The World's Great Classics.

Edmund Spenser in his Faerie Queene describes a park, wherein there was

"No tree whose braunches did not bravely spring;
No braunch whereon a fine bird did not sitt;
No bird but did her shrill notes sweetly sing;
No song but did contain a lovely ditt."

The description is so similar to a famous account of tanks in a garden in Sanskrit literature that one might be almost tempted to suggest that the great Elizabethan got the idea from the Hindu Bhatti (c 650 A. C.). For in the Indian poet's Kâvya we read:

"No water but with dainty lotus on,
No lotus that did not a bee entrap,
Not a bee but hummed a musical note,
No note that did not enrapture the soul."

Now, "fruitfullest Virginia" and "Indian Peru" had indeed been added to the world known to the poets in Spenser's days. But Hindustan was still a veritable ultima thule. Sane criticism will, therefore, declare that in the description of nature human imagination has independently produced identical pieces in the East and the West.

Let us now turn to a more antique world. Two great "national" epics of mankind have been produced in two different regions under similar conditions. The result has been the similarity of products. Virgil wrote his Aeneid during the age of Augustus, when the greatness of the Romans was an established fact. In and through the story of Aeneas, the mythical founder of the Latins, Virgil has given us a prophetic account of the glorious mission of his successors. The whole destiny of the Roman race has been embodied in the hero. Virgil was an idealizer of his country's history, a Livy in verse, so to speak.

The same enthusiasm inspired Kalidas when he wrote his Raghu-vamsha ("House of Raghu"). During the fourth and fifth centuries A. C. the great Gupta Augustuses were paramount sovereigns over India. It was an epoch of all-round success in arms and arts, in fact, the period to conjure with even in the twentieth century. The greatest poet of India wanted to immortalize the achievements of his contemporaries, but took for his theme the "pre-historic" or semi-mythical dynasty of Hindu Aeneases.

Common conditions inspired common art work. The philosophy underlying the Latin and the Sanskrit epics is the same, namely, "Nothing succeeds like success." The ancestors of a successful people must certainly have been super-men! Virgil and Kalidas read the past in the light of the present. The Hindu poet was as great a nationalist or patriot or jingo as was the Roman. Thus in Kalidasa's chauvinistic idealism his heroes were nothing short of

"Lords of the lithosphere from sea to sea,
Commanding the skies by air-chariots."

1. Eur-American Methodology

These are specimens from widely different epochs of literature. But it is not difficult to perceive that the poetic soul reacts to the stimuli of the universe in much the same way in spite of differences in time and space.

During the last few decades, however, aesthetic appreciation has unfortunately been obsessed by pseudo-scientific theories of climate, race and religion. The science of criticism has managed to construct a geography of artistic temperament, and men and women have been taught to interpret art-ideals and art-motifs in terms of latitude and longitude. The most notorious of these anthropological demarcations of the art-sphere is the distinction between the Occidental and the Oriental zones.

In what manner, then, does the modern Eur-American critic approach the creations of Asian literary and artistic genius? The method would be clearly understood if we apply it to some Occidental classic. Let us take the Iliad of Homer.¹ According to this orthodox school of interpretation we need only cite a few detached passages and then emphasize the conclusion as applicable to the entire continents of Europe and America and as valid for three millenniums. We should have to pronounce, for instance, the sweepingly universal judgment that in the West the position of the wife has ever been servile, subjection of women being the most prominent characteristic of society. For Juno, "the stag-eyed Queen of Heaven", says to Jove:

"Tell me, deceiver, who was she with whom
Thou late held'st council? ever 'tis thy way
Apart from me to weave the secret schemes,
Nor dost thou freely share with me thy mind."

And what is the husband's reply to this challenge?

"Expect not, Juno, all my mind to know;
My wife thou art, yet would such knowledge be
Too much for thee; whatever I deem it fit
That thou shouldst know, nor God nor man shall hear
Before thee; but what I in secret plan.
Seek not to know, nor curiously enquire."

