The composition of these hymns occupied many centuries, and in 600 B.C. the collection seems to have been complete. Some early treatises on these hymns tell us that at this date the theological schools had accomplished a great undertaking, that of counting every verse, every word, every syllable of the hymns; the number of syllables is 432,000, the number of words 153,826, and the number of verses as computed in these treatises varies from 10,402 to 10,622. Until the introduction of writing, the Vedic hymns were entirely preserved by memory, with such accuracy and fidelity that the rules contained in the treatise for the repetitions correspond with great exactness with the actual text, its accents, metre, and the divinity it praises. The Rig-Veda now forms the foundation of all philological and mythological studies, as well as those connected with the science and growth of religion; without it we should never have obtained any insight into the belief of our ancestors.
We will now transport ourselves to the cradle of the Aryas “Noble,” according to some writers situated on the Asiatic continent, according to others more to the north, between the Baltic and the Caspian seas. This will suffice for the first stage; I shall make few demands on history, or on grammar.
There was a time when the great mass of the Aryan people was hesitating on the eve of abandoning their early habitations, previous to a dispersion in two directions. This people was composed of two branches, the tribes of the north, and those of the south; the former went towards the north-west of Asia and Europe; here they established themselves, and the great historical nations—historical, since most of them have played noted parts amongst the nations—the Celts, Grecians, Romans, Germans and Slavs were their descendants. Endowed with every aptitude for an active life, they fostered these capabilities to the highest degree; society was founded by them, morals brought to a greater perfection, the foundation of science and art established, and the principles of philosophy laid down. Although constantly in conflict with the Semitic and Turanian races, these Aryans became in their descendants the masters of the world. Whilst the northern division followed a north-westerly direction, the southern went to the mountains lying to the north of India; crossing the passes of the Himalayas, and following the long watercourses, they descended into the vast fertile valleys, and from that time India became as their own land. These pleasant dwelling-places of the Aryan colonists, protected on the one side by high mountains, and on the other by the ocean from all foreign invasions, were not disturbed by any of the ancient conquerors of the world; around them kingdoms rose and fell, dynasties were created and became extinct, but the inner life of the tribes remained undisturbed by these events. The ancient Hindoos were calm, contemplative dreamers, a nation of philosophers, who could only conceive of disputes in themselves, in their own thoughts; the transcendental nature of the atmosphere in which his ideas worked, and in which the Hindoo lived, could not fail to retard the development of practical, social, and political virtues, and the appreciation of the beautiful and useful. The Hindoo saw nothing in the past but the mystery of the Creation, in the future but the mystery of his destiny; the present offered nothing to him that could awaken physical activity, and apparently had no reality for him; no people ever existed who believed more firmly in a future life, or who occupied themselves less with this one; such as they were in the beginning, such they remained. The only sphere in which the Indian mind moves freely is the sphere of religion and that of philosophy. In no other part of the world have metaphysical ideas taken such deep root as in India; the forms in which these ideas were clothed, in epochs of varying culture, and in the midst of divers classes of society, were alternately those of the grossest superstition and of the most exalted spiritualism.
It has been asserted that in these two Aryan branches must we look for our ancestors. How shall we verify the truth of this assertion? What family likeness must we seek in order to recognise the relationship? How feel certain that the languages we speak have been derived from them? “If we knew nothing of the existence of Latin—if no historical documents existed to tell us of the Roman empire—a mere comparison of the six Romance dialects would enable us to say that at some time there must have been a language from which all these modern dialects derived their origin in common.”[23]
Let us conjugate the verb to be in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Walachian, and in Rhætian, and we shall see that it is clear: first, that all are but varieties of one common type: secondly, that it is impossible to consider any one of these six dialects as the original from which the others had been borrowed, since no single one contains the elements composing them. “If we find such forms as j’ai aimé, we can explain them by a mere reference to the grammatical materials which French has still at its command, and the same may be said of j’aimerai, i.e. je-aimer-ai, I have to love, I shall love. But a change from je suis to tu es is inexplicable by the light of French grammar; it must have been a part of some language antecedent to any of the Romance dialects; it is, in fact, the verb to be in Latin, which solves this difficulty; each of the six paradigms is but a metamorphosis of the Latin.”[24]
It was known that the roots were the same in all the Aryan languages, that the same grammatical changes were common in many of the words in everyday use, such as father, mother, heaven, sun, moon, horse, and cow, as well as in the principal numbers; but it was the study of Sanscrit in its primitive form which first led the learned to the discovery of the reason of the vowel changes in certain words in use in our day, and which changes the English word to wit, to know, into I wot, I know, and the German ich weise into wir wissen; these changes are the result of a general law, the application of which can nowhere be more clearly appreciated than in the Vedic Sanscrit, and which was unknown until this language was studied in the Veda. (I will here note that Sanscrit not being the original from which the other Aryan dialects have their being, but an elder brother, when Max Müller makes use of a Sanscrit phrase he does it to give an idea of the process through which the language has passed which he considers preceded Sanscrit.)
There is another list of paradigms which, under a less familiar aspect than the first, presents the same phenomenon. Conjugate the verb to be in Doric, Latin, old Slav, Sanscrit, Celtic, Lithuanian, Zend, Gothic, and Armenian, and you will see that the nine are varieties of one common type, and that it is impossible to consider any one of them as the original of the others, since, here again, none of the languages possess the grammatical material out of which these forms could have been framed. Sanscrit cannot have been the source from which the rest were derived, since Greek, in several instances, has retained a more organic form than the Sanscrit. Nor can Greek be considered as the earliest language from which the others were derived, for not even Latin could be called the daughter of Greek, since Latin has preserved certain forms more primitive than the Greek. Hence all these nine dialects point to some more ancient language, which was to them what Latin was to the Romance dialects; only at that early period there was no literature to preserve to us any remnant of that mother-tongue that died in giving birth to all the modern Aryan dialects.[25]
There is one fact to be noted. If a comparison be made of the verb to be in these dialects, it will be seen that Sanscrit is no more distinct from the Greek of Homer, or from the Gothic of Ulfilas, or from the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred, than the Romance dialects from each other; that, in fact, the resemblance is more striking between Sanscrit and Lithuanian, and between Sanscrit and Russian, than between French and Italian. This circumstance proves that all the essential grammatical forms of these languages had been fully framed and established before the first separation of the Aryan family took place, that is to say, at a time before there were any Grecians to speak Greek, or any Brahmans to invoke God’s name in Sanscrit.
The science of comparative philology enables us to have glimpses of the social condition of our Aryan ancestors before they left their first abode. All historical documents of this period are lacking, for the simple reason that the time of which we are speaking is anterior to any historical records; “but comparative philology has placed in our hands a telescope of such power that where formerly we could see but nebulous clouds we now discover distinct forms and outlines.”[26]