India: What can it teach us? Part 2

First of all, its antiquity--for we know Sanskrit at an earlier period than Greek. But what is far more important than its merely chronological antiquity is the antique state of preservation in which that Aryan language has been handed down to us. The world had known Latin and Greek for centuries, and it was felt, no doubt, that there was some kind of similarity between the two. But how was that similarity to be explained? Sometimes Latin was supposed to give the key to the formation of a Greek word, sometimes Greek seemed to betray the secret of the origin of a Latin word. Afterward, when the ancient Teutonic languages, such as Gothic and Anglo-Saxon, and the ancient Celtic and Slavonic languages too, came to be studied, no one could help seeing a certain family likeness among them all. But how such a likeness between these languages came to be, and how, what is far more difficult to explain, such striking differences too between these languages came to be, remained a mystery, and gave rise to the most gratuitous theories, most of them, as you know, devoid of all scientific foundation. As soon, however, as Sanskrit stepped into the midst of these languages, there came light and warmth and mutual recognition. They all ceased to be strangers, and each fell of its own accord into its right place. Sanskrit was the eldest sister of them all, and could tell of many things which the other members of the family had quite forgotten. Still, the other languages too had each their own tale to tell; and it is out of all their tales together that a chapter in the human mind has been put together which, in some respects, is more important to us than any of the other chapters, the Jewish, the Greek, the Latin, or the Saxon.

The process by which that ancient chapter of history was recovered is very simple. Take the words which occur in the same form and with the same meaning in all the seven branches of the Aryan family, and you have in them the most genuine and trustworthy records in which to read the thoughts of our true ancestors, before they had become Hindus, or Persians, or Greeks, or Romans, or Celts, or Teutons, or Slaves. Of course, some of these ancient charters may have been lost in one or other of these seven branches of the Aryan family, but even then, if they are found in six, or five, or four, or three, or even two only of its original branches, the probability remains, unless we can prove a later historical contact between these languages, that these words existed before the great _Aryan Separation_. If we find _agni_, meaning fire, in Sanskrit, and _ignis_, meaning fire, in Latin, we may safely conclude that _fire_ was known to the undivided Aryans, even if no trace of the same name of fire occurred anywhere else. And why?

Because there is no indication that Latin remained longer united with Sanskrit than any of the other Aryan languages, or that Latin could have borrowed such a word from Sanskrit, after these two languages had once become distinct. We have, however, the Lithuanian _ugns_, and the Scottish _ingle_, to show that the Slavonic and possibly the Teutonic languages also, knew the same word for fire, though they replaced it in time by other words. Words, like all other things, will die, and why they should live on in one soil and wither away and perish in another, is not always easy to say. What has become of _ignis_, for instance, in all the Romance languages? It has withered away and perished, probably because, after losing its final unaccentuated syllable, it became awkward to p.r.o.nounce; and another word, _focus_, which in Latin meant fireplace, hearth, altar, has taken its place.

Suppose we wanted to know whether the ancient Aryans before their separation knew the mouse: we should only have to consult the princ.i.p.al Aryan dictionaries, and we should find in Sanskrit _mush_, in Greek _??_, in Latin _mus_, in Old Slavonic _my?se_, in Old High German _mus_, enabling us to say that, at a time so distant from us that we feel inclined to measure it by Indian rather than by our own chronology, the mouse was known, that is, was named, was conceived and recognized as a species of its own, not to be confounded with any other vermin.

And if we were to ask whether the enemy of the mouse, the _cat_, was known at the same distant time, we should feel justified in saying decidedly, No. The cat is called in Sanskrit mar_g_ara and vi_d_ala. In Greek and Latin the words usually given as names of the cat, _?a???_ and a???????, _mustella_ and _feles_, did not originally signify the tame cat, but the weasel or marten. The name for the real cat in Greek was ??tta, in Latin _catus_, and these words have supplied the names for cat in all the Teutonic, Slavonic, and Celtic languages. The animal itself, so far as we know at present, came to Europe from Egypt, where it had been wors.h.i.+pped for centuries and tamed; and as this arrival probably dates from the fourth century A.D., we can well understand that no common name for it could have existed when the Aryan nations separated.[15]

In this way a more or lees complete picture of the state of civilization, previous to the Aryan Separation, can be and has been reconstructed, like a mosaic put together with the fragments of ancient stones; and I doubt whether, in tracing the history of the human mind, we shall ever reach to a lower stratum than that which is revealed to us by the converging rays of the different Aryan languages.

