The Crest-Wave Of Evolution Part 20

So much, then, for the age of the Vedic literature. It pa.s.sed, and we come to an age when that literature had become sacred. It seems to me that in the natural course of things it would take a very long time for this to happen. You may say that in the one a.n.a.logy we have whose history is well known,--the _Koran,_--we have an example of a book sacred as soon as written. But I do not believe the a.n.a.logy would hold good here. The _Koran_ came as the rallying-standard of a movement which was designed to work quick changes in the outer fabric of the world; it came when the cycles had sunk below any possibility of floating spiritual wisdom on to the world-currents;--and there were the precedents of Judaism and Christianity, ever before the eyes of Mohammed, for making the new religious movement center about a Book. But in ancient India, I take it, you had some such state of affairs as this: cla.s.ses there would be, according to the natural differences of egos incarnating; but no castes; religion there was,--that is to say, an attention to, an aspiration towards, the spiritual side of life; but no religions,--no snarling sects and jangling foolish creeds. Those things (a G.o.d's mercy!) had not been invented then, nor were to be for thousands of years. The foremost souls, the most spiritual, gravitated upward to the headship of tribes and nations; they were the _kings,_ as was proper they should be: King-Initiates, Teachers as well as Rulers of the people. And they ordained public ceremonies in which the people, coming together, could invoke and partic.i.p.ate in the Life from Above. So we read in the Upanishads of those great Kshattriya Teachers to whom Brahmans came as disciples.

Poets made their verses; and what of these were good, really inspired, suitable--what came from the souls of Poet-Initiates,-- would be used at such ceremonies: sung by the a.s.sembled mult.i.tudes; and presently, by men specially trained to sing them. So a cla.s.s rose with this special function; and there were other functions in connexion with these ceremonies, not proper to be performed by the kings, and which needed a special training to carry out. Here, then, was an opening in life for men of the right temperament;--so a cla.s.s arose, of _priests:_ among whom many might be real Initiates and disciples of the Adept-Kings. They had the business of taking care of the literature sanctioned for use at the sacrifices,--for convenience we may call all the sacred ceremonies that,--at which they performed the ritual and carried out the mechanical and formal parts. It is very easy to imagine how, as the cycles went on and down, and the Adept-Kings ceased to incarnate continuously, these religious officials would have crystallized themselves into a close corporation, an hereditary caste; and what power their custodianship of the sacrificial literature would have given them;--how that literature would have come to be not merely sacred in the sense that all true poetry with the inspiration of the Soul behind it really is;--but credited with an extra-human sanction. But it would take a long time. When modern creeds are gone, to what in literature will men turn for their inspiration?

--To whatever in literature contains real inspiration, you may answer. They will not sing Dr. Watts's doggerel in their churches; but such things perhaps as Wordsworth's _The World is too much with us,_ or Henley's _I am the Captain of my Soul._ And then, after a long time and many racial pralayas, you can imagine such poems as these coming to be thought of as not merely from the Human Soul, an ever-present source of real inspiration, --but as revelations by G.o.d himself, from which not one jot or t.i.ttle should be taken without blasphemy; given by G.o.d when he founded his one true religion to mankind. We lose sight of the spirit, and exalt the substance; then we forget the substance, and deify the shadow. We crucify our Saviors when they are with us; and when they are gone, we crucify them worse with our unmeaning worship and dogmas made on them.

Well, the age of the Vedas pa.s.sed, and pralayas came, and new manvantaras; and we come at last to the age of Cla.s.sical Sanskrit; and first to the period of the Epics. This too is a Kshattriya age. Whether it represents a new ascendency of the Kshattriyas, or simply a continuance of the old one: whether the priesthood had risen to power between the Vedas and this, and somewhat fallen from it again,--or whether their rise was still in progress, but not advanced to the point of ousting the kings from their lead,--who can say? But this much, perhaps, we may venture without fear: the Kshattriyas of the Epic age were not the same as those of the Upanishads. They were not Adept-Kings and Teachers in the same way. By Epic age, I mean the age in which the epics were written, not that of which they tell. And neither the _Mahabharata_ nor the _Ramayana_ was composed in a day; but in many centuries;--and it is quite likely that on them too Brahmanical hands have been tactfully at work. Some parts of them were no doubt written in the centuries after Christ; there is room enough to allow for this, when you think that the one contains between ninety and a hundred thousand, the other about twenty-four thousand couplets;--the _Mahabharata_ being about seven times, the _Ramayana_ about twice as long as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ combined. So the Age of the Epics must be narrowed down again, to mean the age that gave birth to the nuclei of them.

