CHAPTER XXVI
FROM ARIANE TO DON QUICHOTTE
I never deliver a work until I have kept it by me for months, even for years.
I had finished Thérèse—long before it was produced—when my friend Heugel told me that he had already made arrangements with Catulle Mendes to write a sequel to Ariane.
Although to our way of thinking Bacchus was a distinct work, it should form a whole with Ariane.
The text for it was written in a few months and I took great interest in it.
And yet—and this is entire accord with my character—hesitation and doubt often bothered me.
Of all the fabulous stories of the gods and demigods of antiquity those which relate to the Hindu heroes are perhaps the least known.
The study of the fables of mythology, which has had until recently only the interest of curiosity in even the most classical learning, has, thanks to the work of modern scholars, acquired a higher import as they have discovered its rôle in the history of religion.
To allow the inspiration of his poetic muse, which was always so ardent and finely colored, wander at will in such a region was bound to delight the well informed mind of Catulle Mendes.
Palmiki's Sanscrit poem, the Ramayana, is at once religious and epic. For those who have read that sublime poem it is more curious and greater than even the Nibelungen, Germany's epic of the Middle Ages, which traces the struggle between the family of the Nibelungen with Etzel or Attila and their consequent destruction. There is nothing exaggerated in calling the Ramayana the Iliad or Odyssey of India. It is as divinely beautiful as the immortal work of old Homer which has come down through the centuries.