Page:The religions of India.djvu/29

Rh myself in not introducing into my exposition any pronounced peculiarities of private opinion.

The reader who peruses with intelligence what I have written, and is au courant with Indianist studies, will not fail to remark that my views on the Yeda are not precisely the same as those which are most generally accepted. Tor in it I recognise a literature that is pre-eminently sacerdotal, and in no sense a popular one ; and from this conclusion I do not, as is ordinarily done, except even the Hymns, the most ancient of the documents. Neither in the language nor in the thought of the Rig- Veda have I been able to discover that quality of primitive natural simplicity which so many are fain to see in it. The poetry it contains appears to me, on the contrary, to be of a singularly refined character and artificially elaborated, full of allusions and reticences, of pretensions to mysticism and theosophic insight ; and the manner of its expression is such as reminds one more frequently of the phraseology in use among certain small groups of initiated than the poetic language of a large community. And these features I am constrained to remark as characteristic of the whole collection; not that they assert themselves with equal emphasis in all the Hymns — the most abstruse imaginings being not without their moments of simplicity of concep- tion ; but there are very few of these Hymns which do not show some trace of them, and it is always difficult to find in the book and to extract a clearly defined portion of per- fectly natural and simple conception. In all these respects the spirit of the Rig-Yeda appears to me to be more allied than is usually supposed to that which prevails in the other Vedic collections, and in the Brahmanas, This conviction, which I had already expressed emphatically enough more than once in the Bevue Critique, I have not felt called upon to urge here, in a work such as this from which all discussion should be excluded as much as possible. I have, nevertheless, given it such expression even here that a careful reader, if he looks, will not fail to recognise it ;