As to when it may have been, I do not know that there is any clue to be found. Modern criticism has been at work, of course, to reduce all things to as commonplace and brain-mind a basis as possible; but its methods are entirely the wrong ones. Mr.

Romesh Dutt, who published abridged translations of the two poems in the late nineties, says of the _Mahabharata_ that the great war which it tells of "is believed to have been fought in the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ"; and of the _Ramayana,_ that it tells the story of nations that flourished in Northern India about a thousand years B. C.--Is believed by whom, pray? It is also believed, and has been from time immemorial, in India, that Krishna, who figures largely in the _Mahabharata,_ died in the year 3102 B.C.; and that he was the eighth avatar of Vishnu; and that Rama, the hero of the _Ramayana,_ was the seventh. Now brain-mind criticism of the modern type is the most untrustworthy thing, because it is based solely on circ.u.mstantial evidence; and when you work upon that, you ought to go very warily;--it is always likely that half the circ.u.mstances remain un-discovered; and even if you have ninety and nine out of the hundred possible, the hundredth, if you had it, might well change the whole complexion of the case. And this kind of criticism leads precisely nowhere, does not build anything, but pulls down what was built of old. So I think we must be content to wait for real knowledge till those who hold it may choose to reveal it; and meanwhile get back to the traditional starting-point; --say that the War of the Kuravas and Pandavas happened in the thirty-second century B.C.; Rama's invasion of Lanka, ages earlier; and that the epics began to be written, as they say, somewhere between the lives of Krishna and Buddha,--somewhere between 2500 and 5000 years ago.

Why before Buddha?--Because they are still Kshattriya works; written before the Brahman ascendency, though after the time when the Kshattriyas were led by their Adept-Kings;--and because Buddha started a spiritual revolt (Kshattriya) against a Brahman ascendency well established then,--a revolt that by Asoka's time had quite overthrown the Brahman power. Why, then, should we not ascribe the epics to this Buddhist Kshattriya period? To Asoka's reign itself, for example?--Well, it has been done; but probably not wisely. Panini in his _Grammar_ cites the Mahabharata as an authority for usage; and even the westernest of criticism is disinclined, on the evidence, to put Panini later than 400 B.C.

Goldstucker puts him in the seventh century B.C. _En pa.s.sant,_ we may quote this from the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ as to Panini's _Grammar:_ "For a comprehensive grasp of linguistic facts, and a penetrating insight into the structure of the vernacular language, this work stands probably unrivalled in the literature of any language."--Panini, then, cites the _Mahabharata;_ Panini lived certainly before Asoka's time; the greatness of his work argues that he came in a culminating period of scholarship and literary activity, if not of literary creation; the reign of Asoka we may surmise was another such period;--and from all this I think we may argue without much fear that the the nucleus and original form of it, was written long before the reign of Asoka. Besides, if it had been written during the Buddhist ascendency, one fancies we should find more Buddhism in it than we do. There is some;--there are ideas that would be called Buddhist; but that really only prove the truth of the Buddha's claim that he taught nothing new. But a Poem written in Asoka's reign, one fancies, would not have been structurally and innately, as the _Mahabharata_ is, martial.

