upon the Brahmans to disclose the tenets of their religion: he was
therefore obliged to have recourse to artifice. The stratagem he made use
of was to cause an infant, of the name of _Feizi_, to be committed to the
care of these priests, as a poor orphan of the sacerdotal line, who alone
could be initiated into the sacred rites of their theology. Feizi, having
received the proper instructions for the part he was to act, was conveyed
privately to Benares, the seat of knowledge in Hindostan; he was received
into the house of a learned Brahman, who educated him with the same care
as if he had been his son. After the youth had spent ten years in study,
Akbar was desirous of recalling him; but he was struck with the charms of
the daughter of his preceptor. The old Brahman laid no restraint on the
growing passion of the two lovers. He was fond of Feizi, and offered him
his daughter in marriage. The young man, divided between love and
gratitude, resolved to conceal the fraud no longer, and, falling at the
feet of the Brahman, discovered the imposture, and asked pardon for his
offences. The priest, without reproaching him, seized a poniard which hung
at his girdle, and was going to plunge it in his heart, if Feizi had not
prevented him by taking hold of his arm. The young man used every means to
pacify him, and declared himself ready to do anything to expiate his
treachery. The Brahman, bursting into tears, promised to pardon him on
condition that he should swear never to translate the _Vedas_, or sacred
volumes, or disclose to any person whatever the symbol of the Brahman
creed. Feizi readily promised him: how far he kept his word is not known;
but the sacred books of the Indians have never been translated.”(151)
We have thus traced the existence of Sanskrit, as the language of
literature and religion of India, from the time of Alexander to the reign
of Akbar. A hundred years after Akbar, the eldest son of Shah Jehan, the
unfortunate Dárá, manifested the same interest in religious speculations
which had distinguished his great grandsire. He became a student of
Sanskrit, and translated the Upanishads, philosophical treatises appended
to the Vedas, into Persian. This was in the year 1657, a year before he
was put to death by his younger brother, the bigoted Aurengzebe. This
prince’s translation was translated into French by Anquetil Duperron, in
the year 1795, the fourth year of the French Republic; and was for a long
time the principal source from which European scholars derived their
knowledge of the sacred literature of the Brahmans.
At the time at which we have now arrived, the reign of Aurengzebe
(1658-1707), the cotemporary and rival of Louis XIV., the existence of
Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature was known, if not in Europe generally, at
least to Europeans in India, particularly to missionaries. Who was the
first European, that knew of Sanskrit, or that acquired a knowledge of
Sanskrit, is difficult to say. When Vasco de Gama landed at Calicut, on
the 9th of May, 1498, Padre Pedro began at once to preach to the natives,
and had suffered a martyr’s death before the discoverer of India returned
to Lisbon. Every new ship that reached India brought new missionaries; but
for a long time we look in vain in their letters and reports for any
mention of Sanskrit or Sanskrit literature. Francis, now St. Francis
Xavier, was the first to organize the great work of preaching the Gospel
in India (1542); and such were his zeal and devotion, such his success in
winning the hearts of high and low, that his friends ascribed to him,
among other miraculous gifts, the gift of tongues(152)—a gift never
claimed by St. Francis himself. It is not, however, till the year 1559
that we first hear of the missionaries at Goa studying, with the help of a
converted Brahman,(153) the theological and philosophical literature of
the country, and challenging the Brahmans to public disputations.
The first certain instance of a European missionary having mastered the
difficulties of the Sanskrit language, belongs to a still later period,—to
what may be called the period of Roberto de Nobili, as distinguished from
the first period, which is under the presiding spirit of Francis Xavier.
