Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/326

 poetry grew up as one too intricate for the space at our disposal, we shall turn to the two most famous Indian epics, and the points of comparison or contrast to similar European poetry which they suggest.

Of these two epics, the Rámáyana contains the story of the Aryan advance into India, while the Mahábhárata may be regarded as metrical romance-chronicles of the Delhi kings. The oldest of these epics, the Rámáyana ("the adventures of Rama," from the Sanskrit Ráma and ayana), is said to have been composed by the poet Válmíki. "For centuries," says Professor Williams, "its existence was probably oral; and we know from the fourth chapter of the first book that it had its minstrels and reciters like the Greek ." The antiquity of Sanskrit, like Hebrew, literature cannot be fixed with certainty, and depends on internal evidences contained in its various works; but internal evidences would seem to show that a great part of the Rámáyana as now known to us was current in India as early as the fifth century Ráma, though mentioned in the Veda, may be regarded as the first real hero, belonging to the Kshattriya or warrior caste, of the post-Vedic age; and, as evidences confirmatory of the date just named, Professor Williams mentions the simplicity of style in the Rámáyana, its want of allusions to Buddhism as an established fact, and the marks it contains of that independent spirit of the northern military tribes, and that tendency to sceptical inquiry even among Bráhmans which, working southwards, led to the great Buddhist reformation.

The story of the Rámáyana, though often interrupted by episodes having little bearing on the plot, is more continuous than that of the Mahábhárata, the latter being written in celebration of the lunar race of Delhi kings, as the Rámáyana is of the solar race of Ajodya or