Further, as the wife intends to be obstinate, Jove assumes the full role of the master. The tyrant does not hesitate to threaten the slave thus:

"Presumptuous, to thy busy thoughts thou givest
Too free a range, and watchest all I do;
Yet shalt thou not prevail, but rather thus
Be alien'd from my heart—the worse for thee!"

Thus has the woman always been treated by man in the Western world. Europe can in this and similar ways be proved to be a continent of autocracy, polygamy, concubinage, superstition, and licentiousness, as Asia has been proved to be by Eur-American critics to their own satisfaction.

We would now apply the same method of literary criticism to another stalwart of Europe, Dante. By way of retaliation the Oriental critic can easily spot out the passages in the Divine Comedy that are derogatory to European character. Do we not read Dante's bitter complaint against corruption in contemporary Italian politics? The following Dantesque refrain is too well-known:

"Ah, slavish Italy! thou inn of grief!

Vessel without a pilot in loud storm!

Lady no longer of fair provinces,

But brothel-house impure! . . .

While now thy living ones

In thee abide not without war; and one

Malicious gnaws another; ay, of those

Whom the same wall and the same moat contains.

Seek, wretched one! around thy sea-coasts wide;

Then homeward to thy bosom turn; and mark,

If any part of thee sweet peace enjoy."

This is a picture of political disunion; but the anthropological art-critic can find in the great Italian epic material enough to generalize, if he wishes, about the negation of all domestic morals and public virtues in Christian society. It is on the strength of such passages maliciously manipulated by Eur-American "scientists" that Asia has come to be treated as a synonym for all that is unmanly, impious, imbecile and unchivalrous in Occidental estimation.

2. The New Criticism.

Reprisals and retaliations are undoubtedly justifiable weapons in literary as in material warfare. It is out of vindictiveness that people have resort to them. And surely Asia today is pervaded by the spirit of revenge; for the mal-treatment that she has received at Eur-America's hands is profound and extensive, really "too deep for tears." But no system of values can look for permanence on a war-basis. War is a force in social economy only because it raises issues and clarifies the surcharged atmosphere. Life's dynamics however must proceed to erect new structures on the new foundations created by the change in status quo.

What, now, are the demands of the New Orient in regard to reconstruction in the art-world? On what basis does Young Asia seek to place the new art-criticism? What are the terms of its transvaluation of values?

According to the viewpoint of Young Asia the race-psychologies established during the last two generations in the minds of Eur-American scholars need a thorough overhauling. The manifestations of the human spirit should be attacked historically and statistically without any preconceived subjective or metaphysical notions as to ethnic stocks. It is the findings of this method alone that can place the art-products of the world in the proper sociological perspective.

To unbiassed students of history, the human propensities that evolved themselves in Hellas and Hindustan are, numerically speaking, almost the same. The objective tests of behavioristic psychology, again, would bring out the same kind of mentality among the Hindus, Chinese and Moslems as among the Hellenes, Romans and Teutons. Differences of characteristics may surely be proved to exist between people and people in quantity, variety, and quality; but they are not such as to constitute the basis for radical race-distinctions. The different nations do not represent permanent divergences in Weltanschauung or outlook on the universe.

The culture-anthropologists and diplomats have attempted to demonstrate a fundamental distinction between the East and the West. But they have fallen into serious errors because they have not tried to compare the phases of culture, epoch by epoch, and item by item. For, the list of analogies, parallelisms, identities, and coincidences that can be detected between the historic civilizations of the East and the West is formidable. These analogues and duplicates are to be found not only in the realm of ideas, postulates, hypotheses and beliefs, but also in the field of institutions; conventions, observances and practices.

Some of the parallelisms are indeed superficial, but even in such cases the channels of mental operations indicate a profoundly general agreement in psychological content and sociological context. This is not necessarily due to the migration of ideas or institutions from the East to the West, and vice versa; because this cannot be proved by positive historical evidence in many instances. Most of these identities are really independent growths or accidental convergences and point to the fundamental unity of the human make-up. Indebtedness can undoubtedly be traced to foreign sources in certain incidents. But the very fact of their naturalization and assimilation to the conditions of new habitat indicates, again, the essential psychological uniformity of mankind.

