CHARACTERISTICS AND DEVELOPMENT IN LITERATURE 19
is exhibited quite unexpectedly in the shape of recondite forms culled from Panini or his successors. So serious a philosopher as Cankara resorts to the use of the negative with finite verbs — which originally must have been merely a comic use — and he is guilty also of the employment of the comparative of a verb, upapadye-tarant, a linguistic monstrosity of the worst kind.
The influence of the grammarians explains also the free use of the aorist in the writers of elaborate prose^ Bana and Dandin, moreover, observe the precise rule for the use of the perfect in narration prescribed by the grammarians. It has been suggested that this may be explained by the derivation of prose from a different tradition than poetry, but the suggestion appears needless. 1 Subandhu ignores the rule as to the perfect, and the simple explanation of the accuracy of the other writers is the desire to display their skill in grammar, which was naturalfy facilitated by the absence of metrical restrictions. The same liberty explains their practice in postponing the verb to the end of the sentence, unquestionably, its traditional resting-place, but one impossible to observe in verse.
Very different was the effect on Classical poetry of the influence of the epics. 2 They show, with special frequency in the case of the Mahabharata? the tendency of uncultivated speech to ignore fine distinctions and by analogical formations to simplify grammar. Thus rules of euphonic combination are not rarely ignored ; in the noun the distmction of weak and strong case-forms is here and there forgotten ; there is confusion of stems in i and in ; by analogy pusanam replaces the older pusanam ; there is confusion in the use of cases, especially in the pronoun ; in the verb primary and secondary endings are some- times confused ; active and middle are often employed for metrical reasons in place of each other ; even the passive is found with active terminations ; the delicate rules affecting the use of the intermediate i are violated at every turn ; the feminine of the present participle active is formed indifferently by antl or atl ; the
1 Speijer, Sansk. Synt., % 328 ff. ; Renou, La valeur du par/ail, pp. 86 ff.
2 For the Ramayana cf. Bohthngfc, BSGW. 1887, pp. 213 ff. ; ZDMG. xliii 53 ff.; Roussel, Mus&on, 1911, pp. 89 ff. ; I9i2,pp. 25 ff. , 201 ff. ; JA. 1910, i. 1-69; Keith, JRAS. 1910, pp. 468 ff., 1321 ff.
3 Holtzmann, Gramm.aus d. M. (1884).
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