Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/40

The river Ganges, so essential to a picture of India in historical times, and even more bound up with all Western poetic fancies about India, is scarcely mentioned in the Rig-Veda. This same text is full of allusions to the struggles of the fair-skinned Aryas with the dark-skinned aborigines, the Dasyus. The struggle is likely to have been bitter. The spread of Aryan civilisation was gradual, and resulted finally in the up-building of a people whose civilisation was foreign and superior, but whose race quality was determined a good deal by the overwhelmingly large, native, dark-skinned, non-Aryan population. At the beginning of our knowledge of India we are face to face with an extensive poetical literature, in set metres. This is crude on the whole, even when compared with classical Sanskrit literature of later times. Yet, it shows, along with uncouth naïveté and semi-barbarous turgidity, a good deal of beauty and elevation of thought, and a degree of skill bordering on the professional, in the handling of language and metre. That this product was not created out of nothing on Indian soil follows from the previously mentioned close connection with the earliest product of Persian literature, the Avesta.^[1] Even the metric types of Veda and Avesta are closely related.

1. ↑ See above, p. 13.