Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume VIII.djvu/20



of the Christian era. Take again the exuberance of figures and tropes which is so marked in the classical style. There is little or nothing of that in the Gîtâ, where you have a plain and direct style of natural simplicity, and yet a style not by any means devoid of æsthetic merit like the style of the Sûtra literature. There is also an almost complete absence of involved syntactical constructions; no attempt to secure that jingle of like sounds, which 'seems to have proved a temptation too strong even for Kâlidâsa's muse entirely to resist. But on the contrary, we have those repetitions of words and phrases, which are characteristic, and not only in Sanskrit, of the style of an archaic period. Adverting specially to the language as distinguished from the style of the Gîtâ, we find such words as Anta, Bhâshâ, Brahman, some of which are collected in the Sanskrit Index in this volume, which have gone out of use in the classical literature in the significations they respectively bear in the Gîtâ. The word 'ha,' which occurs once, is worthy of special note. It is the equivalent of 'gha,' which occurs in the Vedic Samhitâs. In the form 'ha' it occurs in the Brâhmanas. But it never occurs, I think, in what is properly called the classical literature. It is, indeed, found in the Purânas. But that is a class of works which occupies a very unique position. There is a good deal in the Purânas that, I think, must be admitted to be very ancient ; while undoubtedly also there is a great deal in them that is very modern. It is, therefore, impossible to treat the use of 'ha' in that class of works as negativing an inference of the antiquity of any book where the word occurs; while its use in Vedic works and its total absence from modern works indicate such antiquity pretty strongly. We may, therefore, embody the result of this part of the discussion in the proposition, that