IX. COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY OF THE TEUTONIC LITERATURE. SCANDINAVIAN FAMILIES. 267 MAN FAMILIES SANSKRIT AND ITS KINDRED LITERATURES. I CHAPTER I. THE ORIGIN OF LITERATURE. PROPOSE to write about the literature of different nations and different centuries. I wish to show that this literature is not many, but one; that the same leading ideas have arisen at epochs apparently far separated from each other; that each nation, however isolated it may seem, is, in reality, a link in the great chain of development of the human mind: in other words, to show the unity and continuity of literature. This has only been possible within a few years. To the despairing school-boy of fifty years ago the histories of Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, or Greeks, were so many detached pieces of information to be fixed in the memory by dreary plodding. But the moment the mind. realizes the mighty truth that one nation is connected with all others, its history becomes delightful and inspiring; because we trace its method of reproducing the ideas we had met elsewhere. And it is to the Sanskrit language that we owe this entire change in our standpoint. Our subject in this chapter is the origin of literature; but before we reach it we ought to have, therefore, a general idea of the Sanskrit language, its enormous importance, and its relations to modern science. Max Müller says, "The discovery of Sanskrit is in many respects equally important, in some even more important, than the revival of Greek scholarship in the fifteenth century; " that is the Renaissance. Formerly Greek and Latin were the boundary of knowledge in the direction of literature. Real students may have devoted a few thoughts to the ancient Egyptians; but the average scholar who had conquered these literatures felt a serene consciousness of having explored the farthest domain of human thought in one line. Men were even satisfied to devote a lifetime to poring over one Greek tragedy: but within the last hundred years a new language with its literature has become known, which has revolutionized all preconceived ideas; created two new sciences, and possibly three. These are comparative philology; that is, the study of different languages: comparative mythology, the study of different religions and Sir Henry Sumner Maine thinks that another science will soon be crystallized, called comparative jurisprudence, the study of the laws of different nations. A hundred years ago Sir William Jones and other Englishmen living in India heard of a literary language of the Hindoos called Sanskrit. The name means a 66 completed" or "perfected" dialect in distinction from the Prakrit or "natural" dialect. It was a spoken language at the time of Solomon, 1015 B. C., also of Alexander, 324 B. C., but for the last two thousand years it has been kept alive like Latin in Europe, by grammars and dictionaries, and an educated caste of men. They studied this language, and were amazed to find that it contained many words resembling those of the European languages; for example : — They published a grammar of the language and translations from the literature in 1785, 1787, 1789, 1794, and thus threw open Sanskrit to the European mind. Learned men of all nations eagerly studied and commented upon these books. Max Müller says, "The first who dared boldly to face both the facts and conclusions of Sanskrit scholarship was the German poet, Frederic Schlegel. He was not a great scholar, many of his statements have since been proved erroneous; but he was a man of genius, and when a new science is to be created, the imagination of the poet is wanted even more than the accuracy of the scholar." Many minds contributed to the great-work, and the new science of comparative philology was created. Max Müller says, "I may express my conviction that the science of language (comparative philology) will yet enable us to withstand the extreme theories of the evolutionists, and to draw a hard and fast line between |