The "unspeakable" Turk, the "impossible" Irishman, the "jingo" Britisher, the "barbarous" German, the "inscrutable" Japanese, the "unchanging" Chinaman, the "dollar-worshipping" American, and the "mystical" Hindu have displayed through their actual history the same responses or reactions to the stimuli of the objective world, the same imaginativeness and the same intellectuality, "under the same conditions of temperature and pressure." The existence of differences in superficial particulars, in social conventions and modes of external expression is due principally to language, economic status or grade of material development, and temporary political vicissitudes. This must not be magnified into the alleged bed-rock of a science for the classification of races according to the mentalities, views of life, or the so-called "ideals" of culture. In an historic or analytical study of Hindu or Chinese morals, manners and sentiments, for instance, we shall not find anything exclusively oriental. The achievements of every great civilization in the past or the present are essentially cosmopolitan or universal.

3. Classicism and Christ-lore.

The Homeric and Vâlmikian epics have innumerable parallels, so much so that when the Greeks under Alexander first came in contact with the literature of the Hindus, they did not hesitate to believe that the Iliad and the Odyssey had been translated into Sanskrit. Recent scholars have, however, tried to demonstrate that it is Homer who owed his plots to the Hindu Râmâyana. The rape of the Hindu queen, Sîtâ, and the war to deliver her from the monarch of Lamkâ, the Indian Troy, can have but one and the same message to all mankind in the "heroic" ages. The chastity of the women-folk, the bravery of the men, the triumph of the hero, and the ruin of the foe,—this and allied motifs characterize all the heroic poetry sung by the earliest strolling bards of the world. Achilles and Penelope or their cousins are well known characters in Hindu literature.²

The Greeks used to believe also that Heracles, Apollo, Dionysius, and other deities of their pantheon were worshipped by the Hindus under different names. Even in modern times, on the other hand, the influence of India has been traced by scholars in the ideas of Pythagoras regarding the transmigration of the soul, the mystical Orphic cult, and the philosophy of Plato. In all these the attempt to trace the indebtedness of one race to the other shows at least how "pragmatically" alike the phenomena really are.

Many superstitions and folk-customs of the Hindus and Hellenes were almost identical. Bacchic revelries, Eleusinian mysteries, the birth of heroes like Hercules through the impregnation of mortal women³ by gods, the hundred-headed Typhaeus, the doctrine of physiological "humours", the medical recipes and oaths of Hippocrates, the flight of Gods in disguise as animals from the attacks of giants, oracles, showers of blood, the divine origin of music, dark chambers in temples,—these and other items have their replicas or analogues in Hindu tradition.

The battle of the "hundred-handers" in Hesiod's Theogony is as much Hindu as Greek. The Vishvâmitras of the Hindu Purânas have undertaken the same titanic conflicts⁴ with the powers that be as have the Prometheus of Hellas. Jimutavâhana⁵ is a peer of the Aeschylean hero in soliciting the vulture to devour him completely and relieve his agony. The tribulations of Chand Sadâgara owing to his defiance of God's decree are only paralleled in the story of Ulysses.

The "unity of time" in a play was the basic Greek canon of dramatic criticism. Hindu dramaturgy also laid down the same rule. Curiously enough, even the number of persons allowed to appear on the stage was held to be 5 in both Greece and India.

In physical science the ideas about the general properties of matter were identical in the two culture-areas. The Hindu Sâmkhya doctrine of the indestructibility of matter can be easily recognized as Empedoclean. The atomic theory of Democritus could be fathered on the Hindu Kanada. The Hindu Vedantic monism was preached by the Eleatics.

Was the mentality of "haughty Rome" far removed from that of the Hindus? Let us see. The Roman mind was notoriously superstitious though practical just as the Greek was essentially mystical and speculative. The Roman augurs studied omens in the flight of birds. The eagle was to them a herald of good, the owl, of bad. The enigmatical sayings of the Sibylline books controlled the public as well as the domestic life of the Roman citizens.

