A Century of Indian Epigrams

IT is refreshing to find in Mr. More’s little volume of epigrams a book on India which is at once scholarly and attractive to the general reader. The new Renaissance to which Schopenhauer looked forward as a result of the study of Sanskrit has found as yet but scant expression in literature. For a century past German scholars have hewn from Sanskrit huge blocks of erudition, but there has been no successful attempt — except perhaps in the stanzas of Rückert — to extract from this crude ore of scholarship its residue of human wisdom and experience. Yet the problem raised by the meeting in India of the two extremes of Aryan civilization, of English and Hindu, and by the slow infiltration of Indian thought into the West, is in itself of real interest to all thinking men. Mr. More has rendered a service to those who wish to reflect on the larger aspects of the question by attempting to give in brief compass a faithful image of the ideals of ancient India. He has only in rare instances used his Sanskrit originals as a background on which to embroider his own poetical fancies, nor has he, like Fitzgerald, read into them any of the moods of the modern agnostic.

It would hardly have been possible to make a literary rendering of the older Sanskrit writings, as any one will testify who has read a book like the translation of the Upanishads in the Sacred Books of the East, and has consented, for the sake of an occasional impressive passage, to struggle through dreary wastes of ineptitude. Mr. More has turned the difficulty by drawing for half his epigrams on the collection of stanzas attributed to Bhartrihari, a work which, as much as anything in Sanskrit, has a distinct personal flavor, and seems to belong to that brief period of the literature when it had attained to some degree of conscious art without as yet having fallen into entire artificiality. And then he has rounded out his “century ” by borrowing freely from the earlier sources. The stanzas of Bhartrihari are divided into three centuries, one for each of the “ paths,” — Love, Worldly Wisdom, and Renunciation. Mr. More has imitated this division in the sequence of his epigrams, giving due prominence to the first and third of the paths, since, as he remarks, the Hindu conceived of but little middle ground between the ideal of the voluptuary and that of the ascetic.

Mr. More tells us in his preface that the Hindu treatment of love, etc., is in many ways more akin to our own sentiment than is that of the classics. This romantic attitude toward woman is visible in whole episodes of the epics, such as the story of Nala and Dama yanti, and perhaps also in epigrams like the following :—

The Hindu conception of woman, however, in general reminds us of the one held in the Middle Ages. Gaston Paris, indeed, in his studies on old French poetry, has attempted to show how largely the mediæval conception is derived from India. A portion of Mr. More’s epigrams, then, have a real historical interest, in that they take us back to the far Indian origins of that ascetic distrust of woman which permeated mediæval thought, and entered as so important a part into the monkish ideal, — mulier hominis confusio : —

Mr. More has taken as motto for his little volume a stanza of Emerson ; and indeed one cannot help being struck by an analogy between the thought of Emerson — and, we may add, the thought of Tennyson in his old age — and the philosophy of India. This analogy, if we consider it more carefully as it appears in the essay on the Over-Soul or in a poem like the New Pantheism, will be found, we imagine, to consist in a certain sense of the absolute. It is a familiar remark of Scherer that the chief achievement of nineteenth-century thought has been to weaken the faith in the absolute; but by this remark Scherer meant the absolute as visibly embodied in rules and observances, the attempt to imprison perfect and immutable truth in creeds and formulas. There is obviously little relation between this form of the absolute and the absolute of Emerson and Tennyson, which may be defined as a purely spiritual perception of the light beyond the reason, entirely disassociated from the faith in creeds and formulas.