There is this difference between the two epics,--I speak of the nucleus-poems in each case;--the _Mahabharata_ seems much more a natural growth, a national epic,--the work not of one man, but of many poets celebrating through many centuries a tradition not faded from the national memory;--but the _Ramayana_ is more a structural unity; it bears the marks of coming from one creative mind: even western criticism accepts Valmiki (whoever he may have been) as its author. To him it is credited in Indian tradition; which ascribes the authorship of the _Mahabharata_ to Vyasa, the reputed compiler of the _Vedas;_--and this last is manifestly not to be taken literally; for it is certain that a great age elapsed between the _Vedas_ and the Epics. So I think that the _Mahabharata_ grew up in the centuries, many or few, that followed the Great War,--or, say, during the second millennium B.C.; that in that millennium, during some great 'day' of literary creation, it was redacted into a single poem;-- and that, the epic habit having thus been started, a single poet, Valmiki, in some succeeding 'day,' was prompted to make another epic, on the other great traditional saga-cycle, the story of Rama. But since that time, and all down through the centuries, both poems have been growing _ad lib._

This is an endeavor to take a bird's-eye view of the whole subject; not to look at the evidence through a microscope, in the modern critical way. It is very unorthodox, but I believe it is the best way: the bird's eye sees most; the microscope sees least; the former takes in whole landscapes in proportion; the latter gets confused with details that seem, under that exaggeration, too highly important,--but which might be negatived altogether could you see the whole thing at once. A telescope for that kind of seeing is not forthcoming; but the methods of thought that H. P. Blavatsky taught us supply at least the first indications of what it may be like: they give us the first lenses. As our perceptions grow under their influence, doubtless new revelations will be made; and we shall see more, and further. All we can do now is to retire from the confusion brought about by searching these far stars with a microscope; to look less at the results of such searching, than at the old traditions themselves, making out what we can of them through what Theosophic lenses we have. We need not be misled by the ridiculous idea that civilization is a new thing. It is only the bias of the age; the next age will count it foolishness.--But to return to our epics.--

First to the _Mahabharata._ It is, as it comes down to us, not one poem, but a large literature. Mr. Dutt compares it, both for length and variety of material, to the sermons of Jeremy Taylor and Hooker, Locke's and Hobbes's books of Philosophy, Blackstone's _Commentaries,_ Percy's Ballads, and the writings of Newman, Pusey, and Keble,--all done into blank verse and incorporated with _Paradise Lost._ You have a martial poem like the _Iliad,_ full of the gilt and scarlet and trumpetings and blazonry of war;--and you find the _Bhagavad-Gita_ a chapter in it. Since it was first an epic, there have been huge accretions to it: Whosever fancy it struck would add a book or two, with new incidents to glorify this or that locality, princely house, or hero. And it is hard to separate these accretions from the original,--from the version, that is, that first appeared as an epic poem. Some are closely bound into the story, so as to be almost integral; some are fairly so; some might be cut out and never missed. Hence the vast bulk and promiscuity of material; which might militate against your finding in it, as a whole, any consistent Soul-symbol. And yet its chief personages seem all real men; they are clearly drawn, with firm lines;--says Mr.

Dutt, as clearly as the Trojan and Achaean chiefs of Homer.

Yudhishthira and Karna and Arjuna; Bhishma and Drona and the wild Duhsasan, are very living characters;--as if they had been actual men who had impressed themselves on the imagination of the age, and were not to be drawn by anyone who drew them except from the life. That might imply that poets began writing about them not so long after they lived, and while the memory of them and of their deeds was fresh. We are to understand, however,--all India has so understood, always,--that the poem is a Soul-symbol, standing for the wars of Light and Darkness; whether this symbol was a tradition firmly in the minds of all who wrote it, or whether it was imposed by the master-hand that collated their writings into an epic for the first time.

For it would seem that of the original writers, some had been on the Kurava, some on the Pandava side; though in the symbol as it stands, it is the Pandavas who represent the Light, the Kurava,-- the darkness. There are traces of this submerged diversity of opinion. Just as in the _Iliad_ it is the Trojan Hector who is the most sympathetic character, so in the _Mahabharata_ it is often to some of the Kurava champions that our sympathies unavoidably flow. We are told that the Kurava are thoroughly depraved and villainous; but not seldom their actions belie the a.s.sertion,--with a certain Kshattriya magnamity for which they are given no credit. Krishna fights for the sons of Pandu; in the _Bhagavad-Gita_ and elsewhere we see him as the incarnation of Vishnu,--of the Deity, the Supreme Self. As such, he does neither good nor evil; but ensures victory for his protegees.