Roberto de Nobili went to India in 1606. He was himself a man of high
family, of a refined and cultivated mind, and he perceived the more
quickly the difficulties which kept the higher castes, and particularly
the Brahmans, from joining the Christian communities formed at Madura and
other places. These communities consisted chiefly of men of low rank, of
no education, and no refinement. He conceived the bold plan of presenting
himself as a Brahman, and thus obtaining access to the high and noble, the
wise and learned, in the land. He shut himself up for years, acquiring in
secret a knowledge, not only of Tamil and Telugu, but of Sanskrit. When,
after a patient study of the language and literature of the Brahmans, he
felt himself strong enough to grapple with his antagonists, he showed
himself in public, dressed in the proper garb of the Brahmans, wearing
their cord and their frontal mark, observing their diet, and submitting
even to the complicated rules of caste. He was successful, in spite of the
persecutions both of the Brahmans, who were afraid of him, and of his own
fellow-laborers, who could not understand his policy. His life in India,
where he died as an old blind man, is full of interest to the missionary.
I can only speak of him here as the first European Sanskrit scholar. A man
who could quote from Manu, from the Purâņas, and even from works such as
the Âpastamba-sûtras, which are known even at present to only those few
Sanskrit scholars who can read Sanskrit MSS., must have been far advanced
in a knowledge of the sacred language and literature of the Brahmans; and
the very idea that he came, as he said, to preach a new or a fourth
Veda,(154) which had been lost, shows how well he knew the strong and weak
points of the theological system which he came to conquer. It is
surprising that the reports which he sent to Rome, in order to defend
himself against the charge of idolatry, and in which he drew a faithful
picture of the religion, the customs, and literature of the Brahmans,
should not have attracted the attention of scholars. The “Accommodation
Question,” as it was called, occupied cardinals and popes for many years;
but not one of them seems to have perceived the extraordinary interest
attaching to the existence of an ancient civilization so perfect and so
firmly rooted as to require accommodation even from the missionaries of
Rome. At a time when the discovery of one Greek MS. would have been hailed
by all the scholars of Europe, the discovery of a complete literature was
allowed to pass unnoticed. The day of Sanskrit had not yet come.
The first missionaries who succeeded in rousing the attention of European
scholars to the extraordinary discovery that had been made were the French
Jesuit missionaries, whom Louis XIV. had sent out to India after the
treaty of Ryswick, in 1697.(155) Father Pons drew up a comprehensive
account of the literary treasures of the Brahmans; and his report, dated
Karikal (dans le Maduré), November 23, 1740, and addressed to Father
Duhalde, was published in the “Lettres édifiantes.”(156) Father Pons gives
in it a most interesting and, in general, a very accurate description of
the various branches of Sanskrit literature,—of the four Vedas, the
grammatical treatises, the six systems of philosophy, and the astronomy of
the Hindus. He anticipated, on several points, the researches of Sir
William Jones.
But, although the letter of Father Pons excited a deep interest, that
interest remained necessarily barren, as long as there were no grammars,
dictionaries, and Sanskrit texts to enable scholars in Europe to study
Sanskrit in the same spirit in which they studied Greek and Latin. The
first who endeavored to supply this want was a Carmelite friar, a German
of the name of Johann Philip Wesdin, better known as Paulinus a Santo
Bartholomeo. He was in India from 1776 to 1789; and he published the first
grammar of Sanskrit at Rome, in 1790. Although this grammar has been
severely criticised, and is now hardly ever consulted, it is but fair to
bear in mind that the first grammar of any language is a work of
infinitely greater difficulty than any later grammar.(157)
We have thus seen how the existence of the Sanskrit language and
literature was known ever since India had first been discovered by
Alexander and his companions. But what was not known was, that this
language, as it was spoken at the time of Alexander, and at the time of
Solomon, and for centuries before his time, was intimately related to
Greek and Latin, in fact, stood to them in the same relation as French to
Italian and Spanish. The history of what may be called European Sanskrit
philology dates from the foundation of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, in
1784.(158) It was through the labors of Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins,
Forster, Colebrooke, and other members of that illustrious Society, that
the language and literature of the Brahmans became first accessible to
European scholars; and it would be difficult to say which of the two, the
language or the literature, excited the deepest and most lasting interest.
