The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

I ought to make an important observation here: it is, that whereas India, mistress of Asia, held the sceptre of the earth, she still recognized only the eumolpoeia of the Vedas and the Pouranas, only the epopoeia of Maha-Bharata and the Ramayana; her poetry was the language of the gods and she gave herself the name of Ponya-Rhoumi, Land of Virtues. It was only when a long prosperity had enervated her, that the love for novelty, the caprice of fashion and perhaps, as it happened in Greece, the deviation of the theatre, caused her to seek for beauties foreign to veritable poetry. It is not a rare thing to pass the point of perfection when one has attained it. The astonishing flexibility of Sanskrit, the abundance of its final consonants opens a double means for corruption. Poets multiplied words believing to multiply ideas; they doubled rhymes; they tripled them in the same verse believing to increase proportionably its harmony. Their imagination bending before an inspiring genius became vagabond; they thought to rise to the sublime, and fell into the bombastic. At last, knowing no longer how to give emphasis and importance to their extravagant thoughts, they created words of such length that, in order to contain them, it was necessary to forge verses of four caesuras of nineteen syllables each. ^

' See Asiat. Research., vol. iii., p. 42, 47, 86, 185, etc. 'Asiat. Research., vol. i., p. 279, 357 at 360.

78 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

It was, therefore, at the epoch of the decadence of the Indian Empire, that rhyme usurped poetry. It would be difficult today to say whether it was an innovation or a simple renovation. However it may be, it is probable that it passed rapidly from the ruling nation to subject nations where it was diversely welcomed according to the language and particular mind of each people.

If one can believe the annals of the Indians, China was one of their colonies for a long time schismatic and rebellious. ' If one can lend faith to the most ancient tradition of the Chinese, they form from time immemorial a body of autochthonous people. "" The discussion of this historic difficulty would be out of place here. Suffice it to say, that the Chinese having commenced by having rhymed verses, and preserving by character and by religion, with an inviolable respect, the ancient usages, have never had but a mediocre poetry, absolutely foreign to' epopoeia.^ Their principal sacred books, called Kings, are composed of symbolic or hieroglyphic characters, forming by groups sorts of tableaux, of profound and often sublime conception, but bereft of what we would call eloquence of language. These are mute images, incommunicable by means of the voice, and which the reader must consider with the eyes and meditate long upon in order to comprehend them.

The Tartars who reign today in China and who are distinguished from the others by the epithet of Manchus, although possessors of a formed tongue whose richness

' Institut. of Hindus-Laws. W. Jones, Works, t. iii., p. 51. Asiat. Research., vol. ii., p. 368.

' Hist. genSr. de la Chine, t. i., p. 19. Mitn. concern, les Chinois, t. i., p. 9, 104, 160. Chou-King. Ch. Yu-Kong, etc., Duhalde, t. i., p. 266. Mini, concern., etc., t. xiii., p. 190.

3 The She-King, which contains the most ancient poetry of the Chinese, is only a collection of odes and songs, of sylves, upon different historical and moral subjects. {Mini, cancer, les Chinois, t. i., p. 51, et t. ii., p. 80.) Besides, the Chinese had known rhyme for more than four thousand years. {Ibid.,t. viii., p. 133-185.)

The Essence and Form of Poetry 79 certain authors praise,' have not any kind of poetry as I have already remarked.^ The other Tartars were hardly more advanced before being placed by their conquests within reach of the learning of the vanquished people. The Turks had no alphabetical characters. The Huns were ignorant even of its existence. The proud vanquisher of Asia, Genghis Khan did not find, according to the best historians, a single man among the Mongolians capable of writing his despatches. The alphabet of fourteen letters that the Uigurian Tartars possess, appears to have been given them by the ancient Persians,* from whom they also received the little that they knew of poetry.