. Yet until it issolved, until the confusion of its heterogeneous materials is reducedto some sort of order, the different layers of which it consistsseparated, classed and attributed to their relative dates, and itsrelations with the Ramayana on the one hand and the Puranicand classic literature on the other fully and patiently examined,the history of our civilisation must remain in the air, a field forpedantic wranglings and worthless conjectures. The world knowssomething of our origins because much labour has been bestowedon the Vedas, something of our decline because post-Buddhisticliterature has been much read, annotated and discussed, but ofour great medial and flourishing period it knows little, and thatlittle is neither coherent nor reliable.All that we know of the Mahabharata at present is that it isthe work of several hands and of different periods — this is literallythe limit of the reliable knowledge European scholarshiphas so far been able to extract from it. For the rest we have tobe content with arbitrary conjectures based upon an unwarrantableapplication of European analogies to Indian things or randomassumptions snatched from a word here or a line there, butnever proceeding from that weighty, careful and unbiassed studyof the work, canto by canto, passage by passage, line by line,which can alone bring us to any valuable conclusions. A fancywas started in Germany that the Iliad of Homer is really a pasticheor clever rifacimento of old ballads put together in the timeof Pisistratus. This truly barbarous imagination with its rude