It was impossible to look, even in the most cursory manner, at the
declensions and conjugations, without being struck by the extraordinary
similarity, or, in some cases, by the absolute identity of the grammatical
forms in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. As early as 1778, Halhed remarked, in
the preface to his Grammar of Bengalí,(159) “I have been astonished to
find this similitude of Sanskrit words with those of Persian and Arabic,
and even of Latin and Greek; and these not in technical and metaphorical
terms, which the mutuation of refined arts and improved manners might have
occasionally introduced; but in the main groundwork of language, in
monosyllables, in the names of numbers, and the appellations of such
things as could be first discriminated on the immediate dawn of
civilization.” Sir William Jones (died 1794), after the first glance at
Sanskrit, declared that whatever its antiquity, it was a language of most
wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the
Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of
them a strong affinity. “No philologer,” he writes, “could examine the
Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, without believing them to have sprung from
some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar
reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic
and Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit. The old Persian may be
added to the same family.”
But how was that affinity to be explained? People were completely taken by
surprise. Theologians shook their heads; classical scholars looked
sceptical; philosophers indulged in the wildest conjectures in order to
escape from the only possible conclusion which could be drawn from the
facts placed before them, but which threatened to upset their little
systems of the history of the world. Lord Monboddo had just finished his
great work(160) in which he derives all mankind from a couple of apes, and
all the dialects of the world from a language originally framed by some
Egyptian gods,(161) when the discovery of Sanskrit came on him like a
thunder-bolt. It must be said, however, to his credit, that he at once
perceived the immense importance of the discovery. He could not be
expected to sacrifice his primæval monkeys or his Egyptian idols; but,
with that reservation, the conclusions which he drew from the new evidence
placed before him by his friend Mr. Wilkins, the author of one of our
first Sanskrit grammars, are highly creditable to the acuteness of the
Scotch judge. “There is a language,” he writes(162) (in 1792), “still
existing, and preserved among the Bramins of India, which is a richer and
in every respect a finer language than even the Greek of Homer. All the
other languages of India have a great resemblance to this language, which
is called the Shanscrit. But those languages are dialects of it, and
formed from it, not the Shanscrit from them. Of this, and other
particulars concerning this language, I have got such certain information
from India, that if I live to finish my history of man, which I have begun
in my third volume of ‘Antient Metaphysics,’ I shall be able clearly to
prove that the Greek is derived from the Shanscrit, which was the antient
language of Egypt, and was carried by the Egyptians into India, with their
other arts, and into Greece by the colonies which they settled there.”
A few years later (1795) he had arrived at more definite views on the
relation of Sanskrit to Greek; and he writes,(163) “Mr. Wilkins has proved
to my conviction such a resemblance betwixt the Greek and the Shanscrit,
that the one must be a dialect of the other, or both of some original
language. Now the Greek is certainly not a dialect of the Shanscrit, any
more than the Shanscrit is of the Greek. They must, therefore, be both
dialects of the same language; and that language could be no other than
the language of Egypt, brought into India by Osiris, of which,
undoubtedly, the Greek was a dialect, as I think I have proved.”
Into these theories of Lord Monboddo’s on Egypt and Osiris, we need not
inquire at present. But it may be of interest to give one other extract,
in order to show how well, apart from his men with, and his monkeys
without, tails, Lord Monboddo could sift and handle the evidence that was
placed before him:—
“To apply these observations to the similarities which Mr. Wilkins has
discovered betwixt the Shanscrit and the Greek;—I will begin with these
words, which must have been original words in all languages, as the things
denoted by them must have been known in the first ages of civility, and
have got names; so that it is impossible that one language could have
borrowed them from another, unless it was a derivative or dialect of that
language. Of this kind are the names of numbers, of the members of the
human body, and of relations, such as that of father, mother, and brother.
