AN INDIAN NO VELIS"1.
INDIA will be revealed one day to Englishmen, if it is ever revealed, in a novel. No man writing a history or a description or a book of travels could infuse into it enough of the personal element, which is everything ia India, or make the reader realise the strangely different forms which, under the influence of many creeds, varying antique customs, and circumstances which differ more violently than in any country in the world, are impressed upon a character which in all its essentials is throughout the vast continent the same, or is broken only when we get fairly down to that ultimate dif- ference of race which divides the great population of crossed Aryans from the smaller but still numerous population of crossed Mongolians or uncrossed " Australoids." Only a novelist who knows India as Scott knew Scotland, who has watched the real people as Thackeray watched English society, who thinks with the West yet sympathises with the East, who, above all, comprehends the women of India, with their vast and in many respects separate influence, as well as the men of India, will ever perform the task, if it is to be per- formed at ail. Such a novelist must, one would th'uk, be a woman, fo. no man will ever comprehend thoroughly the
women of rndia,—an Englishwoman of genius bred up under nearly unimaginable circumstances in a great native house, or a native woman of genius whom circumstances more easily to be imagined, but most improbable, have inspired with a complete sympathy for, and understanding of, the English masters of the land. Whether a novelist of the right kind will ever appear we cannot tell, and indeed can hardly guess, and certainly no such revealing genius has appeared
yet; but we do not hesitate to say that the nearest approach to such a one who has as yet addressed the English public is the author of "On the Face of the Waters," just pub- lished by Messrs. Heinemann. We have read Mrs. Steel's book with ever-increasing surprise and admiration,—sur- prise at her insight into people with whom as a civilian's wife she can scarcely have been intimate, admiration for the genius which, though her information is hardly perfect, has enabled her so to realise that wonderful welter of the East and West, of supreme vice and rare virtue, of imbecility and greatness of conception, which Delhi must have presented just before the Mutiny of 1857, when, in a city governed and garrisoned by Englishmen, there existed an inner city, the huge palace of the Great Mogul, in which Asia was still triumphant and absolute, still leading her own life, still seeking her own noble or foul ideals. Mrs. Steel as artist is far beyond Miss Frere, whose "Old Deccan Days" is limited in scope, or Major Meadows Taylor, whose " Tara " gives only one side of Indian character, or the author of "A Rajah's Heir," whose remarkable insight has penetrated the dreamy depths of Hindoo society, but has, so to speak, been cap- tured there.
Mrs. Steel does not paint, she only sketches; but she has the art, which sketchers so often lack, of creating atmosphere so that you feel that you are far from Europe, in an air which is hot with evil, yet in which men can breathe, amidst scenes where intrigue and murder and fanaticism are all rampant, yet in which there is a certain order too, while all around on the hot green plain are multitudes doing the duty of the day, raising corn, giving in marriage, wor- shipping the gods, not so much indifferent to the wild scenes of blood, revenge, and lechery going on amongst them, as totally unaware of their occurrence. Nothing can be more certain or more wonderful than that in the wildest hours of the Mutiny the mass of the Indian peoples went on with their daily life, instituted suits before Courts which should, on the mutineers' theory, have ceased to exist, and actually bought stamped paper for their plaints as if the special law of the white men had never been suspended. We know in literature of few sketches better than those which reveal to us Buhadar Shah, the last Great Mogul, a poet and philosopher in his dotage, full of dreams of empire, but making it the work of his life to manufacture feebly satiric epigrams, helpless, fatuous, ignoble, yet retaining still his dignity, still the unquestioned Emperor within his palace, still in fact to the last the Great Mogul. Or that of Zeenut Maihl, the evil Queen, raging with ambition and hatred, who will cleave a way for her son with poison, who dare do anything except break a convention, who always uses yet but half believes in astrological superstitions, and who never forgets that her authority and her dreams are all dependent upon her relation to the old dotard