Part 13

In this short story, written with much truth and feeling, the style and handling rises above the commonplace device of dressing up European sentimentality in the garb and phraseology of Asia; and we have, so far as can be judged, a fairly real picture of the inner and the emotional side of native life in India, sufficiently tinged with romantic colouring. The fascination which professional dancers often exercise over natives of the highest rank is a well-known feature of Indian society; and although the dancer is always a courtesan, yet to invest her with a capacity for tender and honourable affection is by no means to overstep the limits of probability. We have noticed this book because it proves that the study of native manners, and sympathetic insight into their feelings and character, still survive among Anglo-Indians, albeit officials; and because it stands out in quiet relief among tales of fierce wars and savage mutiny; it neither chronicles the heroic deeds of Englishmen, nor does it devote even a single page to the loves, sorrows, or comic misadventures that break the monotony of a British cantonment.

The Chronicles of Dustypore, by H. S. Cunningham, takes us back again from the sombre, half-veiled interior of an Indian household, into the fierce light which beats upon English society at some station in the sun-dried plains of the Punjab. We have here a sketch, half satirical, half in earnest, of official work and ways, with one or two personages that can be easily identified from among the provincial notabilities of twenty years ago. The book, which had considerable success in its time, will still provide interest and amusement for those who enjoy an exceedingly clever delineation of familiar scenes and characters; and it is in the main as true and lively a picture of Anglo-Indian life as when it was first written. Here is the summer landscape of the Sandy Tracts, a region just annexed to British administration after the usual skirmish with, and discomfiture of, the native ruler:

'Vast plains, a dead level but for an occasional clump of palms or the dome of some despoiled and crumbling tomb, stretched away on every side and ended in a hazy, quivering horizon that spoke of infinite heat. Over these ranged herds of cattle and goats, browsing on no one could see what; or bewildered buffaloes would lie, panting and contented, in some muddy pool, with little but horns, eyes, and nostrils exposed above the surface. Little ill-begotten stunted plants worked hard to live and grow and to weather the roaring fierce winds. The crows sat gasping, open-beaked, as if protesting against having been born into so sulphurous an existence. Here and there a well, with its huge lumbering wheel and patient bullocks, went creaking and groaning night and day, as if earth grudged the tiny rivulet coming so toilfully from her dry breast, and gave it up with sighs of pain. The sky was cloudless, pitiless, brazen. The sun rose into it without a single fleck of vapour to mitigate its fierceness ... all day it shone and glistened and blazed, until the very earth seemed to crack with heat and the mere thought of it was pain.'

Such is the environment in which many English officers live and labour for years; and this is the side of Anglo-Indian existence that is unknown to, and consequently unappreciated by, the rapid tourist, who runs by railway from one town to another during the bright cold winter months, is delighted with the climate and the country, takes note of the deficiencies or peculiarities of Anglo-Indians, and has a very short memory for their hospitality. The narrative carries us, as a matter of course, to a Himalayan Elysium, with its balls, picnics, and its flirtations, among which the leading lady of the piece is drawn to the brink of indiscretion, but steps happily back again into the secure haven of domestic felicity. A good deal of excellent light comedy and sparkling dialogue will always maintain for this novel a creditable place upon the Indian list; and as an indirect illustration of the social wall that separates ordinary English folk from the population which surrounds them, it is complete, since we have here a story plotted out upon the stage of a great Indian province which contains absolutely no mention of the natives beyond occasional necessary reference to the servants.