And first, as to numbers, the use of which must have been coeval with
civil society. The words in the Shanscrit for the numbers from one to ten
are, _ek_, _dwee_, _tree_, _chatoor_, _panch_, _shat_, _sapt_, _aght_,
_nava_, _das_, which certainly have an affinity to the Greek or Latin
names for those numbers. Then they proceed towards twenty, saying ten and
one, ten and two, and so forth, till they come to twenty; for their
arithmetic is decimal as well as ours. Twenty they express by the word
_veensatee_. Then they go on till they come to thirty, which they express
by the word _treensat_, of which the word expressing three is part of the
composition, as well as it is of the Greek and Latin names for those
numbers. And in like manner they go on expressing forty, fifty, &c., by a
like composition with the words expressing simple numerals, namely, four,
five, &c., till they come to the number one hundred, which they express by
_sat_, a word different from either the Greek or Latin name for that
number. But, in this numeration, there is a very remarkable conformity
betwixt the word in Shanscrit expressing twenty or twice ten, and the
words in Greek and Latin expressing the same number; for in none of the
three languages has the word any relation to the number two, which, by
multiplying ten, makes twenty; such as the words expressing the numbers
thirty, forty, &c., have to the words expressing three or four; for in
Greek the word is _eikosi_, which expresses no relation to the number two;
nor does the Latin _viginti_, but which appears to have more resemblance
to the Shanscrit word _veensatee_. And thus it appears that in the
anomalies of the two languages of Greek and Latin, there appears to be
some conformity with the Shanscrit.”
Lord Monboddo compares the Sanskrit _pada_ with the Greek _pous_, _podos_;
the Sanskrit _nâsa_ with the Latin _nasus_; the Sanskrit _deva_, god, with
the Greek _Theos_ and Latin _deus_; the Sanskrit _ap_, water, with the
Latin _aqua_; the Sanskrit _vidhavâ_ with the Latin _vidua_, widow.
Sanskrit words such as _gonia_, for angle, _kentra_, for centre, _hora_,
for hour, he points out as clearly of Greek origin, and imported into
Sanskrit. He then proceeds to show the grammatical coincidences between
Sanskrit and the classical languages. He dwells on compounds such as
_tripada_, from _tri_, three, and _pada_, foot—a tripod; he remarks on the
extraordinary fact that Sanskrit, like Greek, changes a positive into a
negative adjective by the addition of the _a_ privative; and he then
produces what he seems to consider as the most valuable present that Mr.
Wilkins could have given him, namely, the Sanskrit forms, _asmi_, I am;
_asi_, thou art; _asti_, he is; _santi_, they are; forms clearly of the
same origin as the corresponding forms, _esmi_, _eis_, _esti_, in Greek,
and _sunt_ in Latin.
Another Scotch philosopher, Dugald Stewart, was much less inclined to
yield such ready submission. No doubt it must have required a considerable
effort for a man brought up in the belief that Greek and Latin were either
aboriginal languages, or modifications of Hebrew, to bring himself to
acquiesce in the revolutionary doctrine that the classical languages were
intimately related to a jargon of mere savages; for such all the subjects
of the Great Mogul were then supposed to be. However, if the facts about
Sanskrit were true, Dugald Stewart was too wise not to see that the
conclusions drawn from them were inevitable. He therefore denied the
reality of such a language as Sanskrit altogether, and wrote his famous
essay to prove that Sanskrit had been put together, after the model of
Greek and Latin, by those arch-forgers and liars the Brahmans, and that
the whole of Sanskrit literature was an imposition. I mention this fact,
because it shows, better than anything else, how violent a shock was given
by the discovery of Sanskrit to prejudices most deeply ingrained in the
mind of every educated man. The most absurd arguments found favor for a
time, if they could only furnish a loophole by which to escape from the
unpleasant conclusion that Greek and Latin were of the same kith and kin
as the language of the black inhabitants of India. The first who dared
boldly to face both the facts and the conclusions of Sanskrit scholarship
was the German poet, Frederick Schlegel. He had been in England during the
peace of Amiens (1801-1802), and had learned a smattering of Sanskrit from
Mr. Alexander Hamilton. After carrying on his studies for some time at
Paris, he published, in 1808, his work, “On the Language and Wisdom of the
Indians.” This work became the foundation of the science of language.
Though published only two years after the first volume of Adelung’s
“Mithridates,” it is separated from that work by the same distance which
separates the Copernican from the Ptolemæan system. Schlegel was not a
great scholar. Many of his statements have proved erroneous; and nothing
would be easier than to dissect his essay and hold it up to ridicule. But
Schlegel 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. It surely required somewhat of poetic vision to embrace with
_one_ glance the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Germany,
and to rivet them together by the simple name of Indo-Germanic. This was
Schlegel’s work; and in the history of the intellect, it has truly been
called “the discovery of a new world.”
