The golden verses of Pythagoras

by Antoine Fabre d'Olivet; Pythagoras

§ VI

The Greeks and the Romans, as guilty of ingratitude as of injustice, have styled Asia barbarous, without thinking that they thus outraged their Mother, the one from whom both had their origin and their first instructions. Europe, more impartial today, begins to feel as she should toward this ancient and noble country, and rendering to her venerable scars a filial respect, does not judge her according to her present weakness, but according to the vigour that she possessed in the age of her strength, and of which her magnificent productions still bear the imprint. A philosophical observer, academician of Calcutta, turning an investigating eye upon that part of the terrestrial continent, has recognized there five principal nations, among which that of the Indians holds the first rank; the others are those of the Chinese, Tartars, Persians, and Arabs.[195] According to this able writer, primitive India should be considered as a sort of luminous focus which, concentrating at a very remote epoch the learning acquired by an earlier people, has reflected it, and has dispersed the rays upon the neighbouring nations.[196] She has been the source of Egyptian, Greek, and Latin theogony; she has furnished the philosophical dogmas with which the first poets of Thrace and Ionia have adorned the beauties of Eumolpœia and Epopœia; it is she who has polished the Persians, Chaldeans, Arabs, and Ethiopians; and who by her numerous colonies has entertained relations with the Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavians, Celts, Etruscans, and even with the Peruvians of the other hemisphere.[197]

If one listens to the discourse of those who have been much inclined to study the savant language of the Indians, Sanskrit, he will be persuaded that it is the most perfect language that man has ever spoken. Nothing, according to them, can surpass its riches, its fertility, its admirable structure; it is the source of the most poetic conceptions and the mother of all the dialects which are in use from the Persian Gulf to the waters of China.[198] It is certain that if anything can prove to the eyes of savants the maternal rights that this tongue claims over all the others, it is the astonishing variety of its poetry: what other peoples possess in detail, it possesses in toto. It is there that Eumolpœia, Epopœia, and Dramatic Art shine with native (éclat): it is there that poetry divine and rational, poetry allegorical and passionate, poetry stirring and even romantic, find their cradle. There, all forms are admitted, all kinds of verse received. The Vedas, pre-eminently sacred books, are, like the Koran of Mohammed, written in cadenced prose.[199] The Pouranas, which contain the theosophy and philosophy of the Brahmans, their system concerning Nature, their ideas upon morals and upon natural philosophy, are composed in philosophical verse not rhymed; they are attributed to Vyasa, the Orpheus of the Indians. Valmiki, who is their Homer, has displayed in the Ramayana an epopœia magnificent and sublime to the highest degree; the dramas, which they call Nataks, are, according to their style, rhymed and not rhymed: Bheret is considered as their inventor; Kalidasa as their perfecter.[200] The other kinds of poetry are all rhymed; their number is immense; their variety infinite. Nothing equals the industry and delicacy of the Indian rhymers in this style. The Arabs all skilful as they were, the Oscan troubadours whose rhyme was their sole merit, have never approached their models.[201] Thus, not only does one find among the Indians the measured verse of the Greeks and Romans, not only does one see there rhythms unknown to these two peoples, but one recognizes also there our rhyme with combinations of which we have no idea.

I ought to make an important observation here: it is, that whereas India, mistress of Asia, held the sceptre of the earth, she still recognized only the eumolpœia of the Vedas and the Pouranas, only the epopœia of Maha-Bharata and the Ramayana; her poetry was the language of the gods and she gave herself the name of Ponya-Rhoumi, Land of Virtues. It was only when a long prosperity had enervated her, that the love for novelty, the caprice of fashion and perhaps, as it happened in Greece, the deviation of the theatre, caused her to seek for beauties foreign to veritable poetry. It is not a rare thing to pass the point of perfection when one has attained it. The astonishing flexibility of Sanskrit, the abundance of its final consonants opens a double means for corruption. Poets multiplied words believing to multiply ideas; they doubled rhymes; they tripled them in the same verse believing to increase proportionably its harmony. Their imagination bending before an inspiring genius became vagabond; they thought to rise to the sublime, and fell into the bombastic. At last, knowing no longer how to give emphasis and importance to their extravagant thoughts, they created words of such length that, in order to contain them, it was necessary to forge verses of four cæsuras of nineteen syllables each.[202]

It was, therefore, at the epoch of the decadence of the Indian Empire, that rhyme usurped poetry. It would be difficult today to say whether it was an innovation or a simple renovation. However it may be, it is probable that it passed rapidly from the ruling nation to subject nations where it was diversely welcomed according to the language and particular mind of each people.