Philosophically and symbolically, this is sound and true, no doubt, but one wonders whether the poem (or poems) ran so originally; whether there may not be pa.s.sages written at first by Kuravist poets; or a Brahminical superimposition of motive on a poem once wholly Kshattriya, and interested only in showing forth the n.o.ble and human warrior virtues of the Kshattriya caste. I imagine that in that second millennium B. C., in the early centuries of Kali-Yuga, you had a warrior cla.s.s with their bards, inspired with high Bushido feeling,--with chivalry and all that is fine in patricianism--but no longer under the leadership of Adept Princes;--the esoteric knowledge was now mainly in the hands of the Priest-cla.s.s. The Kshattriya bards made poems about the Great War, which grew and coalesced into a national epic.

Then in the course of the centuries, as learning in its higher branches became more and more a possession of the Brahmans,--and since there was no feeling against adding to this epic whatever material came handy,--Brahmin esotericists manipulated it with great tact and finesse into a symbol of the warfare of the Soul.

There is the story of the death of the Kurava champion Bhishma.

The Pandavas had been victorious; and Duryodhana the Kurava king appealed to Bhishma to save the situation. Bhishma loved the Pandava princes like a father; and urged Duryodhana to end the war by granting them their rights,--but in vain. So next day, owing his allegiance to Duryodhana, he took the field; and

"As a lordly tusker tramples on a field of feeble reeds, As a forest conflagration on the parched woodland feeds, Bhishma rode upon the warriors in his mighty battle car.

G.o.d nor mortal chief could face him in the gory field of war." *

------ * The quotations are from Mr. Romesh Dutt's translation.

Thus victorious, he cried out to the vanquished that no appeal for mercy would be unheard; that he fought not against the defeated, the worn-out, the wounded, or "a woman born." Hearing this, Krishna advised Arjuna that the chance to turn the tide had come. The young Sikhandin had been born a woman, and changed afterwards by the G.o.ds into a man. Let Sikhandin fight in the forefront of the battle, and the Pandavas would win, and Bhishma be slain.--Arjuna, who loved Bhishma as dearly as Bhishma loved him and his brothers, protested; but Krishna announced that Bhishma was so doomed to die, and on the following day; a fate decreed, and righteously to be brought about by the stratagem.

So it happened:

"Bhishma viewed the Pandav forces with a calm unmoving face; Saw not Arjun's bow Gandiva, saw not Bhima's mighty mace; Smiled to see the young Sikhandin rushing to the battle's fore Like the white foam on the billow when the mighty storm winds roar; Thought upon the word he plighted, and the oath that he had sworn, Dropt his arms before the warrior that was, but a woman born;"

--and so, was slain.... and the chiefs of both armies gathered round and mourned for him.--Now it seems to me that the poets who viewed sympathetically the magnanimity of Bhishma, which meets you on the plane of simple human action and character, would not have viewed sympathetically, or perhaps conceived, the strategem advised by Krishna,--which you have to meet, to find it acceptable, on the planes of metaphysics and symbolism.

There is a quality in it you do not find in the _Illiad._ Greek and Trojan champions, before beginning the real business of their combats, do their best to impart to each other a little valuable self-knowledge: each reveals carefully, in a fine flow of hexameters, the weak points in his opponent's character. They are equally eloquent about their own greatnesses, which stir their enthusiasm highly;--but as to faults, neither takes thought for his own; each concentrates on the other's; and a war of words is the appetiser for the coming banquet of deeds. Before fighting Hector, Achilles reviled him; and having killed him, dragged his corpse shamefully round the walls of Troy. But Bhishma, in his victorious career, has nothing worse to cry to his enemies than--_Valiant are ye, n.o.ble princes!_ and if you think of it on the unsymbolic plane, there is a certain n.o.bility in the Despondency of Arjuna in the _Bhagavad-Gita._

Says the _Encyclopaedia Brittanica:_

"To characterize the Indian Epics in a single word: though often disfigured by grotesque fancies and wild exaggerations, they are yet n.o.ble works, abounding in pa.s.sages of remarkable descriptive power; and while as works of art they are far inferior to the Greek epics, in some respects they appeal far more strongly to the romantic mind of europe, namely, by the loving appreciation of natural beauty, their exquisite delineation of womanly love and devotion, and their tender sentiment of mercy and forgiveness."

