but to let oneself be absorbed in the Infinite through the medium of contemplation and ecstasy.2 Greece, on the other hand, affords an example of quite a different kind of landscape originating quite a contrary spirit in man. Greece is a beautifully diversified country, with promontories looking out on the many-islanded Aegean, with a canopy of sky that lends colour and light to land and sea. The broken dentured Grecian coast curving into innumerable gulfs, its small rivers, and low hills of exquisite outline, its several territories closely knit with one another, were easily accessible to human conquest. There was nothing to awe the Greeks. “The wine dark sea” murmurs around Greece, unlike the roar of the ocean around India. Even Ossa and Pelion and Olympus are small when compared with the gigantic snow-capped ranges of the Himālayas; and whole Grecian kingdoms might be swallowed up in the mouths of Indian rivers. In such a country, man was free to evolve a spirit of independence and conquest and liberty. The Greek’s sense of the Infinite proceeded from within, while that of the Indian was forced on him from without.3 Similarly, the physical texture of the South Indian landscape with its dividing mountains and rivers and its clearly denned contours, gave the South of India not only an occasion for its small kingdoms and smaller chieftaincies, but also formed the basis for the division of poetry on geographical regions as for example “mountain poetry”, “pasture-land poetry” and “seaside poetry”. Tamil poetry has all the marks of being indigenous to the Tamil soil. It is tantamount to saying that Tamil poetry contains no indication of the Tamil people having come from some foreign abode with a language and literature already developed. By the Tamil soil, must be meant, not only the present linguistic Tamil zone, but all the land between the Tirupati hills and Cape Comorin and between the Western Sea and the ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2 DE REINCOURT AMAURY, The Soul of India, p. 15 ff, Jonathan Cape, London, 1961. 3VICTOR DE LAPRADE, Le sentiment de la nature avant le Christianisme, p. 257 ff, Paris, 1866: “Dans l’Orient primitif, I’incommensurable, l’infini entourent de tous cotés L’ecrasent”. |