Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/332

a very high antiquity, "they must have been unintelligible to a considerable part of their audiences, and never could have been so directly addressed to the bulk of the population as to have exercised much influence on their passions or tastes." This, however, as Professor Wilson himself adds, is perfectly in harmony with Hindu social life, in which the highest branches of literature as well as the highest offices in the State were reserved for the Bráhmans and Kshattriyas; and, though the sacred character of the representation, as well as of the Sanskrit language itself, is regarded by Wilson as a poor substitute for really popular interest, we must not forget that such dramatic spectacles required considerable relaxation of Bráhmanic exclusiveness, that the diversities of spoken dialects would have given a local tone to any drama employing one of these dialects, and that the pedantry of Latin plays like those of Ariosto (with which the Indian have been compared) offends, not so much as an affectation of scholarship, but rather as the wilful preference of a dead language to a polished national speech. Had India possessed any national speech, we might be justified in comparing her drama with the Latin plays of modern Europe; but, in the absence of uniform speech, it is not easy to see how a drama could have been produced without the aid of some such instrument as Sanskrit. Dramas in the vernacular dialects and of an inferior character have, indeed, left traces of their existence "in the dramatised stories of the Bhanrs, or professional buffoons, in the Játras of the Bengalis, and the Rásas of the western provinces." Of these, the first are representations "of some ludicious adventure by two or three performers, carried on in extempore dialogue usually of a very coarse kind, and enlivened by practical jokes not always very decent. The Játra is generally the