--Precisely because they come from a much higher civilization that the Greek. From a civilization, that is to say, older and more continuous. Before Rome fell, the Romans were evolving humanitarian and compa.s.sionate ideas quite unlike their old-time callousness. And no, it was not the influence of Christianity; we see it in the legislation of Hadrian for example, and especially in the anti-Christian Marcus Aurelius. These feeling grow up in ages unscarred by wars and human cataclysms; every war puts back their growth. The fall of Rome and the succeeding pralaya threw Europe back into ruthless barbarity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries humanism began to grow again; and has been gaining ground especially since H. P. Blavatsky began her teaching. But not much more than a century ago they were publicly hanging, drawing, and quartering people in England; crowds were gathering at Tyburn or before the Old Bailey to enjoy an execution. We have hardly had four generations in Western Europe in which men have not been ruthless and brutal barbarians with a sprinkling of fine spirits incarnate among them; no European literature yet has had time to evolve to the point where it could portray a Yudhishthira, at the end of a national epic, arriving at the gates of heaven with his dog,--and refusing to enter because the dog was not to be admitted. There have been, with us, too great ups and downs of civilization; too little continuity. We might have grown to it by now, had that medieval pralaya been a quiet and natural thing, instead of what it was:-- a smash-up total and orgy of brutalities come as punishment for our sins done in the prime of manvantara.

A word or two as to the _Ramayana._ Probably Valmiki had the other epic before his mental vision when he wrote it; as Virgil had Homer. There are parallel incidents; but his genius does not appear in them;--he cannot compete in their own line with the old Kshattriya bards. You do not find here so done to the life the chargings of lordly tuskers, the gilt and crimson, the scarlet and pomp and blazonry, of war. The braying of the battle conches is muted: all is cast in a more gentle mold. You get instead the forest and its beauty; you get tender idylls of domestic life.--This poem, like the _Mahabharata,_ has come swelling down the centuries; but whereas the latter grew by the addition of new incidents, the _Ramayana_ grew by the re-telling of old ones. Thus you may get book after book telling the same story of Rama's life in the forest-hermitage by the G.o.davari; each book by a new poet in love with the gentle beauty of the tale and its setting, and anxious to put them into his own language. India never grows tired of these Ramayanic repet.i.tions. Sita, the heroine, Rama's bride, is the ideal of every good woman there; I suppose Shakespeare has created no truer or more beautiful figure. To the _Mahabharata,_ the _Ramayana_ stands perhaps as the higher Wordsworth to Milton; it belongs to the same great age, but to another day in it.

Both are and have been wonderfully near the life of the people: children are brought up on them; all ages, castes, and conditions make them the staple of their mental diet. Both are semi-sacred; neither is quite secular; either relates the deeds of an avatar of Vishnu; ages have done their work upon them, to lift them into the region of things sacrosanct.

And now at last we come to the age of King Vikramaditya of Ujjain,--to the Nine Gems of Literature,--to a secular era of literary creation,--to the Sanskrit Drama, and to Kalidisa, its Shakespeare;--and to his masterpiece, _The Ring of Sakoontala._

There is a tendency with us to derive all things Indian from Greek sources. Some Greek writer says the Indians were familiar with Homer; whereupon we take up the cry,--The _Ramayana_ is evidently a plagiarism from the _Iliad;_ the abduction of Sita by Ravan, of the abduction of Helen by Paris; the siege of Lanka, of the siege of Troy. And the _Mahabharata_ is too; because,--because it must be; there's a deal of fighting in both. (So Macedon plagiarized its river from Monmouth.) We believe a Greek at all times against an Indian; forgetting that the Greeks themselves, when they got to India, were astounded at the truthfulness of the people they found there. Such strained avoidance of the natural lie,--the harmless, necessary lie that came so trippingly to a Greek tongue,--seemed to them extraordinary.--So too our critics naturally set out from the position that the Indian Drama must have been an offshoot or imitation of the Greek. But fortunately that position had to be quitted _toute de suite;_ for the Indian theory is much nearer the English than the Greek;--much liker Shakespeare's than Aeschylus's. _Sakoontal_ is romantic; it came in a Third or Alawn Period; of all Englishmen, Keats might most easily have written it; if _Endymion_ were a play, _Endymion_ would be the likest thing to it in English. You must remember that downward trend in the Great Cycle; that make each succeeding period in Sanskrit literature a descent from the heights of esotericism towards the personal plane. That is what brings Kalidasa on to a level with Keats.

