“Willt Du die Blüthe des Frühen, die Früchte des Späteren Jahres,
Willt Du, was reizt und entzückt, willt Du was sättigt und nährt,
Willt Du den Himmel, die Erde mit einem Namen begreifen,
Nenn ich, Sacontala, Dich, und so ist Alles gesagt.”[144]
A. W. von Schlegel finds in it so striking a resemblance to our romantic drama that we might, he says, be inclined to suspect we owe this resemblance to the predilection for Shakespeare entertained by Sir William Jones, if the fidelity of his translation were not confirmed by other learned Orientalists. And Alex. von Humboldt says of Kalidasa that “tenderness in the expression of feeling, and richness of creative fancy, have assigned to him his lofty place amongst the poets of all nations.”
Voltaire went into ecstasies over a French translation of the Ezour-Veda, a Sanskrit poem in the style of the Purânas, quite an inferior production, written in the XVIIth century by a native convert of Robert de' Nobili. This French translation was published by Voltaire under the title, “L'Ezour-Vedam, traduit du Sanscritam par un Brame,” and he stated his belief that the original was four centuries older than Alexander, and that it was the most precious gift for which the West had been indebted to the East.
Adelung, as we have seen, found fault with Sir William Jones and Father Pons for overrating the claims of Sanskrit, and subsequent critics have gone so far as to assert that its literary and scientific value is very slight. Among the latest of these are M. Jules Oppert[145] and Prof. Key of University College, London. Their objections and arguments are met and discussed by Prof. Whitney in the seventh essay of his volume, in a tone so moderate and a treatment so thorough as to present a more than satisfactory vindication of the claims of Indo-European philology and ethnology to the serious attention and close study of every scholar. We are not aware that either Prof. Key or M. Oppert has cited the fact that, when the Indian rajah Rammohun Roy found the distinguished Sanskrit scholar Rosen at work in the British Museum upon an edition of the hymns of the Veda, he expressed his surprise at so useless an undertaking. It was not that the Indian philosopher looked upon all Vedic literature as worthless. On the contrary, he was of the opinion that the Upanishads were worthy of becoming the foundation of a new religion. The rajah most probably did not also consider the fact that, whatever might be the intrinsic literary merit of the Vedic hymns, they were none the less valuable to the comparative grammarian and philologist. For the purposes of grammatical construction, it is perfectly immaterial whether or not a text has the fire of genius or the inspiration of poetry.
And here it may be mentioned that Rammohun Roy, the descendant on both the paternal and maternal side of the highest caste Brahmans, and familiar with the whole body of Vedic and Sanskrit literature, indirectly bears high testimony to one of the grandest results obtained by European study of Sanskrit literature. That result is the exposure of Brahmanism as a gross imposture. Against any attack on its social and religious errors, the Brahmans formerly entrenched themselves in the pretended warrant of high antiquity and the authority of the sacred works. “Thus say the Vedas” was a sufficient justification for any claim, and “That is not in the Vedas” an unanswerable argument against any objection. Although they threw every possible obstacle in the way of Europeans who strove to obtain a knowledge of Sanskrit and access to the Vedas, by refusing to teach them and by withholding the sacred books, these difficulties [pg 334] were finally overcome, and when the Vedas were read and understood it became apparent that fully one-half of the social and religious institutions of Brahmanism, as it existed down to the commencement of the present century, were not only without a shadow of authority in the Vedas, but absolutely opposed to the spirit and letter of its law. Thus, it is certain that nothing of the great characteristic feature of Brahmanism—the system of castes—can be found in the Vedas. The belief in the transmigration of souls and in the doctrines flowing from it has no existence there. And the Suttee, or system of widow immolation, the singular mingling of pantheistic philosophy with gross superstition, and the worship of the triad Brahma, Vishnu, and Civa, are all equally without Vedic foundation.
Robert de' Nobili discovered all this at an early period, and it was only when he first fought the Brahmans with their own weapons—the Vedas—that they were, for the first time, silenced. Rammohun Roy had his eyes opened at an early age to the idolatrous system of the Hindus, came out from among them, and openly attacked its pretensions. “I endeavored to show,” he says, “that the idolatry of the Brahmans was contrary to the practice of their ancestors, and to the principles of the ancient works and authorities which they profess to revere and obey.”
Prof. Whitney, referring to the same subject, says: “Each new phase of belief has sought in them (the sacred texts) its authority, has claimed to found itself upon them, and to be consistent with their teachings; and the result is that the sum of doctrine accepted and regarded as orthodox in modern India is incongruous beyond measure, a mass of inconsistencies”: a summing up that might, we regret to say, be truthfully made of a Christian country of far higher civilization than that of India.