LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 79 , This happier Hindu experience is the more remarkable, considering that, a priori^ the Sanskrit language and literature might have been expected to weigh even more heavily than the Sinic upon the neck of an affiliated society. The Sanskrit's Cronos-like feat of devouring its own children, the prakrits, in a post-Afokan Age of Indie history1 had en- dowed the cannibal tongue with such an irrepressible vitality that in the history of a Hindu Civilization, affiliated to the Indie, there was never any question of a renaissance of Sanskrit, because the successfully re- instated archaic Indie language and literature had never tasted death2 during an intervening social interregnum which had seen the end of so many other elements of a dissolving Indie Civilization's cultural heri- tage. In a subsequently born Hindu World this ever-green Sanskrit language and literature enjoyed two signal advantages, neither of which was possessed by the Sinic classics in the Far Eastern World in which these had been resuscitated. In the first place, Sanskrit was a sacred language, and the literature enshrined in it therefore holy writ, in the eyes of all pious Hindus, whereas in China the classics conveyed in the Sinic characters were merely the canonical expositions of the philosophy of an esoterically cultivated corporation of civil servants. This Confucian guild's influence on the masses was not comparable, either in range of diffusion or in degree of intensity, with the influence of the Brahman caste that was the custodian of a Hindu Society's Sanskrit heritage from an Indie past; and the Brahmans had turned their social prestige to account by achieving two feats which, if they had not been achieved both at once, might have been imagined to be incompatible. On the one hand the Brahmans had incorporated into their canon of holy scripture the profane works of Sanskrit literature, including the epics, by dint of copiously interpolat- ing incongruous theological matter;3 and on the other hand they had managed to save a drastically 'doctored* heroic poetry from losing its popular appeal. An interpolated Mahabharata and Rdmdyana were never relegated to the shelves of Brahmanic theological libraries; through- out the course of Hindu history they never ceased to 'flit alive from mouth to mouth'.4 An early twentieth-century Confucian litteratus would have been dumbfounded if on an oecumenical grand tour he had found, at the annual paniyirls on the Aegean island of Tinos, crowds of Modern Greek Orthodox Christian pilgrims listening spellbound to a recital of the Odyssey interpolated with passages of Neoplatonic theology in a passable imitation of the Homeric diction, or if, at some gathering of a similar kind in Algarve or in Hainault, he had come across Portuguese or Walloon peasants drinking in, with equal eagerness, a recital of the Aeneid interpolated with an exposition of Saint Augustine's arguments against Pelagianism in Latin verse which Augustine, if not Virgil him- self, might have allowed to pass muster. Even in a latter-day Chinese setting, not to speak of a latter-day Greek Orthodox Christian or * See V. vi. 75-78. 2 Matt. xvi. a8; Mark ix. i; Luke ix. 27. 3 See V. v. 597 and 605-6. •* 'Volito vivo' per ora virum*.—Quintus Ennius's anticipatory epitaph for himself.