For a strong contrast to Dustypore, both in subject and style of treatment, we may take a story which merits notice, even though it be hardly long enough to be ranked among Indian novels. The Bond of Blood, by R. E. Forrest (1896), draws, like Bijli the Dancer, its incidents and their environment exclusively from Indian life; and the book may be placed high in this class of difficult work, which few have ventured to attempt, and where success has been very rare. It is a study of peculiarly local manners, that may be also called contemporary; for though the period belongs to the early years of this century, yet the sure drawing from life of a skilful hand may still be verified by those readers who actually know the customs and feelings at the present day of the Rajpût clans, among whom primitive ideas and institutions have been less obliterated in the independent States than in any other region of India. The descriptive and personal sketches attest the writer's gift of close observation; there is good workmanship in all the details; his sentences hit the mark and are never overcharged or superfluous. The tale is of a dissipated Rajpût chief, to whom a moneylender has lent a large sum upon a bond which has been endorsed by the sign-manual of the family Bhât, or hereditary bard, herald, and genealogist—an office of great repute and importance in every noble Rajpût house. Debauchees and cunning gamblers empty the chief's purse; the moneylender, an honest man enough in his way, is obliged to press him for the sum due; until at last the bewildered chief is persuaded by one of the gamblers to declare flatly that he will not pay at all, whereupon the creditor falls back upon the surety. Now the Bhât has pledged upon the bond not his property but his life, according to an ancient and authentic custom among Rajpût folk, as formerly throughout India, whereby a man who has no other means of enforcing a just claim against a powerful debtor has always the resource of bringing down upon him a fearful curse by committing suicide before his door. The Rajpût chief pretends that the bond is illegal and void, being founded upon an obsolete custom disallowed by the English rulers; but in truth he has brought himself to believe that the blood penalty will not really be paid, and he is struck with horror when the Bhât, after formal and public warning, stabs his own mother in the chief's presence, whereupon the curse falls and clings to the family. We may add that the substitution of the Bhât's mother for himself as an expiatory victim is in accordance with accepted precedents on such occasions, while it makes room for a pathetic situation, and greatly enhances the dramatic interest of the closing scene. Here we have the antique Oriental version of the story in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, where Shylock takes the same kind of security from Antonio, upon whose person he subsequently demands execution of his bond of blood; nor does the law refuse it to him. But the Hindu custom is so far milder than the Venetian code that the Rajpût Shylock could not have rejected a tender of full payment in cash. Mr. Forrest's tale might be turned into an effective stage-tragedy if the main incident were not too shockingly improbable for Europeans, although to an Indian audience it would be credible enough. The final scene of the mother's death is stamped on the reader's imagination by the writer's power of giving intense significance not only to the speech but to slight movements of the actors, so that the mental picture becomes almost objective, while the strained expectation of the crowd makes itself felt by the force of the words.

'"Will you redeem the bond?" asks the herald once more.

'"Say 'No,'" exclaims Takht Singh.

'"No," shouts Hurdeo Singh (the chief).

'"Then blood must be shed at your door, and the life forfeit paid at your threshold, so that the curse may alight upon you and your house."

'He draws the dagger from its sheath. He had not laid his hand upon its handle in the same manner that he would have laid it on the hilt of his sword, but the reverse way to that; he puts the palm of his hand under it and not over it, so he could best use it in the way he intended to use it—so could he best strike the blow he meant to strike.

'"Begone! Begone!" shouts Hurdeo Singh, waving him away with his hand.

'The people around stand fixed as statues, eyes straining, necks craning. The herald stretches his left arm behind his mother, and she, throwing open her chudder, leans back against it....

'The money-lender had given a sudden cry, stretched out his hand, uttered some words.

'When Hurdeo Singh had beheld the herald raise his right arm, his own had gone up with it, and from his mouth had come the cry, "Don't! Don't."

'But it was too late. The herald had raised his arm, turned round his head, and plunged the sharp stiletto into his mother's breast.'

It would be scarcely possible in an article that ranges over the light literature of Anglo-India to omit mentioning the name of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who is the most prominent and by far the most popular of Anglo-Indian authors. Yet our reference to his writings must be very brief, since most of them lie beyond the scope of our present subject; for although Mr. Kipling's short stories are famous, and he is a consummate artist in black and white, yet in the complete edition of his volumes up to date there is, in fact, but one full-sized Indian novel, and for this he is only responsible in part. Nor, assuming that the Indian chapters of the Naulakha may be ascribed to him, would it be fair criticism to treat them as good samples of his work, or as illustrating his distinctive genius. The attempt in this story to bring together West and East, and to strike bold contrasts by setting down a Yankee fresh from Colorado before the palace gate of a Maharaja in the sands of western Rajputana, is too daring a venture; and the plot's development, though here and there are some touches of true vision and some vigorous passages, labours under the weight of its extravagant improbability. The American's restless energy, brought face to face with Oriental immobility, expresses itself in the following way:

'It made him tired to see the fixedness, the apathy, and lifelessness of this rich and populous world, which should be up and stirring by rights—trading, organising, inventing, building new towns, making the old ones keep up with the procession, laying new railroads, going in for fresh enterprises, and keeping things humming.

