First to the Mahabharata. It is, as it comes down to us, not one poem, but a large literature.  Mr. Dutt compares it, both for length and variety of material, to the sermons of Jeremy Taylor and Hooker, Locke’s and Hobbes’s books of Philosophy, Blackstone’s Commentaries, Percy’s Ballads, and the writings of Newman, Pusey, and Keble,—­all done into blank verse and incorporated with Paradise Lost. You have a martial poem like the Iliad, full of the gilt and scarlet and trumpetings and blazonry of war;—­and you find the Bhagavad-Gita a chapter in it.  Since it was first an epic, there have been huge accretions to it:  Whosever fancy it struck would add a book or two, with new incidents to glorify this or that locality, princely house, or hero.  And it is hard to separate these accretions from the original,—­from the version, that is, that first appeared as an epic poem.  Some are closely bound into the story, so as to be almost integral; some are fairly so; some might be cut out and never missed.  Hence the vast bulk and promiscuity of material; which might militate against your finding in it, as a whole, any consistent Soul-symbol.  And yet its chief personages seem all real men; they are clearly drawn, with firm lines;—­says Mr. Dutt, as clearly as the Trojan and Achaean chiefs of Homer.  Yudhishthira and Karna and Arjuna; Bhishma and Drona and the wild Duhsasan, are very living characters;—­as if they had been actual men who had impressed themselves on the imagination of the age, and were not to be drawn by anyone who drew them except from the life.  That might imply that poets began writing about them not so long after they lived, and while the memory of them and of their deeds was fresh.  We are to understand, however,—­all India has so understood, always,—­that the poem is a Soul-symbol, standing for the wars of Light and Darkness; whether this symbol was a tradition firmly in the minds of all who wrote it, or whether it was imposed by the master-hand that collated their writings into an epic for the first time.

For it would seem that of the original writers, some had been on the Kurava, some on the Pandava side; though in the symbol as it stands, it is the Pandavas who represent the Light, the Kurava,—­ the darkness.  There are traces of this submerged diversity of opinion.  Just as in the Iliad it is the Trojan Hector who is the most sympathetic character, so in the Mahabharata it is often to some of the Kurava champions that our sympathies unavoidably flow.  We are told that the Kurava are thoroughly depraved and villainous; but not seldom their actions belie the assertion,—­with a certain Kshattriya magnamity for which they are given no credit.  Krishna fights for the sons of Pandu; in the Bhagavad-Gita and elsewhere we see him as the incarnation of Vishnu,—­of the Deity, the Supreme Self.  As such, he does neither good nor evil; but ensures victory for his