OF ANCIENT INDIA

CONDENSED into ENGLISH VERSE

By ROMESH C. DUTT, C.I.E.

WITH ΑΝ INTRODUCTION BY

THE RIGHT HON. F. MAX MÜLLER

TWENTY-FOUR PHOTOGRAVURES

FROM

ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS DESIGNED

FROM INDIAN SOURCES BY

E. STUART HARDY

29

LONDON

J. M. DENT & CO.

& 30 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.

INTRODUCTION

WE possess but very little of true Epic Poetry, and the
wonder is that we should possess any. Of course if
we define an epic as a poem which in the form of continuous
narrative celebrates the achievements of one or more heroic
personages of history or tradition, any poet may write an epos.
But if by epos are meant early unwritten narrative poems cele-
brating incidents of heroic tradition, we can easily understand
why their number should be so small as it is. Strictly speaking,
I know of one true epic poem only, the Kalewala of the Fins,
and possibly the Kalewipoeg of the Estonians. These were
preserved to the present day, and are still living in the mouths
of the people. They were never written down till they were
lately collected and fitted together, without any additions, by
such men as Von Becker, Lönnrot, Castrén, and others. Lönn-
rot's first edition of the Kalewala in Finnish appeared in 1835,
comprising about 12,000 verses in thirty-two songs.
This was
translated into Swedish by Castrén in 1841. In 1849, how-
ever, Lönnrot published a new edition, consisting of 22,793
verses in fifty songs, and a German translation by Schiefner
appeared in 1857. More songs even, all forming integral parts
of a large epic poem, have been discovered since the death of
Castrén and Lönnrot. While we may perfectly trust the
painstaking scholarship and conscientious accuracy of Castrén,
Lönnrot, and other Finnish students in their treatment of these
ancient popular poems of Finland, some doubt has been thrown
on the perfect authenticity of the Estonian poems of Kale-
wipoeg as collected by Kreutzwald and translated into German

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by Reinthal, 1857. They were found to be in a much more fragmentary state, and it is supposed that they were largely restored, while in the case of the Kalewala we possess the trustworthy copy of poems exactly as they were, and are still recited in Finland by old men and women in the presence of their Swedish auditors.

All other epic poems, after existing for an unknown length of time in the tradition of popular poets, have passed through what is called a Diaskeué, a setting in order, a dressing or recension at the hands of later poets. The most perfect specimen of this kind of epic poetry exists in the two Homeric poems, the Iliad and Odyssey. How the component parts of these poems, such as the Cyclopeia, the story of the wooden horse at Troy, the Nekyia, the Doloneia, the Patrokleia, &c., had existed before they formed part of an Odyssey and Iliad, we can see in the case of Demodokos and other Aoidoi who sang these Aristeias at festivals, both public and private. But we have no trustworthy information as to how these poems came to be collected, whether their dialect and metre were changed in the schools of the Homerida, and at what time the first written copies of them were prepared and circulated. I doubt whether in Greece the very idea of a written literature existed much before 500 or 600 B.C., that is, before the first contact between West and East. There is the Greek alphabet, which tells us in the clearest way that the Greeks learnt their letters from the Phoenicians; but there is a long distance between a knowledge of the ABC and its employment for inscriptions, coins, and even for official treaties, and its use for literary purposes. I confess that the well-known passage at the end of the Phædrus gives me the impression as if even Plato had still a recollection of the time when literature was mnemonic only, and not yet written