We shall see, in our next lecture, how Schlegel’s idea was taken up in
Germany, and how it led almost immediately to a genealogical
classification of the principal languages of mankind.
LECTURE V. GENEALOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES.
We traced, in our last Lecture, the history of the various attempts at a
classification of languages to the year 1808, the year in which Frederick
Schlegel published his little work on “The Language and Wisdom of the
Indians.” This work was like the wand of a magician. It pointed out the
place where a mine should be opened; and it was not long before some of
the most distinguished scholars of the day began to sink their shafts, and
raise the ore. For a time, everybody who wished to learn Sanskrit had to
come to England. Bopp, Schlegel, Lassen, Rosen, Burnouf, all spent some
time in this country, copying manuscripts at the East-India House, and
receiving assistance from Wilkins, Colebrooke, Wilson, and other
distinguished members of the old Indian Civil Service. The first minute
and scholar-like comparison of the grammar of Sanskrit with that of Greek
and Latin, Persian, and German, was made by Francis Bopp, in 1816.(164)
Other essays of his followed; and in 1833 appeared the first volume of his
“Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian,
Slavonic, Gothic, and German.” This work was not finished till nearly
twenty years later, in 1852;(165) but it will form forever the safe and
solid foundation of comparative philology. August Wilhelm von Schlegel,
the brother of Frederick Schlegel, used the influence which he had
acquired as a German poet, to popularize the study of Sanskrit in Germany.
His “Indische Bibliothek” was published from 1819 to 1830, and though
chiefly intended for Sanskrit literature, it likewise contained several
articles on Comparative Philology. This new science soon found a still
more powerful patron in William von Humboldt, the worthy brother of
Alexander von Humboldt, and at that time one of the leading statesmen in
Prussia. His essays, chiefly on the philosophy of language, attracted
general attention during his lifetime; and he left a lasting monument of
his studies in his great work on the Kawi language, which was published
after his death, in 1836. Another scholar who must be reckoned among the
founders of Comparative Philology is Professor Pott, whose “Etymological
Researches” appeared first in 1833 and 1836.(166) More special in its
purpose, but based on the same general principles, was Grimm’s “Teutonic
Grammar,” a work which has truly been called colossal. Its publication
occupied nearly twenty years, from 1819 to 1837. We ought, likewise, to
mention here the name of an eminent Dane, Erasmus Rask, who devoted
himself to the study of the northern languages of Europe. He started, in
1816, for Persia and India, and was the first to acquire a knowledge of
Zend, the language of the Zend-Avesta; but he died before he had time to
publish all the results of his learned researches. He had proved, however,
that the sacred language of the Parsis was closely connected with the
sacred language of the Brahmans, and that, like Sanskrit, it had preserved
some of the earliest formations of Indo-European speech. These researches
into the ancient Persian language were taken up again by one of the
greatest scholars that France ever produced, by Eugène Burnouf. Though the
works of Zoroaster had been translated before by Anquetil Duperron, his
was only a translation of a modern Persian translation of the original. It
was Burnouf who, by means of his knowledge of Sanskrit and Comparative
Grammar, deciphered for the first time the very words of the founder of
the ancient religion of light. He was, likewise, the first to apply the
same key with real success to the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and
Xerxes; and his premature death will long be mourned, not only by those
who, like myself, had the privilege of knowing him personally and
attending his lectures, but by all who have the interest of oriental
literature and of real oriental scholarship at heart.
I cannot give here a list of all the scholars who followed in the track of
Bopp, Schlegel, Humboldt, Grimm, and Burnouf. How the science of language
has flourished and abounded may best be seen in the library of any
comparative philologist. There has been for the last ten years a special
journal of Comparative Philology in Germany. The Philological Society in
London publishes every year a valuable volume of its transactions; and in
almost every continental university there is a professor of Sanskrit who
lectures likewise on Comparative Grammar and the science of language.