The classical mind was no more shocked than was the Hindu when it saw almost every crisis in the epics regulated and tided over by the intervention of gods. Like those of the Greeks, again, the customs, festivals, myths, and ceremonies of pre-Christian Rome e.g. the twelfth night festivities, the Dii Lares (offerings to ancestors), cattle-blessing, etc. could be easily assimilated to the Hindu system. This is no news to students of comparative philology and comparative mythology. They are aware of the common cultural beginnings of the three races. Similarly the Hindus who wrote the Brihat Samhitâ would be quite at home in the midst of the superstitions of Pliny's Natural History. There was nothing peculiarly Latin in Roman morals, manners and sentiments. Kissing a wife in the presence of one's daughter was considered disgraceful in Rome.⁶ The ideals of greatness that Livy attempted to teach through his prose epic, the History of Rome, viz. high righteousness, stern sense of duty, sanctity of home life etc. would be no less acceptable to the Hindus than to the Romans.

We can thus detect Hellenic and Latin elements in Hindustan. Nor would Christ-lore be found absent among the incidents of Hindu life. The mystical and other-worldly leanings of Christianity may be dittoed by the Hindus, Buddhists and Jainas also. The cult of the Infinite, the preparation for mukti (salvation), faith in a Personal God, the worship of God-incarnate-in-man (Avatâra), the doctrine of love (bhakti), etc. are as much Hindu as Christian. In fact, Christianity, like Pythagoreanism and Platonism, has been traced to Hindu thought.⁷ On the other hand, Buddhism (Mahâyânism) has been supposed in recent years to have been inspired by Christian notions.

Then there is the story of Infant Krishna in India, in which one may be easily led to read an echo of the Christ-myth. The story of Josaphat again is still passing for a holy legend in Christian countries. But scholars are aware that it was adapted from genuine Buddhist legends prevailing in Byzantine (Graeco-Roman) Syria in the sixth century.

The Hindu mind is nurtured on the same stuff as the Christian. No conception of life is exclusively Occidental.

4. From the Mediaeval to the Romantic.

The analysis of virtues and vices in Dante's Divine Comedy, its purgatorial machinery, its cult of Beatrice or Divine Philosophy, and its general theologico-moral message are typical gifts of the highest mind in mediaeval Europe. These, however, do not appear to the men and women brought up in the atmosphere of the Hindu Purânas as Italian or Roman Catholic patents. And we have already seen in the previous essay how Dante's solicitude for the Veltro, the Deliverer, and the faith of the Gitâ in the Yugâvatâra are identical.

Spenser's Faerie Queene was the embodiment of the Renaissance culture. But neither his allegoristic scheme nor his over-seriousness jars upon the spiritual consciousness of the Asians. Everybody is familiar with the moralism of this "poet's poet". Here is a specimen:

"What warre so cruel, or what siege so sore,
As that strong affections doe apply
Against the forte of reason evermore,
To bring the sowle into Captivity?
Their force is fiercer through, infirmity
Of the frail flesh, relenting to their rage,
And exercise most bitter tyranny
Upon the partes brought unto their bondage:
No wretchedness is like to sinful vellenage."

How much of this condemnation of "the world and the flesh" is peculiarly European? This Spenserian stanza on the virtues of "Temperaunce" could indeed have a place in the Hindu Moha-mudgara (The Cudgelling of Senses) or Bhartrihari's Vairâgya-shataka (Hundred verses on Renunciation), or the Pali Dhammapada. And if Buddhism is the philosophy of restraint, surely Spenser would be hailed as a Rishi or "superior man" in China, Japan, and India.

In Molière's L'Etourdi (The Blunderer), as we have seen once before, we may find incidents which are not more European than Asian. Corruption among police to which we have reference in Act IV, Sc. iv is an item in point. Some of the signs of love described in the same scene are quite universal. A female character in Act I, Sc. iv was adept in the art of fortune-telling. Even a belief in such a thing as the "astral body" occurs among the people of France in the seventeenth century (1655).