'"They've got resources enough," he said. "It isn't as if they had the excuse that the country's poor. It's a good country. Move the population of a lively Colorado town to Rhatore, set up a good local paper, organise a board of trade, and let the world know what is here, and we'd have a boom in six months that would shake the empire. But what's the use? They're dead. They're mummies. They're wooden images. There isn't enough real, old-fashioned, downright rustle and razzle-dazzle and 'git up and git' in Gokral Seetaram to run a milk-cart."'

Such indeed might be the sentiments of an eager speculator who found himself among primitive folk. But the discord of ideas puts the whole piece so completely out of tune as to produce only a harsh and jarring sensation; the rough Western man is thoroughly out of his element, and flounders heavily, like a cockney among mediæval crusaders. This must be taken in fairness to be the result of collaboration, for in his own short stories Mr. Kipling never commits solecisms of the kind; on the contrary, he excels in the shading of strong local colours, and in the rapid, unerring delineation of characters that stand out in clear relief, yet blend with and act upon each other when they encounter. But Mr. Kipling's volumes would require a separate article to themselves, so that we will merely take this occasion of recording our wish that he may some day turn his unique faculty of painting real Indian pictures toward the composition of a novel which shall not be about Anglo-Indian society (for the thin soil of that field has already been over-harrowed), but shall give a true and lively rendering of the thoughts which strike an imaginative Englishman when he surveys the whole moving landscape of our Indian empire, watches the course of actual events, and tries to forecast its probable destiny.

It has been manifestly impossible in this brief article to do more than touch upon a few books that may illustrate the prominent characteristics, and the general place in light literature, of Indian novels. This must explain why we have omitted several other works, of which Transgression is the latest. In this tale we have a sketch of life on the North-West Frontier at the present day, with some well-known incidents of the Afridi War of 1897-98 introduced, and so coloured from the writer's own point of view as to convey, under a thin varnish of fiction, some sharp and sarcastic criticism on the management of affairs, the politics of the Government, and the personal behaviour of certain officials, who can be at once identified. Although the book is not without interest as a true account of hazardous and stirring frontier duties, we are bound to repeat our warning that this abuse of the novel for controversial purposes is not only unfair, but profoundly inartistic. No literary success, but failure and the confusion of styles, lies that way.

What, then, are the conclusions which we may draw from this brief survey of the more prominent and typical Indian novels? To the repertory of English fiction, which is perhaps the largest and most varied that any national literature contains, they have undoubtedly made a not unworthy contribution; for we may agree that fiction has some, if not the highest, value when it produces an animated representation of life and manners, even upon a limited and distant field. In the present instance the narrow range of plot and character that may be observed in the pure Anglo-Indian novel reflects the uniformity of a society which consists almost entirely, outside the Presidency capitals on the sea-coast, of civil and military officials—a society that is also upon one level of class and of age, for among the English in India there are neither old men nor boys and girls; the men and women are in the prime of life, with a number of small children. This age-limit lops off from both ends of human existence a certain proportion of the characters that are available for filling up the canvas of the social novelist at home. And it is in truth a peculiar feature, not only of Anglo-Indian society, but of the Anglo-Indian administration, because the enforced retirement of almost every officer after the age of fifty-five years greatly diminishes the influence of weighty and mature experience exercised by the senior men in the services and government of most countries. In regard to the equality of class it may be observed that here also the lack of variety produces a similar dearth of materials; we miss the picturesque contrasts of rich and poor, of townsfolk and country folk, of the diverse groups which make up a European population. The 'short and simple annals of the poor' cannot be woven into the Indian tapestry which records higher and broader scenes; the peasantry, for example, whose quaint figures and idioms are so useful in English novels, do not come into the Anglo-Indian tale. They cannot be blended in fiction with the foreign element because they are wholly apart in reality. In short, the whole company that play upon the exclusively Anglo-Indian stage belong to one grade of society, and the hero is invariably a military officer.