If one can believe the annals of the Indians, China was one of their colonies for a long time schismatic and rebellious.[203] If one can lend faith to the most ancient tradition of the Chinese, they form from time immemorial a body of autochthonous people.[204] The discussion of this historic difficulty would be out of place here. Suffice it to say, that the Chinese having commenced by having rhymed verses, and preserving by character and by religion, with an inviolable respect, the ancient usages, have never had but a mediocre poetry, absolutely foreign to epopœia.[205] Their principal sacred books, called Kings, are composed of symbolic or hieroglyphic characters, forming by groups sorts of tableaux, of profound and often sublime conception, but bereft of what we would call eloquence of language. These are mute images, incommunicable by means of the voice, and which the reader must consider with the eyes and meditate long upon in order to comprehend them.

The Tartars who reign today in China and who are distinguished from the others by the epithet of Manchus, although possessors of a formed tongue whose richness certain authors praise,[206] have not any kind of poetry as I have already remarked.[207] The other Tartars were hardly more advanced before being placed by their conquests within reach of the learning of the vanquished people. The Turks had no alphabetical characters. The Huns were ignorant even of its existence. The proud vanquisher of Asia, Genghis Khan did not find, according to the best historians, a single man among the Mongolians capable of writing his despatches. The alphabet of fourteen letters that the Uïgurian Tartars possess, appears to have been given them by the ancient Persians,[208] from whom they also received the little that they knew of poetry.

These Persians, today imitators of the Arabs, were in very remote times disciples of the Indians. Their sacred tongue then called Zend, in which are written the fragments that remain to us of Zoroaster, was a dialect of Sanskrit.[209] These fragments that we owe to the indefatigable zeal of Anquetil Duperron, appear to be written, as the Vedas, or as all the sacred books of India, in cadenced prose. After the Zend-Avesta, the most famous book among the Parsees is the Boun-Dehesh, written in Pehlevi, and containing the cosmogony of Zoroaster. Pehlevi, which is derived from Chaldaic Nabatæan, indicates a translation,[210] and testifies that Persia had already passed from under the dominion of India to that of Assyria. But when, thanks to the conquests of Cyrus, Persia had become free and mistress of Asia, Pehlevi, which recalled its ancient servitude, was banished from the court by Bahman-Espandiar, whom we call Artaxerxes Longimanus.[211] The Parsee replaced it; this last dialect, modified by Greek under the successors of Alexander, mixed with many Tartar words under the Parthian kings, polished by the Sassanidæ, usurped at last by the Arabs and subjected to the intolerant influence of Islamism, had no longer its own character: it has taken, in the modern Persian, all the movements of the Arabic, notwithstanding its slight analogy with it[212]; following its example, it has concentrated all the beauties of poetry in rhyme and since then it has had neither Eumolpœia nor Epopœia.

As to the Arab, no one is ignorant of the degree to which he is a slave to rhyme. Already, by a sufficiently happy conjecture, a French writer had made the first use of rhyme in France coincide with the irruption of the Moors into Europe at the beginning of the eighth century.[213] He has said that Provence had been the door by which this novelty was introduced into France. However difficult it may appear of proving rigorously this assertion, lacking monuments, it cannot, however, be denied that it may be very probable, above all considering what influence the Arabs exercised upon the sciences and arts in the south of France after they had penetrated through Spain. Now, there is no country on earth where the poetry that I have called romantic has been cultivated with more constancy and success than in Arabia; rhyme, if she has received it from India, was naturalized there by long usage, in such a way as to appear to have had birth there. If it must be said, the Arab tongue seems more apt at receiving it than the Sanskrit. Rhyme seems more requisite to poetry there, on account of the great quantity and inflexibility of the monosyllables, which joining together only with much difficulty to form the numerous and rhythmic combinations, had need of its assistance to soften their harshness and to supply the harmony which they lacked.

Neverthless, whatever may be the pretension of Arabia to the invention of rhyme, and even to that of romantic poetry, one cannot be prevented, when one possesses without prejudice and to a certain extent the distinguishing character of the Asiatic languages, from seeing that there are proofs in the Arabic itself which give evidence in favour of India. Such is, for example, the word Diwan,[214] by which the Arabs designate the collection of their ancient poetries.[215] This word, which is attached to the Sanskrit expression Dewa or Diwa, designates all that is divine, celestial; all that emanates from the Universal Intelligence[216]: it is the poetry of the Greeks, the language of the gods, or the voice of the Universal Being of the Egyptians and the Phœnicians.