Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/290

 accepted doctrine of transmigration. To that doctrine, according to which beings pass by gradations from Brahmā through men and animals to the lowest forms of existence, is doubtless also largely due the fantastic element characteristic of this later poetry. Here, for instance, we read of Vishṇu coming down to earth in the shape of animals, of sages and saints wandering between heaven and earth, of human kings visiting Indra in heaven.

Hand in hand with this fondness for introducing the marvellous and supernatural into the description of human events goes a tendency to exaggeration. Thus King Viçvāmitra, we are told, practised penance for thousands of years in succession; and the power of asceticism is described as so great as to cause even the worlds and the gods to tremble. The very bulk of the Mahābhārata, consisting as it does of more than 200,000 lines, is a concrete illustration of this defective sense of proportion.

As regards the form in which it is presented to us, Sanskrit literature contrasts with that of both the earlier and the later Vedic period. While prose was employed in the Yajurvedas and the Brāhmaṇas, and finally attained to a certain degree of development, it almost disappears in Sanskrit, nearly every branch of literature being treated in verse, often much to the detriment of the subject, as in the case of law. The only departments almost entirely restricted to the use of prose are grammar and philosophy, but the cramped and enigmatical style in which these subjects are treated hardly deserves the name of prose at all. Literary prose is found only in fables, fairy tales, romances, and partially in the drama. In consequence of this neglect, the prose of the later period compares unfavourably with that of the Brāhmaṇas. Even the