Nor is that all; for even that Proto-Aryan language, as it has been reconstructed from the ruins scattered about in India, Greece, Italy, and Germany, is clearly the result of a long, long process of thought.

One shrinks from chronological limitations when looking into such distant periods of life. But if we find Sanskrit as a perfect literary language, totally different from Greek and Latin, 1500 B.C., where can those streams of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin meet, as we trace them back to their common source? And then, when we have followed these mighty national streams back to their common meeting-point, even then that common language looks like a rock washed down and smoothed for ages by the ebb and flow of thought. We find in that language such a compound, for instance, as _asmi_, I am, Greek ?s?.

What would other languages give for such a pure concept as _I am_?

They may say, _I stand_, or _I live_, or _I grow_, or _I turn_, but it is given to few languages only to be able to say _I am_. To us nothing seems more natural than the auxiliary verb _I am_; but, in reality, no work of art has required greater efforts than this little word _I am_.

And all those efforts lie beneath the level of the common Proto-Aryan speech. Many different ways were open, were tried, too, in order to arrive at such a compound as _asmi_, and such a concept as _I am_. But all were given up, and this one alone remained, and was preserved forever in all the languages and all the dialects of the Aryan family.

In _as-mi_, _as_ is the root, and in the compound _as-mi_, the predicative root _as_, to be, is predicated of _mi_, I. But no language could ever produce at once so empty, or, if you like, so general a root as _as_, to be. _As_ meant originally _to breathe_, and from it we have _asu_, breath, spirit, life, also _as_ the mouth, Latin _os_, _oris_. By constant wear and tear this root _as_, to breathe, had first to lose all signs of its original material character, before it could convey that purely abstract meaning of existence, without any qualification, which has rendered to the higher operations of thought the same service which the nought, likewise the invention of Indian genius, has to render in arithmetic. Who will say how long the friction lasted which changed _as_, to breathe, into _as_, to be? And even a root _as_, to breathe, was an Aryan root, not Semitic, not Turanian. It possessed an historical individuality--it was the work of our forefathers, and represents a thread which unites us in our thoughts and words with those who first thought for us, with those who first spoke for us, and whose thoughts and words men are still thinking and speaking, though divided from them by thousands, it may be by hundreds of thousands of years.

This is what I call _history_ in the true sense of the word, something really worth knowing, far more so than the scandals of courts, or the butcheries of nations, which fill so many pages of our Manuals of History. And all this work is only beginning, and whoever likes to labor in these the most ancient of historical archives will find plenty of discoveries to make--and yet people ask, What is the use of learning Sanskrit?

We get accustomed to everything, and cease to wonder at what would have startled our fathers and upset all their stratified notions, like a sudden earthquake. Every child now learns at school that English is an Aryan or Indo-European language, that it belongs to the Teutonic branch, and that this branch, together with the Italic, Greek, Celtic, Slavonic, Iranic, and Indic branches, all spring from the same stock, and form together the great Aryan or Indo-European family of speech.

But this, though it is taught now in our elementary schools, was really, but fifty years ago, like the opening of a new horizon of the world of the intellect, and the extension of a feeling of closest fraternity that made us feel at home where before we had been strangers, and changed millions of so-called barbarians into our own kith and kin. To speak the same language const.i.tutes a closer union than to have drunk the same milk; and Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, is substantially the same language as Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. This is a lesson which we should never have learned but from a study of Indian language and literature, and if India had taught us nothing else, it would have taught us more than almost any other language ever did.

It is quite amusing, though instructive also, to read what was written by scholars and philosophers when this new light first dawned on the world. They would not have it, they would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called n.i.g.g.e.rs of India. The cla.s.sical scholar scouted the idea, and I myself still remember the time, when I was a student at Leipzig, and began to study Sanskrit, with what contempt any remarks on Sanskrit or comparative grammar were treated by my teachers, men such as Gottfried Hermann, Haupt, Westermann, Stallbaum, and others.