Behind _Sakoontala,_ as behind _Endymion,_ there is a Soul-symbol; only Kalidasa, like Keats, is preoccupied in his outer mind more with forest beauty and natural magic and his romantic tale of love. It marks a stage in the descent of literature from the old impersonal to the modern personal reaches: from tales told merely to express the Soul-Symbol, to tales told merely for the sake of telling them. The stories in the _Upanishads_ are glyphs pure and simple. In the epics, they have taken on much more human color, though still exalting and enn.o.bling,--and all embodying, or molded to, the glyph. Now, in _The Ring of Sakoontala,_--and it is typical of its cla.s.s,--we have to look a little diligently for the glyph; what impresses us is the stillness and morning beauty of the forest, and,--yes, it must be said.--the emotions, quite personal, of King Dushyanta and Sakoontala, the hero and heroine.

She is a fairy's child, full beautiful; and has been brought up by her foster-father, the yogi Kanwa, in his forest hermitage.

While Kanwa is absent, Dushyanta, hunting, follows an antelope into that quiet refuge; finds Sakoontala, loves and marries her.

Here we are amidst the drowsy hum of bees, the flowering of large Indian forest blossoms, the scent of the jasmine in bloom; it is what Keats would have written, had his nightingale sung in an Indian jungle.--The king departs for his capital, leaving with Sakoontala a magical ring with power to reawaken memory of her in his heart, should he ever forget. But Durvasas, a wandering ascetic, pa.s.ses by the hermitage; and Sakoontala, absorbed in her dreams, fails to greet him; for which he dooms her to be forgotten by her husband. She waits and waits, and at last seeks the unreturning Dushyanta at his court; who, under the spell of Durvasas, fails to recognise her. If what she claims is true, she can produce the ring?--But no; she has lost it on her journey through the forest. He repudiates her; whereupon she is caught up by the G.o.ds into the Grove of Kasyapa beyond the clouds.

But the ring had fallen into a stream in the forest, and a fish had swallowed it, and a fisherman had caught the fish, and the police had caught the fisherman .... and so it came into the hands of Dushyanta again; who, at sight of it, remembered all, and was plunged in grief over his lost love.

Years pa.s.s, and Indra summons him at last to fight a race of giants that threaten the sovereignty of the G.o.ds. In the course of that warfare, mounting to heaven in the car of Indra, Dushyanta comes to the Grove of Kasyapa, and is reunited with Sakoontala and with their son, now grown into an heroic boy.

As in _The Tempest_ a certain preoccupation with the magical beauty of the island dims the character-drawing a little, and perhaps thereby makes the symbol more distinct,--so in Sakoontala. It is a faery piece: begining in the morning calm and forest magic; then permitting pa.s.sion to rise, and sadness to follow; ending in the crystal and blue clearness of the upper air. In this we see the basic form of the Soul-Symbol, which is worked out in the incidents and characters. Dushyanta, hunting in the unexplored forest, comes to the abode of holiness, finds and loves Sakoontala;--and from their union is born the perfect hero,--Sarva-Damana, the 'All-tamer.'--Searching in the impersonal and unexplored regions within us, we do at some time in our career of lives come to the holy place, get vision of our Immortal Self; from the union of which with this, our human personality is to be born some time that new being we are to become,--the Perfect Man or Adept. But that first vision may be lost; I suppose almost always is;--and there are wanderings and sorrows, forgetfulness and above all heroic services to be performed, before the final reunion can be attained.

XVI. THE BEGINNINGS OF ROME

We have seen an eastward flow of cycles: which without too much Procrusteanizing may be given dates thus:--Greece, 478 to 348; Maurya India, 320 to 190; Western Han China, 194 to 63; in this current, West Asia, being then in long pralaya, is overleaped.