It is in this inner sense of the absolute, this constant aspiration toward the central unity of life, that we are to seek, if anywhere, the message of India to the modern world. The disappearance of faith in a visible absolute, as understood by Scherer, has meant for the average man the lapse into pure impressionism. He has not as yet succeeded in creating by reflection a set of inner standards, to take the place of the outer standards he has lost. We of America, as being most completely emancipated from the past, from all respect for authority and tradition, are likewise the most impressionistic. We are, to a degree almost unexampled in history, a nation of impressionists. Herein lies the secret both of our weakness and of our strength. We owe to this fact especially our freedom from exclusiveness and intolerance, those twin vices almost inseparable from the faith in an outer absolute. Our less lenient critics might also trace to this source a certain triviality and lack of elevation in our temper, an absence of vigorous personal conviction, a weakening of the sense of conduct, and a falling off in the stanchness of individual character. If these evils of impressionism are masked from us at present, it is possibly because we are still living on the capital of moral energy inherited from Puritanism. The study of Oriental philosophy, therefore, might find some justification if it gave even a few of us a means of escape from our impressionism, — from that intellectual anarchy of the present which has so frightened thinkers like M. Brunetière that they are ready to return to the old conception of the absolute as embodied in Catholicism. In truth, if an effective resistance is to be offered to the arguments of M. Brunetière, some new vision of the absolute would seem to be needed to crown the edifice of modern rationalism, and reconcile the antinomies into which life resolves itself when viewed from the platform of pure intellect.

This new insight, if we are to judge from India, will bring with it a new sense of obligation, a new form of self-discipline, to take the place of that “ principle of restraint ” the gradual disappearance of which fills M. Brunetière with so much alarm. The goal toward which everything tends in Hindu philosophy is to enter into communion with the Atman, or true Self, the divinity hidden in the secret place of the heart, and then to subdue to its authority the senses and the turbulent passions of the lower self.

The present, then, is perhaps one of those moments in the history of the West when its sense of certain truths needs to be refreshed and quickened by contact with the thought of the East. Entirely absorbed as we have been in the pursuit, of the secret of power, it may be well for us, if we would avoid satiety, to turn at times to a country like India, which has given itself no less entirely to the pursuit of the secret of peace.

Our endeavor to penetrate by analysis to the infinitely small may result in mere pedantry and immersion in detail, unless tempered by something of the Oriental’s aspiration toward the infinitely large. The West tends more and more to pure activity, just as India, when most herself, has tended toward pure repose. Here again the half truth of the East may serve as a corrective to the half truth of the West, and may bring to pass that activity in repose which some one has defined as the classical ideal. We in America, especially, if we are not to spend ourselves in vain surface agitation, might profitably cultivate some feeling for the “ultimate element of calm.” We should thus avoid the reproach of Ruskin, that as a nation we are incapable of rest.

The friend of classical culture will not be deterred from thus commending the thought of India by any fear that we may be led into the opposite excess of quietism. We appear at present to be in no danger of being too much preoccupied by the thought that the kingdom of heaven is within us. The danger is rather that serious attempts to interpret Eastern thought to American readers should fail of due recognition. There is, it is true, no lack of a certain kind of interest in things Oriental ; no lack of people ready to listen to some Brahmin, specially imported for the occasion, as he holds forth on the blessedness of dissolving one’s self in the divine essence. One is tempted, indeed, to think at times that Orientalism, in order to attract one portion of the American public, requires a dash of charlatanry. How many persons who wax enthusiastic over Buddhism as set forth in the works of Mr. Paul Carus would shrink back if brought into direct contact with a Pali text, repelled by the virtues even more than the faults of their original! Nothing at bottom could run more counter to the gregarious and humanitarian instincts of the present age than that insistence on renunciation and meditation, on the essential loneliness of the human spirit, which is the burden of so many of Mr. More’s epigrams.

The real reason that the Indian point of view is so foreign to us is not far to seek. The main concern for the Hindu, as it was for the mediæval Christian, is the salvation of the individual soul, whereas the interest of the modern man centres more and more in the progress, not of the individual, but of society. Bhartrihari is more akin in spirit to a mediæval saint than to a nineteenth-century philanthropist, as appears in epigrams like the following, which is very nearly literal: —

It is translations of this quality which make of Mr. More’s little book a contribution to general literature. At the same time, its success, and the success of other work done in the same spirit, will serve as a measure of the legitimate interest taken in this country in the thought of the Far East.