Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/323

 § 80. It is evident that a language which had thus fallen into the possession of a priestly caste is not likely to enshrine a literature in any sense of the word popular. But in dealing with the literature of India we must remember that it is really an error to transfer our European conceptions of "people" and "popular"—conceptions which are not strictly applicable to the slave-supported municipalities of Greece and Rome, and which even in modern Europe mark the last links in a long line of development from the serfdom and communes of the Middle Ages—to the many races, languages, and caste-distinctions of that vast country which we briefly name "India." Without some language standing apart from the many varieties of daily speech and some privileged caste to keep watch and ward over its treasures, it is difficult to conceive how India, especially in the face of Greek, Scythic, and Mohammedan conquests, could have produced or retained a literature at all. If, indeed, the monopoly of the Bráhmans had received no serious checks, if no development of new sects and no introduction of foreign thought by conquest had left them sole masters of the religious, political, and literary traditions of India, it is probable that Sanskrit literature might never have advanced much beyond ritual books like the Vedas, law treatises full of Bráhman interests, and chronicles combining myth and history in incalculable proportions. But for Brahman exclusiveness an aufklärung was reserved.

In 543, at the age of eighty, died a reformer worthy of being placed beside, if not above, the greatest our Western world has known. Gautama Buddha—"the Enlightened"—had renounced his royal rank as only son of a king, passed through years of hermitage and penance, and, from his thirty-sixth year, entered upon