the exuberance of vegetation, the wealth of trees and fruits and flowers, the glow of burning skies, the freshness of the rainy season, the fury of storms, the serenity of Indian moonlight, and the gigantic mould in which natural objects are generally cast," but also a state of social life in which the primary units are not the city and the citizen, but the agricultural village and its communal brethren redolent of Nature's life. We may say, then, that the great differences between the Indian and Greek epics are the fantastic intermixture (not merely, as in the Iliad, the juxtaposition) of gods, heroes, men, and the vast extension of space and time in the former, characteristics also accompanied by a profound sympathy with physical nature which, in spite of a few well-known passages, may be said to be singularly absent from the Greek epics.
Whether the cause is to be found in the unsuitableness of the Chinese language for a long poem, or in conditions of social life in China, or in both, nothing resembling an epic has been discovered in Chinese literature by European scholars. The Indian epics have thus no Chinese analogue to be here noticed, and we may pass on to another species of Indian literature. The individualising spirit of Buddha’s age and the humanising tone of the Mahábhárata, contrasted with the Bráhmanic narrowness of the older epic, have already called our attention to that expansion of social sympathies and deepening of individual conscience which in India, as in Greece, preceded and accompanied the rise of the drama; and, since the differences between the Greek and Indian epics just noticed are much the same as those between the Greek and Indian theatres, we may take the present opportunity to pass on to the Sanskrit drama,
§ 82. Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry, maintained