We have the following extract from a dialogue in the French Shakespeare's same piece: "You are clothed with a celestial body. which looks very much like you, but it could change into some other form in a moment. I am in terror lest you should grow into the dimensions of a giant and your face turn hideously ugly all over." The people who. were taking delight in such scenes and were being catered to by.one of Europe's greatest humourists could sit in the same theatre somewhere in Asia side by side with Oriental spectators. Where, on earth, for instance, are not to be found people who could take childish advantage of the fact that old men cannot tolerate any jokes about death (Act III, Sc. iv)?

Goethe liberally utilized in his Faust the innumerable superstitions and folk-beliefs relating to Black Arts, magic, "godless curiosity", the power of wizards over supernatural beings or demons, prevalent among the Germans of the eighteenth century. Is there anything of specifically Teutonic Kultur in all this? Goethe, besides, had faith even in the transmigration of the soul.

The Tantrist of Hindu dramas e. g. the Mâlatî-Mâdhava undertakes to bring about the union of lovers by employing his esoteric science. The Taoist priest of Chinese literature ransacks the whole universe, as in Po Chui's Never-ending Wrong to find the whereabouts of Ming Huang's beloved Taichen. These Oriental characters can equally say with the Spirit in Goethe's Faust:

"In floods of being, in action's storm,
Up and down I wave,
To and fro I flee,
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A changeful weaving,
An ardent living;
The ringing loom of Time is my care
And I weave God's living garment there."

If in passages like this we have to read the beginnings of romanticism in Europe we need only understand that romanticism has been a native Asian commodity as well.

Altogether, then, one should admit that, as art-works, these masterpieces of literature may undoubtedly be sui generis, but that from the standpoint of "ideals", they are rooted in the universal passions and emotions of man. The "ideals of the East" are to be found in these Western products as much as in the Clay Cart, he Birth of Kumâra (War Lord), and the Kavi-kamkana-chandî.

5. Folk-Imagination.

Delight in the stories of adventure, interest in the romantic, the humorous and the marvellous, and sympathy with the fortunes of heroic personalities, whether fictitious or real, are not confined to any particular race. These are ingrained in the "original nature" of man, so to speak, and form part of his theatrical instincts, love of play and sense of fun. The stories of the Râmâyana, the Iliad, the Cuchulain, the Beowulf, and the Nibelungenlied cater to the same demand among different peoples.⁸

It is easy to pick up the Oriental elements in the tales and chronicles of European literature, in Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Froissart, for example. La Fontaine himself admitted the Oriental origin of some of his Fables.⁹ It is not, however, in these "derived" or borrowed and ostensibly similar instances alone that the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales appeal to the Oriental mind. Readers of "Tales within Tales" e.g., the Pancha-tantra, the Kathâsaritsâgara (Ocean of the rivers of stories), or "Legends of Thirty-two Thrones", find the same dramatic interest in the non-Oriental sections of European stories as in their own. The Vikrams and Prataps, the Charlemagnes and Richard Coeur de Lions, the Robin Hoods and Arthurs of Hindu ballad literature likewise call forth a sympathetic response from Occidental imagination.

The troubadours of Provence, the minnesingers of mediaeval Germany, and the minstrels of England could, easily change place with the Kodans of Japan, the warrior-chârans of the Rajputs and Marathas, and the Asian Volksdichter of all ages. Both in the East and the West these bards have sung of love and hatred, of war and intrigue. The patriotism and the sense of duty stirred up by them have been of the same stuff, and their vendettas and defiances have assumed the same character. Chivalry and austerity, obscenity and ribaldry, simplicity and straightforwardness are equally reflected in the Eastern and Western lores.¹⁰

The mysteries and miracles of mediaeval Europe as well as the "passion plays" of Oberammergau and Erl have had their counterparts in India too. Chambers Mediaeval Stage is an account as much of the ludi of the folk, feasts, pageants, buffooneries, folk-dances, and folk-drama of Europe as of the Yâtrâ, Râmlilâ, Bharatmilâp, and Gambhîrâ, of India with slight verbal modifications.¹¹

