It is a very common thing to see signs of decline and darkness in one’s own age; and Ssema himself had no cause to love the administration of Han Wuti; under which he had been punished rather severely for some offense.  Still, what he says is more or less what you would expect the truth to be.  And you will note him historian of the life of the people; not mere recounter of court scandals and chronicler of wars:  conscious, too, of the law of cycles;—­all told, something a truer historian than we have seen too much of in the West.—­Where, indeed, we are wedded to politics, and must have our annalists chronicle above all things what we call political growth; not seeing that it is but a circle, and squirreling round valiantly in a cage to get perpetually in high triumph to the place you started from; a foolish externality at best.  But real History mirrors for us the motions of the Human Spirit and the Eternal.

I said that what Ssema tells us is what you would expect the truth to be; this way:—­After half a cycle of that adventurous and imaginative spirit, eyes jaundiced a little would surely find excuse enough for querulous vision.  There is, is there not, something Elizabethan in that Chang Ch’ien, taking the vast void so gaily, and not to be quenched by all those fusty years imprisoned among the Huns, but returning only the more fired and heady of imagination?  If he was a type of Han Wuti’s China, we may guess Ssema was not far out, and that vaulting ambition was overleaping itself a little; that men were buying automobiles who by good rights should have ridden in a wheelbarrow.  Things did not go quite so well with the great emperor after his twenty flaming Napoleonic years; his vast mountain-cleaving schemes were left unfinished; Central Asia grew more troublesome again, and he had to call off Chang Ch’ien from an expedition into India by way of Yunnan and Tibet and the half-cleaved mountains, to fight the old enemy in the north-west.  But until the thirteen decades were passed, and Han Chaoti, his successor, had died in 63 B.C., the vast designs were still upspringing; high and daring enterprise was still the characteristic of the Chinese mind.  The thirteen decades, that is, from the accession of Han Hueiti and the beginning of the Revival of Literature in 194.

XV.  SOME POSSIBLE EPOCHS IN SANSKRIT LITERATURE

Han Chaoti died in 63 B.C.; his successor is described as a “boor of low tastes";—­from that time the great Han impetus goes slowing down and quieting.  China was recuperating after Han Wuti’s flare of splendor; we may leave her to recuperate, and look meanwhile elsewhere.