We have also seen a tide in the other direction; it was first Persia that touched Greece to awakenment; and there is that problematical Indian period (if it existed), thirteen decades after the fall of the Mauryas, and following close upon the waning of the first glory of the Hans. So we should look for the Greek Age to kindle something westward again, sooner or later;-- which of course it did. 478 to 348; 348 to 218; 218 to 88 B.C.; 88 B.C. to 42 A. D.: we shall see presently the significance of those latter dates in Roman history. Meanwhile to note this: whereas Persia woke Greece at a touch, thirteen decades elapsed before Greece began to awake Italy. It waited to do so fully until the Crest-Wave had sunk a little at the eastern end of the world; for you may note that the year 63 B.C., in which Han Chaoti died, was the year in which Augustus was born.

With him in the same decade came most of the luminaries that made his age splendid: Virgil in 70; Horace in 65; Vipsanius Agrippa in 63; Cilnius Maecenas in what precise year we do not know. The fact is that the influx of vigorous light-bearing egos, as it decreased in China, went augmenting in Italy: which no doubt, if we could trace it, we should find to be the kind of thing that happens always. For about four generations the foremost souls due to incarnate crowd into one race or quarter of the globe; then, having exhausted the workable heredity to be found there,--_used up_ that racial stream,--they must go elsewhere. There you have the _raison d'etre,_ probably, of the thirteen-decade period. It takes as a rule about four generations of such high life to deplete the racial heredity for the time being,--which must then be left to lie fallow. So now, America not being discovered, and there being no further eastward to go, we must jump westward the width of two continents (nearly), and (that last lecture being parenthetical as it were) come from Han Chaoti's death to Augustus' birth, from China to Rome.

But before dealing with Augustus and the Roman prime, we must get some general picture of the background out of which he and it emerged: this week and next we must give to early and to Republican Rome. And here let me say that these two lectures will be, for the most part, a very bare-faced plagiarism; summarizing facts and conclusions taken from a book called _The Grandeur that was Rome,_ by Mr. J. C. Stobart, of the English Cambridge. One greatest trouble about historical study is, that it allows you to see no great trends, but hides under the record of innumerable fidgety details the real meanings of things. Mr.

Stobart, with a gift of his own for taking large views, sees this clearly, and goes about to remedy it; he does not wander with you through the dark of the undergrowth, labeling bush after bush; but leads you from eminence to eminence, generalizing, and giving you to understand the broad lie of the land: he makes you see the forest in spite of the trees. As this is our purpose, too, we shall beg leave to go with him; only adding now and again such new light as Theosophical ideas throw on it;--and for the most part, to avoid a tautology of acknowledgments, or a plethora of footnotes in the PATH presently, letting this one confession of debt serve. The learning, the pictures, the marshaling of facts, are all Mr. Stobart's.

In the fifth and sixth centuries A. D., when the old manvantara was closing, Europe was flung into the Cauldron of Regeneration.

Nations and fragments of nations were thrown in and tossing and seething; the broth of them was boiling over, and,--just as the the Story of Taliesin, flooding the world with poison and destruction: and all that a new order of ages might in due time come into being. One result that a miscellany of racial heterogeneities was washed up into the peninsular and island extremities of the continent. In the British you had four Celtic and a Pictish remnant,--not to mention Latins galore,--pressed on by three or four sorts of Teutons. In Spain, though it was less an extremity of Europe than a highway into Africa, you had a fine a.s.sortment of odds and ends: Suevi, Vandals, Goths and what not; superimposed on a more or less h.o.m.ogenized collection of Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, and Italians;--and in Italy you had Italians broken up into numberless fragments, and overrun by all manner of Lombards, Teutons, Slavs, and Huns. Welded by cyclic stress, presently first England, then Spain, and lastly Italy, became nations; in all three varying degrees of h.o.m.ogeneity being attained. But the next peninsula, the Balkan, has so far reached no unity at all; it remains to this day a curious museum of racial oddments, to the sorrow of European peace; and each of them represents some people strong in its day, and perhaps even cultured.

