Miscellaneous Notes

DANTE AND THE 'MAHABHARATA.'

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The first recorded reference to the Mahabharata-that great collection of Indian epic poetry described as 'a heterogeneous mass of legendary and didactic matter, worked into and around a central heroic narrative'-is met with in the fifth century B.C., but, as Professor Macdonell remarks in his History of Sanscrit Literature, it may, owing to the immemorial practice of recitation, have been in use long before it began to be recorded. In the form in which we know it, it has not changed since about 500 A.D. To give some idea of its length, it may be recalled that it is nearly eightfold that of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. It has been noted by M. Vitti in L' Alghieri (1889), and M. de Gubernatis in the Giornale Dantesco, vol. III, and by other scholars, that there may be links connecting the Mahabharata with the Divina Commedia. The suggestions of MM. Vitti and de Gubernatis have, however, been wholly denied by M. Blochet in his scholarly work, Les sources orientales de la Divina Commedia. He says: 'Le Mahabharata n'a certainement rien a voir avec l'ceuvre de Dante.' It is therefore with some diffidence that I venture to draw attention to one point which I think has not hitherto been noticed, but which seems to suggest an opposite conclusion. Judging from medieval literature generally, with its apparent delight in -the gruesome and horrible, its supreme interest in the future, and its teaching that, for the vast majority of mankind, death is but the beginning of endless tortures, such descriptions as the Mahabharata gives of the nether world are such as could not have failed to make a deep impression, and although Sanscrit scholars are agreed that not even so much as an abstract of the Mahabharata could have been known in Europe in the Middle Ages, it seems not only possible, but also probable, that writers may have acquired some hearsay knowledge of its plot through the Arabs, those great disseminators of Oriental thought. With the complicated series of histories of which the Mahabharata is composed, largely the result of accretions due to constant recitation, we are not here concerned, but only with certain episodes towards the end of it. The last two books, or 'parvas,' of the Mahabharata, called respectively 'The Great Journey,' and 'The Entry into Heaven ,' tell how the king Yudhisthura, sovereign of all the known earth, lays aside
1 Mahaprasthanika Parva, Sect. 1, and Swargarohanika Parva, Sect. 2. The quotations are taken from the translation by Pratapa Chandra Ray.

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his sceptre ere death comes to him, and, accompanied by his wife, his brethren, and a dog, sets out for Mount Meru, the Heavenly Mountain, where dwell the Gods. On the way, his human companions sink down and die, and the King and the dog alone arrive at the foot of the mountain. Upon his refusal, even at the risk of thereby losing Heaven, to comply with the request of the Gods-who desire to test his 1oy altythat he should abandon the faithful dog that has followed him throughout his journey, the dog is transformed into the God of Justice, and now nothing seems left to prevent his attainment of the Celestial goal. But on the threshold he hesitates, for he cannot see those whom on Earth he has held most dear. 'This is not Heaven,' he exclaims, 'I wish not to stay here. That is Heaven where those brethren of mine are.' The Gods, unable to dissuade him, and 'ready to do what is agreeable' to him, command a celestial messenger to show him his friends and kinsmen. He now enters on 'a path difficult and inauspicious, and enveloped in thick darkness.' It is called 'the Sinners' Way,' and led to the lower sphere, and, as described in the Mahabharata, 'it abounded with gadflys and stinging bees and gnats...it was noisome with worms and insects.' In passing, but without specially emphasizing the point, we may recall Dante's vision of the cowardly neutrals (Inf., iii, 65) 'in the starless air,' just within Hell's gate, 'these unfortunates were sorely goaded by hornets and wasps that were there. These made their faces stream with blood, which, mixed with tears, was gathered at their feet by loathsome worms' (Carlyle's trans.). Here Dante gives the same idea, but raised by his dramatic imagination to the acme of horror. Returning to the Mahabharatal, we read that, proceeding through a region abounding in every sort of foulness, Yudhisthura 'beheld a river full of boiling water, and therefore difficult to cross, as also a forest of trees whose leaves were sharp swords and razors. There were plains full of fine white sand, exceedingly heated.' It is to these last three incidents, the boiling river, the forest of sword-leaved trees, and the desert of fiery sand, and to their sequence, that I wish specially to draw attention, for when we turn to the Inferno, Cantos xii, xiii, and xiv, we find not only that the three incidents there set out bear a striking resemblance to those quoted from the Mahabharata, but that they are recorded in the'same sequence, although it is true that in the Mahabharata the direful situations are given without details, whereas, with Dante, the development of horrors seems almost to run riot. To
1 Swargarohanika Parva, Sect. 2, ver. 23 and 24.

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the river of boiling water, difficult to cross, of the Mahabharata, there corresponds the river of boiling blood which Dante could only cross with miraculous assistance. To the forest of trees whose leaves were sharp swords and razors,there corresponds the Forest of Suicides, whose trees were pronged with poisoned, withered sticks. To the plains of sand, exceedingly heated, there corresponds the Desert of Fiery Sand (Inf., xiv, 28 and 37), 'Over all the great sand, falling slowly, rained dilated flakes of fire,' and 'So fell the eternal heat, by which the sand was kindled.' Each situation may, indeed, be to some extent paralleled in medieval literature, whilst the Forest of Suicides finds a possible prototype in the Aeneid, though it is worthy of note that the treeirnprisoned soul of Polydorus cries out 'Harvests of iron have sprouted and grown with spears from my heart,' which comes closer to the sharp swords and razors of the Mahabharata than to the withered sticks of Dante. In an age overwhelmed with a tremendous sense of sin, death, and judgment, to dwell in thought on prospective suffering seemed a wholesome discipline, and therefore if Dante, by his rendering, raises the sense of the awful to white-heat, he is only expressing the feeling of the time, intensified by a poet's inspiration. The incidents above quoted from the Mahabharata and Dante respectively correspond so closely as regards matter, and so absolutely as regards sequence, that it is very difficult to believe that even if Dante elaborated his ideas from other more accessible sources, as, for instance, the Vision of Alberico, monk of Cassino, which tells, though not in sequence, of a river of blood, and a forest of sharp and thorny trees, his arrangement of the three consecutive incidents referred to, in three consecutive cantos, was not suggested by some knowledge, however indirect, of the Mahabharata.
ALICE KEMP-WELCH. LONDON.