No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. All hands were against him; and if in comparing Greek and Latin with Sanskrit, Gothic, Celtic, Slavonic, or Persian, he happened to have placed one single accent wrong, the shouts of those who knew nothing but Greek and Latin, and probably looked in their Greek dictionaries to be quite sure of their accents, would never end. Dugald Stewart, rather than admit a relations.h.i.+p between Hindus and Scots, would rather believe that the whole Sanskrit language and the whole of Sanskrit literature--mind, a literature extending over three thousand years and larger than the ancient literature of either Greece or Rome--was a forgery of those wily priests, the Brahmans. I remember too how, when I was at school at Leipzig (and a very good school it was, with such masters as n.o.bbe, Forbiger, Funkhaenel, and Palm--an old school too, which could boast of Leibnitz among its former pupils) I remember, I say, one of our masters (Dr. Klee) telling us one afternoon, when it was too hot to do any serious work, that there was a language spoken in India, which was much the same as Greek and Latin, nay, as German and Russian. At first we thought it was a joke, but when one saw the parallel columns of numerals, p.r.o.nouns, and verbs in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin written on the blackboard, one felt in the presence of facts, before which one had to bow. All one's ideas of Adam and Eve, and the Paradise, and the tower of Babel, and Shem, Ham, and j.a.phet, with Homer and aeneas and Virgil too, seemed to be whirling round and round, till at last one picked up the fragments and tried to build up a new world, and to live with a new historical consciousness.

Here you will see why I consider a certain knowledge of India an essential portion of a liberal or an historical education. The concept of the European man has been changed and widely extended by our acquaintance with India, and we know now that we are something different from what we thought we were. Suppose the Americans, owing to some cataclysmal events, had forgotten their English origin, and after two or three thousand years found themselves in possession of a language and of ideas which they could trace back historically to a certain date, but which, at that date, seemed, as it were, fallen from the sky, without any explanation of their origin and previous growth, what would they say if suddenly the existence of an English language and literature were revealed to them, such as they existed in the eighteenth century--explaining all that seemed before almost miraculous, and solving almost every question that could be asked?

Well, this is much the same as what the discovery of Sanskrit has done for us. It has added a new period to our historical consciousness, and revived the recollections of our childhood, which seemed to have vanished forever.

Whatever else we may have been, it is quite clear now that, many thousands of years ago, we were something that had not yet developed into an Englishman, or a Saxon, or a Greek, or a Hindu either, yet contained in itself the germs of all these characters. A strange being, you may say. Yes, but for all that a very real being, and an ancestor too of whom we must learn to be proud, far more than of any such modern ancestors, as Normans, Saxons, Celts, and all the rest.

And this is not all yet that a study of Sanskrit and the other Aryan languages has done for us. It has not only widened our views of man, and taught us to embrace millions of strangers and barbarians as members of one family, but it has imparted to the whole ancient history of man a reality which it never possessed before.

We speak and write a great deal about antiquities, and if we can lay hold of a Greek statue or an Egyptian Sphinx or a Babylonian Bull, our heart rejoices, and we build museums grander than any royal palaces to receive the treasures of the past. This is quite right. But are you aware that every one of us possesses what may be called the richest and most wonderful Museum of Antiquities, older than any statues, sphinxes, or bulls? And where? Why, in our own language. When I use such words as _father_ or _mother_, _heart_ or _tear_, _one_, _two_, _three_, _here_ and _there_, I am handling coins or counters that were current before there was one single Greek statue, one single Babylonian Bull, one single Egyptian Sphinx. Yes, each of us carries about with him the richest and most wonderful Museum of Antiquities; and if he only knows how to treat those treasures, how to rub and polish them till they become translucent again, how to arrange them and read them, they will tell him marvels more marvellous than all hieroglyphics and cuneiform inscriptions put together. The stories they have told us are beginning to be old stories now. Many of you have heard them before. But do not let them cease to be marvels, like so many things which cease to be marvels because they happen every day. And do not think that there is nothing left for you to do. There are more marvels still to be discovered in language than have ever been revealed to us; nay, there is no word, however common, if only you know how to take it to pieces, like a cunningly contrived work of art, fitted together thousands of years ago by the most cunning of artists, the human mind, that will not make you listen and marvel more than any chapter of the Arabian Nights.