Masks of beasts besmeared with filth are not yet things of the past in European festivities.¹² Christian manners grant "indulgences" to the moralities which are practised in connection with "vigils" or "wakes" (i.e. all-night watches that are enforced on the anniversary or dedication day of churches). Summer festivals in the Occident are notorious for such "moral holidays." A quaint old reflection on folk-life in the Western world comes from the Puritan Fetherston who in his Dialogue against light, lewde and lascivious dancing (1583) says that he has "hearde of tenne maidens which went to set May, and nine of them came home with child." All this is not psychologically, ethnologically, or climatologically distinct from the Asian practices wherever they may be detected by sociologists or Christian missionaries.

Some of the Buddhist Jâtaka-stories of the pre-Christian era, as well as of the tales prevalent among the various peoples of India today are common to those with which the Europeans and Americans are familiar, e.g., in Grimm's collections. Thus the stories of St. Peter in disguise as beggar being entertained by Bruder Lustig, of Brüderchen and Schwesterchen, of the substituted bride, of the ass in Kaden's Unter den Olivenbäumen, of Teufel smelling human flesh, of the queen's order to kill Maruzedda's three children and bring their liver and heart, of the daughter telling her father, the king, that she loves him like salt and water, of gold-splitting princes, and pearl-dropping maidens, belong to the tradition of both Hindustan and Europe.

Even the folk-customs, folk-superstitions, and folk-beliefs of the different parts of the world bear on them the marks of a common mentality. The popular May-festivals of Europe and the Spring-celebrations all over India are born of a common need and satisfy the same hunger of the human heart. The agricultural observances, harvest rites, ceremonial songs, and rustic holidayings of the Christian are akin to those of the Hindu. The history of medicine and surgery in Europe from the earliest times exhibits innumerable superstitions of which the analogues are to be found in the Orient.¹²

6. Inductive Generalization.

The evidences of culture-lore as well as of folk-lore are thus contrary to the alleged difference in the mentality, philosophic stand-point, and world-view between the Eastern and Western races. The "ideals" of life have been statistically and historically the same in Asia and Eur-America. The student of culture-systems can, therefore, declare his inductive generalization in the following words of Walt Whitman:

"These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands,
This is the grass that grows where the land is and the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe".

Notes

1. Supra, pp. 4-6↩
2. Lillie: Râma and Homer, London, 1912.↩
3. Grote: History of Greece, Vol. I. p. 471↩
4. Bhartrihari: Niti-shataka, stanza 80; Kennedy: Bhartrihari's Shatakas, Boston, 1913.↩
5.  Vishvanâtha: Sâhitya Darpana, or Mirror of Literature (Mitra and Ballantyne's transl.) Calcutta, 1865-66, p. 126.↩
6. Lecky: European Morals, Vol. II. p. 300.↩
7. Lillie: India in Primitive Christianity, London, 1909.↩
8. Ridgeway: Origin of Tragedy (1910), Dramas and Dramatic Dances of Non-European Races (1915).↩
9.  Ed. Chavannes: Contes et Légendes du Bouddhisme Chinois, Fables Chinois au VIIe au VIIIe Siècle, Cinq cents Contes et Apologues. The migration of folk-lore is traced by Chavannes in his studies↩
10. Tawney: Kathâ-sarit-sâgara, Calcutta, 1880; Kathâ-kosha, London, 1895; Conant: Orient Tale in England, New York, 1908.↩
11. Sarkar: Folk-Element in Hindu Culture, London, 1917.↩
12. Chambers: Mediaeval Stage, Vol. I, pp. 93, 115, 145, 149; Stubbs: Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents (1869-78), p. 1 49; cf. Lecky: European Morals, Vol. II, pp. 288, 367.↩
13. Martinengo-Caesaresco : Essays in the Study of Folksongs, London, 1914; John Moyle: The present ill state of the practice of physik in this nation truly represented, London, 1702.↩