What the Balkan peninsula has been in our own time, the Apennine peninsula was after the fall of Rome, and also before the rise of Rome: a job-lot of race-fragments driven into that extremity of Europe by the alarms and excursions of empires in dissolution whose history time has hidden. The end of a manvantara, the break-up of a great civilization and the confusion that followed, made the Balkans what they are now, and Italy what she was in the Middle Ages. The end of an earlier manvantara, the break-up of older and forgotten civilizations, made Italy what she was in the sixth century B.C. Both peninsulas, by their mere physical geography, seem specially designed for the purpose.

Italy is divided into four by the Apennines, and is mostly Apennines. Everyone goes there: conquerors, lured by the _dono fatale,_ and for the sake of the prizes to be gathered; the conquered, because it is the natural path of escape out of Central Europe. The way in is easy enough; it is only the way out that is difficult. The Alps slope up gently on the northern side; but sharply fall away in grand precipices on the southern.

There, too, they overlook a region that would always tempt invaders: the great rich plain the Po waters; a land no refugees could well hope to hold. It has been in turn Cisalpine Gaul, the Plain of the Lombards, and the main part of Austrian Italy; this thrice a possession of conquerors from the north.

It is the first of the four divisions.

There never would be safety in it for refugees; you would not find in it a great diversity of races living apart; conquerors and conquered would quickly h.o.m.ogenize,--unless the conquerors had their main seat in, and remained in political union with, transalpine realms. Refugees would still and always have to move on, if they desired to keep their freedom. Three ways would be open to them, and three destinies, according to which way they chose. They might go down into the long strip of Adriatic coastland, where there are no natural harbors--and remain isolated and unimportant between the mountain barrier and the sea. Those who occupied this _cul de sac_ have played no great part in history: the isolated never do.--Or they might cross the Apennines and pour down into the lowlands of Etruria and Latium, where are rich lands, some harbors, and generally, fine opportunities for building up a civilization. Draw-backs also, for a defeated remnant: Etruria is not too far from Lombardy to tempt adventurers from the north, the vanguard of the conquering people;--although again, the Apennine barrier might make their hold on that middle region precarious. They might come there conquering; but would form, probably, no very permanent part of the northern empire: they would mix with the conquered, and at any weakening northward, the mixture would be likely to break away. So Austria had influence and suzerainty and various crown appanages in Tuscany; but not such settled sway as over the Lombard Plain. Then, too, this is a region that, in a time of West Asian manvantara and European pralaya, might easily tempt adventurers from the Near East.

But the main road for true refugees is the high Apennines; and this is the road most of them traveled. Their fate, taking it, would be to be pressed southward along the backbone of Italy by new waves and waves of peoples; and among the wild valleys to lose their culture, and become highlandmen, bandit tribes and raiding clans; until the first comers of them had been driven down right into the hot coastlands of the heel and toe of Italy.

Great material civilizations rarely originate among mountains: outwardly because of the difficulty of communications; inwardly, I suspect, because mountain influences pull too much away from material things. Nature made the mountains, you may say, for the special purpose of regenerating effete remnants of civilizations.

Sabellians and Oscans, Samnites and Volscians and Aequians and dear knows what all:--open your Roman Histories, and in each one of the host of nation-names you find there, you may probably see the relic of some kingdom once great and flourishing north or south of the Alps;--just as you can in the Serbians, Roumanians, Bulgars, Vlachs, and Albanians in the next peninsula now.

One more element is to be considered there in the far south. Our Lucanian and Bruttian and Iapygian refugees,--themselves, or some of them, naturally the oldest people in Italy, the most original inhabitants,--would find themselves, when they arrived there, very much de-civilized; but, because the coast is full of fine harbors, probably sooner or later in touch with settlers from abroad. It is a part that would tempt colonists of any cultured or commercial peoples that might be spreading out from Greece or the West Asian centers or elsewhere; and so it was Magna Graecia of old, and a mixing-place of Greek and old Italian blood; and so, since, has been held by Saracens, Normans, Byzantines, and Spaniards.

The result of all this diversity of racial elements would be that Italy could only difficultly attain national unity at any time; but that once such unity was attained, she would be bound to play an enormous part. No doubt again and again she has been a center of empire; it is always your ex-melting-pot that is.