But I must not allow myself to be carried away from my proper subject.

All I wish to impress on you by way of introduction is that the results of the Science of Language, which, without the aid of Sanskrit, would never have been obtained, form an essential element of what we call a liberal, that is an historical education--an education which will enable a man to do what the French call _s'orienter_, that is, "to find his East," "his true East," and thus to determine his real place in the world; to know, in fact, the port whence man started, the course he has followed, and the port toward which he has to steer.

We all come from the East--all that we value most has come to us from the East, and in going to the East, not only those who have received a special Oriental training, but everybody who has enjoyed the advantages of a liberal, that is, of a truly historical education, ought to feel that he is going to his "old home," full of memories, if only he can read them. Instead of feeling your hearts sink within you, when next year you approach the sh.o.r.es of India, I wish that every one of you could feel what Sir William Jones felt, when, just one hundred years ago, he came to the end of his long voyage from England, and saw the sh.o.r.es of India rising on the horizon. At that time, young men going to the wonderland of India were not ashamed of dreaming dreams and seeing visions; and this was the dream dreamed and the vision seen by Sir William Jones, then simple Mr. Jones:

"When I was at sea last August (that is in August, 1783), on my last voyage to this country (India) I had long and ardently desired to visit, I found one evening, on inspecting the observations of the day, that _India_ lay before us, _Persia_ on our left, while a breeze from _Arabia_ blew nearly on our stern. A situation so pleasing in itself and to me so new, could not fail to awaken a train of reflections in a mind which had early been accustomed to contemplate with delight the eventful histories and agreeable fictions of this Eastern world. It gave me inexpressible pleasure to find myself in the midst of so n.o.ble an amphitheatre, almost encircled by the vast regions of Asia, which has ever been esteemed the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human genius, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in the laws, manners, customs, and languages, as well as in the features and complexions of men. I could not help remarking how important and extensive a field was yet unexplored, and how many solid advantages unimproved."

India wants more such dreamers as that young Mr. Jones, standing alone on the deck of his vessel and watching the sun diving into the sea--with the memories of England behind and the hopes of India before him, feeling the presence of Persia and its ancient monarchs, and breathing the breezes of Arabia and its glowing poetry. Such dreamers know how to make their dreams come true, and how to change their visions into realities.

And as it was a hundred years ago, so it is now; or at least, so it may be now. There are many bright dreams to be dreamed about India, and many bright deeds to be done in India, if only you will do them.

Though many great and glorious conquests have been made in the history and literature of the East, since the days when Sir William Jones[16]

landed at Calcutta, depend upon it, no young Alexander here need despair because there are no kingdoms left for him to conquer on the ancient sh.o.r.es of the Indus and the Ganges.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Pliny (VI. 26) tells us that in his day the annual drain of bullion into India, in return for her valuable produce, reached the immense amount of "five hundred and fifty millions of sesterces." See E. Thomas, "The Indian Balhara," p. 13.]

[Footnote 2: Cunningham, in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal," 1881, p. 184.]

[Footnote 3: General Cunningham describes this treasure in the "Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal" as having been found on the northern bank of the Oxus in 1877, and containing coins from Darius down to Antiochus the Great, and Euthydemus, King of Baktria. This would seem to indicate that it had been buried there in 208 B.C., when Baktria was invaded by Antiochus and Euthydemus defeated. The coins, figures, and ornaments, many of them, were manifestly Persian, and doubtless had been brought into that country and kept by the victorious generals of Alexander. Some of the works of art unearthed by Dr. Schliemann at Mykenae are either Persian or a.s.syrian in character, and are like those found on the Oxus. Professor Forchhammer very plausibly supposes that they were spoils from the Persian camp which had been awarded to Mykenae as her share after the overthrow of Mardonius.--A. W.]

