IMPRESSIONIST DESCRIPTIONS.
MR. BOSWORTH SMITH, while writing his little book on"Rome and Carthage," one of the best of an ex- cellent series, "Epochs of Ancient History," was struck by the difficulty all historians have felt in deciding ha to the path by which Hannibal crossed from Gad into Italy. There are plenty of accounts of the march, and all manner of details are given ; but there are no descriptions such as might enable a modern traveller or soldier to be certain that he had found the route. He himself, we believe, tried in an expedition of his own to solve the problem, and thinks he succeeded; but there are still elements of doubt, and in a momentary access of petulance, he declares that the ancients never noticed natural appearances. They cared nothing about them, and they did not record them. The statement is certainly true, as anybody will find who tries to realise the scenery of ancient Italy without any help from the poets ; but is the explanation correct ? The moderns are supposed to see the things their eyes rest on, and to care about the facts of Nature ; but it is astonishing how many books of travel you may read without being able to gather anything like a clear idea of the external aspect of the country you are interested in. The travellers either do not care, or they do not see, or they think their readers will not be interested in such things as the detail of scenery, or they are too ambitious to put down "mere sketches" which will not reveal to anybody their own acumen. The inquirer possessed of a visualising curiosity—there is such a thing, though the words may seem affected—the inquirer, that is, who cannot rest till his eyes call up the scenes in which he is interested, is constantly compelled to rely on poem and novel for the details which the traveller, apparently out of perversity, refuses to supply. Take New York State, for example. There are visitors enough, in all conscience, to New York, and among those visitors quite a sufficient number write books about the State ; and those books find readers, for the curiosity of Englishmen about the American State of which they hear most is endless. Yet we can ask in full security of any one of those thousands of readers whether he ever obtained from any of those books the smallest notion of the general scenery of New York State, or of any section of it outside the suburbs of the great city. How many will tell us straight off whether there are hedges, or only fences ; if the village streets are usually planted, or hare ; whether lanes exist as distinguished from roads ; if it is possible to "cross country " on horseback, or if anything pre- vents that ; whether the roads are straight, or, as in England, laid out by engineers anxious to economise labour, but careless of time ; what is the prevailing colour of the forest ; if the " clearings " are clear, or filled, as they would be in England, with clumps left for effect ; or even whether the hills are sharp or rounded, a difference which entirely modifies the general effect of scenery. Is water a frequently present constituent in the pros- pect? Is the eye constantly interrupted except when gazing from a hill—we have a fancy this is the case—and does the clearness of the air, devoid as it is of English sea-borne moisture, materially increase the range of vision, as in some countries it does to such a bewildering extent P The novelists tell us these things incidentally, and we can get patches of true light about New York State from Fenimore Cooper and his successors, and rays are shot on the path by the local poets ; but the travellers will tell us nothing. Either they do not see, or they will not record, and consequently half their work is thrown away, from the want of a few touches which, if they would only remember, they could give without an effort. New England interests us, who never saw it, almost painfully ; but we had read literally scores of books about its villages, before we realised how they would disappoint visitors with English eyes by what would seem their squalor, the wooden houses, the neglected gardens, the dreary orchards, the half- finished look of everything, which arises partly from want of taste, partly from the unwillingness to expend valuable labour on the unproductive. It is just the same with Australia. Henry Kingsley went there, it is true, and where he went, he, being a Kingsley, could not help seeing ; but just let anybody try by reading visitors' accounts to make clear to himself the external differences between Tasmania, New South Wales, and Victoria, three Colonies which must, merely from circumstances of climate, be as different as England is from Algeria, or Algeria from Lombardy. There are hundreds of books about New Zealand, and just show us a passage in one of them mentioning that the first specialty of New Zealand is wind, an endless, remorseless, persistent blowing of air from the Pacific, which even residents never cease to notice, and which to new-corners occasionally makes life almost unbearable. There is no end, of information from Australian travellers about blue
gams, and eucalypti, and "rolling plains," and the colour of the hills ; but of the general effects it is nearly impossible to find a well-recorded trace. The present writer imagines, pos. sibly without reason, of course, that he can catch the general impression of a scene described in print, and the books on Australia which he has not read must certainly be few, but with the exception of some scenes near Sydney, he can in Australia visualise next to nothing ; and inquiring of other much-reading men, he finds they all angrily assent. They have learned a little from family photographs, but from books next to nothing.
