THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

188 The Harmony of Virtuethat gift until it has become as sure a lactometer as the palate ofthe swan which rejects the water mingled with milk and takesthe milk alone, we have in the peculiar characteristics of thispoetry a test of unquestionable soundness and efficacy.But there is another objection of yet more weight and requiringas full an answer. This method of argument from styleseems after all as a priori and Teutonic as any other; for thereis no logical reason why the mass of writing in this peculiar styleshould be judged to be the original epic and not any of the threeothers or even part of that inferior work which was brushed asideso contemptuously. The original Mahabharata need not have beena great poem at all; it was more probably an early, rude anduncouth performance. Certain considerations however may leadus to consider our choice less arbitrary than it seems. That theWar Parvas contain much of the original epic may be concededto Professor Weber; the war is the consummation of the storyand without a war there could be no Mahabharata. But the warof the Mahabharata was not a petty contest between obscurebarons or a brief episode in a much larger struggle or a romanticand chivalrous emprise for the rescue of a ravished or errantbeauty. It was a great political catastrophe employing theclash of a hundred nations and far-reaching political consequences;the Hindus have always considered it as the turning-point inthe history of their civilisation and the beginning of a new age,and it was long used as a historical standpoint and a date toreckon from in chronology. Such an event must have had themost considerable political causes and been caused by the collisionof the most powerful personalities and the most importantinterests. If we find no record of or allusion to these in thepoem, we shall be compelled to suppose that the poet, livinglong after the event, regarded the war as a legend or romancewhich would form excellent matter for an epic and treated it accordingly.But if we find a simple and unvarnished, though notnecessarily connected and consecutive account of the politicalconditions which preceded the war and of the men who made itand their motives, we may safely say that this also is an essentialpart of the epic. The Iliad deals only with an episode of the legendarysiege of Troy, it covers an action of about eight days in a