SANSKRIT STUDIES
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it down with his arrow. Seeing the bird lie on the ground, welter- ing in its blood, its mate began to wail in plaintive tones. The soft- hearted sage was moved to intense pity at this sight; and his grief spontaneously burst forth in the form of a sloka which according to tradition, was the first rhythmic utterance outside the old archaic language of the Vedas . 1 Valmiki looked upon this sloka as suggesting to him the key-note of his contemplated work and under the spell of its inspiration composed his great poem — the Ramayana , and became celebrated as the adikavi. Divested of its romantic ele- ments this story signifies that a new poetic era dawned after the prosaic age of the Brahmanas which had succeeded to the creative period of the Rgveda and that Valmiki was the morning-star of Indian classical song.
The appearance of the Ramayana marks a turning point in the history of the Indian language as well as in the history of Indian literature. It tells us in the first instance that what came to be known later as Samskrta was for the first time raised to the dignity of a literary language by the efforts of Valmiki. The old literary dialect of the Vedas had long fallen into disuse and poetic works had ceased to appear in it. Songs and ballads must indeed have been produced in the popular dialects of the day; but they could hardly take rank as literature. The popular dialects themselves had largely increased in number owing to the vastness of the terri- tory occupied by the Aryans and the lack of a common medium of communication had also been strongly felt. But no lingua franca had as yet made its appearance. There was indeed one among the dialects distinguished for the transparency of its vocabulary, its regularity, flexibility and beauty of sound. But it could gain general currency only through its use by a poet of surpassing artistic genius. Valmiki was such a poet; and by adopting that dialect as the medium of poetic expression he rendered to it the same service which Dante did to Italian or Chaucer to English. It thenceforward became the standard literary language, which character it has retained to this day, uniting in bonds of kinship communities which have spread themselves over the whole con- tinent of India. The language which Valmiki thus immortalised has ever since continued, substantially the same, and literature of
1 [See, however, for a detailed discussion of the story. Art Experience , pp» 34 f. — Ed.]
