106 INDO-IRANIAN LANGUAGES 



of lofty reach, picturesque or pathetic or grandiose pieces such as the 

 Aryan Bible demanded. Two other collections, the Sama and the 

 Yajur-Veda, betrayed their liturgic origin too crudely to take rank 

 with the Rig- Veda. The fourth collection, the Atharva-Veda, had 

 nothing edifying about it; the Brahmans themselves had recognized 

 this more than once. It was a strange combination of charms, spells, 

 speculations, and domestic ritual, in which medicine, sorcery, de- 

 bauchery, political intrigue, and daily life, with its trifling incidents, 

 jostled each other. It was embarrassing for the ideal of Aryan nobil- 

 ity; it was kept at a distance, or at least in the background, like a 

 suspected personage, like a bastard. However, the world was chang- 

 ing; literary nobility and nobility of birth were sinking together; 

 la grande populace et la sainte canaille were claiming their turn. 

 History no longer confined herself to a list of exploits connected 

 with illustrious names. Watching the stir in the street, she had 

 guessed at the obscure supernumeraries taking their part in the 

 human drama; she strove to catch a glimpse of them in the shadows 

 of the past. Folk-lore came into existence, and the Atharva sup- 

 planted the Rig- Veda, fallen into discredit. Triumphant democracy 

 made its victory apparent in Vedic studies. 



If limited to the study of the Vedas and the orthodox classics, 

 Sanskrit philology was in no danger of exhausting its material too 

 quickly; the enormous mass of works accumulated in the course of 

 twenty centuries by unwearying generations of writers gave promise 

 of a long time to be spent in exploiting them. A great number of 

 these works found favor with literary men by the beauty of their 

 form, with thinkers by the loftiness of their ideas or the boldness of 

 their speculations. But history, for which so much had been expected 

 from the discovery and study of these works, was destined to be 

 disappointed. Blinded by puerile vanity, the Brahmans had de- 

 tached India from the world; they had been wonderfully seconded 

 by nature, which seemed to have isolated the peninsula amid the 

 walls of the Himalayas, the formidable deserts of the Indus, and the 

 yet more formidable expanse of the sea. They delighted in represent- 

 ing "Hindu wisdom" as a fruit sprung spontaneously from the soil, 

 a miraculous production due to their power alone. Their fascinating 

 spell, which still sways so many candid minds, had already had its 

 effect upon the ancients. Did not Pythagoras, among others, pass 

 for a disciple of the Brahmans? With a consistency so strict that it 

 seems to imply a conscious determination, they had put away in- 

 convenient memories, and if, by chance, tradition forced a real name 

 upon them, they shrouded it in the mists of a false antiquity. If we 

 had to trust to their fantastic chronology, a glorious contemporary 

 of Alexander, Candragupta the Maurya (the Sandrakoptos of the 

 Greeks), would be placed seventeen centuries before the Christian 