The most popular of Anglo-Indian novels are probably those which deal in exact reproduction of ordinary incidents and conversation, related in a sprightly and humorous style. This accords with the taste of present-day readers, many of whom take up a book only for the momentary amusement that it gives them, and are well content with interminable dialogues that do little more than echo, with a certain spice of epigram and smart repartee, the commonplaces interchanged among clever people at a country house or in a London drawing-room. Nevertheless, we believe that Anglo-Indian fiction is seen at its best in the novel of action, since war and love-making must still, as formerly, rule the whole kingdom of romance; since as emotional forces they are the same in every climate and country. Each successive campaign in India, from the first Afghan War to the latest expedition across the Afridi frontier, has furnished the Anglo-Indian writer with a new series of striking incidents that can be used for his heroic deeds and dire catastrophes, for new landscapes and figures, all of them bearing the very form and stamp of impressive reality. If he is artist enough to avoid abusing these advantages, if he is neither an extravagant colourist nor a mere copyist or compiler, he has this fresh field to himself, he can give us a stirring narrative of frontier adventures, he can sketch in the aspect of a country or the distinctive qualities of a people that have preserved many of the features which in Europe have now vanished into the dim realms of early romance. His danger lies, as we have seen from some examples already quoted, in the temptation to make too much use of the attractive materials that are readily found to hand in military records or in such a real tragedy as the Sepoy mutiny, so that the novel is liable to become little more than authentic history related in a glowing, exuberant style of writing and portraiture.

In short, the Indian novel belongs to the objective outdoor class; it is full of open air and activity, and the introspective psychological vein is almost entirely wanting. There are, indeed, passages which indicate that peculiar sense of the correlation, so to speak, of the environment with the moods and feelings of men, the influence upon the human mind of nature—a sense which has inspired some of our finest poetry, and which is so well rendered by the best Russian novelists, by Tourguéneff and by Tolstoi. One work of Tolstoi's, Les Cosaques, might be especially recommended for study to the Anglo-Indian novelist of the future, as an example of the true impress that can be made upon a reader's mind by the literary art, when it succeeds in giving vivid interest to the picture of a solitary officer's life upon a dull and distant frontier.

FOOTNOTES:

(1) Tara. By Meadows Taylor. London, 1898. (2) Oakfield. By William D. Arnold. London, 1853. (3) The Wetherbys, Father and Son. By John Lang. London, ?1850. (4) Mr. Isaacs. By F. Marion Crawford. London, 1898. (5) Helen Treveryan. By John Roy. London, 1892. (6) On the Face of the Waters. By Mrs. Steel. London, 1896. (7) Bijli the Dancer. By James Blythe Patton. London, 1898. (8) The Chronicles of Dustypore. By H. S. Cunningham. London, 1875. And other Novels.—Edinburgh Review, October 1899.

[Greek] 'alla chrê ton katathaptein, hos ke thanêsi, nêlea thumon echontas, ep hêmati hoakrusants.'

(Iliad, xix. 228, 229.)

Naulakha, by Rudyard Kipling and W. Balestier. London, 1892.

Transgression, by S. S. Thorburn. London, 1899.

HEROIC POETRY

I have taken the words 'Heroic Poetry' to signify the poetry of strenuous action, the art of describing in vigorous animating verse those scenes and emergent situations in which the energies of mankind are strung up to the higher tones, and where the emotions are brought into full play by the exhibition of valour, endurance, and suffering. It seems to me remarkable that modern English poetry, with all its splendid variety, should have produced very little in this particular form; because no one can deny that the latter-day story of the English has been full of enterprise and perilous adventure, providing ample material to the artist who knows how to use it. Nor can it be said that there is any lack of demand for this sort of poetry, and consequently little inducement to supply it. On the contrary, any one can see that hero worship is as strong as ever, that any striking incident, or example of personal valour, or exploit of war, brings out the verse-writer, and that his efforts, if only very moderately successful, are sure to win him great popularity.