Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/322

religious and political knowledge, but also of the purer literary language. Hence, by degrees, popular Prákritic dialects arose out of the ancient Indo-Aryan vernacular, and marked differences began to manifest themselves between these spoken dialects and the language of the educated class or "Sanskrit." The latter gradually ceasing to be a spoken language, and becoming the peculiar property of a class which desired as little as possible to entrust its knowledge to a written form in which it might cease to be a monopoly, it is easy to see why the prose-form, of days when the speech of the educated and uneducated had been the same, was abandoned, and (as Weber says) "a rhythmic one adopted in its stead, which is employed exclusively even for strictly scientific explanation." Indian prose, indeed, we have in the grammatical and philosophical Sútras, but a prose "characterised by a form of expression so condensed and technical that it cannot properly be so called. Apart from this, we have only fragments of prose, occurring in stories which are now and then found cited in the great epic; and, farther, in the fable literature and in the drama; but they are uniformly interwoven with rhythmical portions. It is only in the Buddhist legends that a prose style has been retained. … Anything more clumsy than the prose of the later Indian romances and of the Indian commentaries can hardly be conceived; and the same may be said of the prose of the inscriptions. … Works of poetry, of science and art, and works relating to law, custom, and worship, all alike appear in a poetic form; and while, on the one hand, the poetic form has been extended to all branches of the literature, upon the other, a good deal of practical prose has entered into the poetry itself, imparting to it the character of poetry with a purpose" (Weber).