Of all places about which this is true, however, commend us to India. The Anglo-Indians are like Mr. Bosworth Smith's Romans in this, as in many other respects, and positively cannot describe. Cross-examine any one of them, even if he be soldier or sportsman, as to the look of the places other than cities that he has seen, and note the intolerable vagueness of his answers. There are thousands here in London interested, pecuniarily or otherwise, in Calcutta, and how many of them know that for two hundred miles north of it there is not an undulation, that all roads are red and not dust-colour, that over a space, say, of sixteen thousand square miles a man sitting in a balloon would see what seemed to him unbroken forest, with silver threads winding through it, forest which conceals every- thing, yet is teeming, brimming over with human life, and is in itself half orchard ? Who knows that the Himalayas, till their awful majesty has slowly caught you, are neither beautiful nor grand, and except at a single spot in their endless range are entirely without the charm of water ; or that the far more insignificant Vindhya range is, in spots, of overpowering beauty ; or that the general effect of the Northern plains in the cold weather is that of a God-abandoned ugliness worse than that of the great Russian plain ; or that in Central India, which no one ever hears of, are literally thousands of lovely glens ; or that Madras, as Mr. Grant Duff has recently told us, is a wilderness of scenes which, if they existed in Enrope, would draw all the landscape-painters of the world, and make those who love scenery, and especially those who love rich wildness, the wildness which is not naked but clothed, sick with longing to dwell among them for ever ? "India," of course, has no scenery, for India is a continent ; but nobody will tell us about any part of it in any intelligible way, or give the slightest adequate notion of its endless variety, and startling peculiarities. Who knows that in India there is a rose-coloured city, not red, but rose-coloured ; yet who that has heard of India has not heard of Jeypore, the city where the Prince reigns whose fore- fathers were reigning and were antique when Alexander crossed the Jhelum ? We ask any fair-minded and truthful man whether he does not think that sleepy lassitude is the characteristic, the special "note" of Indian cities and villages. The note, on the contrary, is bustle,—bustle as in Cheapside, or in the fullest bit of the Boulevard des Italiens ; bustle such as is possible only where population swarms, where every one works to eat, where all men are sociable, where all love noise and chatter, and where all life, except the life of non-working women, transacts itself in the open air. There are scores of descriptions of Indian cities, but there is scarcely one of them—certainly not one of them popular—which gives even the faintest impression of an Indian city as it is Yes ; here is one, and it brings us, we fancy, close to the heart of the puzzle. Thinner book shall no man ever read than Mr. Edwin Arnold's "India Revisited," a . mere series of hasty letters tossed off—often in illness, we believe—for his paper at home. There is scarcely an effort at thinking in them ; nothing that will be of the smallest use to anybody who hopes he may make of India a subject in the House of Commons ; nothing that will help anybody perplexed with that great problem. And yet, thin as the book is, and hasty as it is, and free of thought as it strives to be, no one who takes it up will lay it down, and no one will lay it down without knowing that he has obtained something he never possessed before, that he has solidly benefited in some way which, even to himself, he can hardly explain. Why, somehow, has the air grown hot, and all around widened itself, and life become full,-over-full, choke-full, of new figures, unintelligible, graceful, pleasant, indescribably interesting, but not us ? The answer is simple; the reader has seen India, or part of it, as if he bad been there himself, and had looked out with the eyes of a habitue, and also of a poet, and also of an amused, and excited, and observant child. Reading it is not in the least like reading ; it is like looking at a series of water-colours, hastily done, hardly pictures, sometimes careless to contempt, but with effects which, on the memory, are in- delible. It is " impressionist " work purely, but of its kind nearly perfect, as in this little passage, which we pick only for its odd suggestiveness of a world which is not like ours,—a world full of men who are childlike, and yet canny ; so clever, and yet so stupendously credulous. Mr. Arnold was talking to Kasinath, a " Jain " (Buddhist of Western India who thinks it on the whole a counsel of perfection to go naked, but does not always follow the counsel) and a jeweller :—" This Jain, who maintained that his faith was older than Buddhism —baktst puraua mat—was a Digantbara, and held that all women must be born in another life as men before they can attain moksha, or release. Immensely wealthy, and still accumulating money, the Jain goldsmith's eyes were hollow with fasting, and he was acknowledged even by the Pandit—who looked on him as nastika, a heathen—to be an excellent man, and true to the five prohibi- tions against killing, lying, stealing, adultery, and worldly- mindedness. Kasinath, however, frankly confessed that the second sin was hard to avoid in business ; and I heard, indeed, that not long ago some conscientious Jains begged the adminis- tration in Jeypore not to plant peepul trees in the gold and silver bazaar, because every Hindu knows that the peepul leaves whisper to Rishabha, or to Yama (Pluto), every word they hear, and nobody can possibly buy and sell, in a world like ours, with any chance of profit, if a peepul tree is always listening." Why will no one give us New York State, or an Australian Colony, as a morsel of India is given in this book P The answer, we greatly fear, is Mr. Bosworth Smith's un- pleasant one about the Romans, that the majority of travellers do not care, and therefore do not see; and that if they did care like Mr. Arnold, they would see, even if they could not describe like him, and that then we should see too.
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