[Footnote 4: See "Selected Essays," vol. i., p. 500, "The Migration of Fables."]

[Footnote 5: Cratylus, 411 A. "Still, as I have put on the lion's skin, I must not be faint-hearted." Possibly, however, this may refer to Hercules, and not to the fable of the donkey in the lion's or the tiger's skin. In the Hitopade_s_a, a donkey, being nearly starved, is sent by his master into a corn-field to feed. In order to s.h.i.+eld him he puts a tiger's skin on him. All goes well till a watchman approaches, hiding himself under his gray coat, and trying to shoot the tiger. The donkey thinks it is a gray female donkey, begins to bray, and is killed. On a similar fable in aesop, see Benfey, "Pantschatantra," vol. i., p. 463; M. M., "Selected Essays," vol. i., p. 513.]

[Footnote 6: See "Fragmenta Comic" (Didot), p. 302; Benfey, l. c. vol.

i., p. 374.]

[Footnote 7: "Lectures on the Science of Language," vol. i., p. 231.

The names employed in the Hebrew text of the Bible are said to be Tamil.--A. W.]

[Footnote 8: 1 Kings 3:25.]

[Footnote 9: The Bible story is dramatic; the other is not. The "shudder" is a tribute to the dramatic power of the Bible narrative.

The child was in no danger of being cut in twain. In the Buddhist version the child _is_ injured. Why does not Prof. Muller shudder when the child is hurt and cries? The Solomonic child is not hurt and does not cry. Is not the Bible story the more humane, the more dignified, the more dramatic? And no canon of criticism requires us to believe that a poor version of a story is the more primitive.--AM. PUBS.]

[Footnote 10: See some excellent remarks on this subject in Rhys Davids, "Buddhist Birth-Stories," vol. i., pp. xiii. and xliv. The learned scholar gives another version of the story from a Singhalese translation of the _G_ataka, dating from the fourteenth century, and he expresses a hope that Dr. Fausboll will soon publish the Pali original.]

[Footnote 11: This is true of what theologians call natural religion, which is a.s.sumed to be a growth out of human consciousness; but the Christian religion is not a natural religion.--AM. PUBS.]

[Footnote 12: There are traces of Aryan occupation at Babylon, Rawlinson a.s.sures us, about twenty centuries B.C. This would suggest a possible interchange of religious ideas between the earlier Aryan and Akkado-Chaldean peoples.--A. W.]

[Footnote 13: See Cunningham, "Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal," 1881, pp. 162-168.]

[Footnote 14: _Sim_, the Persian word for silver, has also the meaning of one thirteenth; see Cunningham, l. c. p. 165.]

[Footnote 15: The common domestic cat is first mentioned by Caesarius, the physician, brother of Gregory of n.a.z.ia.n.u.s, about the middle of the fourth century. It came from Egypt, where it was regarded as sacred.

Herodotus denominates it a???????, which was also the designation of the weasel and marten. Kallimachus employs the same t.i.tle, which his commentator explains as ??tt??. In later times this name of uncertain etymology has superseded every other. The earlier Sanskrit writers appear to have had no knowledge of the animal; but the mar_g_ara is named by Manu, and the vi_d_ala by Pa_n_ini.--A. W.]

[Footnote 16: Sir William Jones was thirty-seven years of age when he sailed for India. He received the honor of knighthood in March, 1783, on his appointment as Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William, at Bengal.--A. W.]

LECTURE II.

TRUTHFUL CHARACTER OF THE HINDUS.

In my first Lecture I endeavored to remove the prejudice that everything in India is strange, and so different from the intellectual life which we are accustomed to in England, that the twenty or twenty-five years which a civil servant has to spend in the East seem often to him a kind of exile that he must bear as well as he can, but that severs him completely from all those higher pursuits by which life is made enjoyable at home. This need not be so and ought not to be so, if only it is clearly seen how almost every one of the higher interests that make life worth living here in England, may find as ample scope in India as in England.

To-day I shall have to grapple with another prejudice which is even more mischievous, because it forms a kind of icy barrier between the Hindus and their rulers, and makes anything like a feeling of true fellows.h.i.+p between the two utterly impossible.