who, because of some kingliness inherent in him, she cannot wholly govern. Or of the Moulavie who roused by his preaching the war against the English, yet haughtily denounced the murder of the ladies and children in Delhi—this is a fact—as depriving the Jehad of all sacredness. Or of Abool, the Prince whom Englishmen as they read of him will disbelieve in, yet who is only a feeble Humayoon with a career barred off, half-poet, whole profligate, Prince and buffoon, Mahommedan and mad drunkard, who helped in the great murder, yet whose mind is shot with strange gleams of thirst to do right, who spares no woman except one who rules him by her goodness, devil by descent, dreamer by tendency and mental gifts. Or of Tiddu, the Brinjara hereditary juggler-actor, who can deceive all men by his disguises and who claims—and, we fancy in Mrs. Steel's judgment, possesses—the "gift" of hypnotising any single onlooker till he sees what he does not see, but who is all the same a low dog, traitor to all but his English friend, thirsty in his very soul for gain in cash. Or of Sama, the haughty, sullen Sepoy, proud to his toes of descent from the Lunar line, unable to decide whether he hates the English as heretics or is devoted to them for leading him to victory ; or of his twin-sister Tara, whom he loves to devotion but dare not touch or eat with because she was rescued from suttee by the English, and is therefore accursed and out of caste. This woman, the proud Rajputnee, who lives only to expiate her sin in being saved, yet can hardly resist earthly affections and earthly fears, pure, for was she not a Rajputnee bride, yet tolerant of all evil, for is she not a rescued suttee, and therefore beneath all outcasts, is the most original concep- tion of a book full of original portraits. And the best evidence of Mrs. Steel's genius is that those who can scarcely conceive the society, or the beliefs in which such a character was pos- sible will feel certain that it is truly drawn. All these figures and many more live amidst a welter of native leaders, rebellions and faithful Sepoys, English officers, devotees, and harlots of the bazaar—Mrs. Steel is never offensive, but she has no scruples, and as the musk-reeking little rooms of the harlot- market played a great part in the tragedy of Delhi, she takes us into them—and all urge on the story, which is that of an English lady, Kate Erlton, during the Great Mutiny, with unfaltering energy and verve. There is many an officer, we fancy, who would give his sword to write military history as Mrs. Steel has written th history of the rising, the siege, and the storm, with its final scene centring round the figure of the grand captain, "General" John Nicholson, the man who with a hundred faull I even as soldier—for he was almost useless if subordinate—possessed the one supreme qualification of bringing out in action all that was heroic in other men—and who yet by the irony of fate died because he demanded of English soldiers more than they could give. It is the most wonderful picture, and though the book that contains it does not admit of review, for no extract or even chapter will give the smallest idea of its peculiar merit, of the confusion which reflects the confusion that existed, yet is never con- fused, we know that none who lived through the Mutiny will lay it down without a gasp of admiration, and believe that the -same emotion will be felt by thousands to whom the scenes depicted are but lurid phantasmagoria better forgotten.
And yet, and yet, the novelist is not come who may some day come, and "On the Face of the Waters," though it will -thrill the older Anglo-Indians, and may thrill the multitude who read English novels—a multitude which is becoming innumerable and is driving the incapable as well as the capable in hosts towards the new goldfield, where most of them will die of neglect and thirst—is not a revealing book. It does not tell us, no book tells us, the secret spring which set the Indian multitudes in motion, which caused that strangely strong yet half-hearted effort to throw Europe off. Mrs. Steel is evidently of opinion, though she rather hints it than says it, that the movement was purely military, that the people never joined it or resisted it, and that even the military were for the most part half - hearted. Well, grant that it was so, though we cannot forget that the Sepoys were recruited daring the contest by a number as great as their own, where is the explanation in that? What moved the Sepoys, after a century of obedience and at a time when they were, by their own confession, "spoilt" rather than oppressed, suddsaly to throw off the yoke ? They could not have become suddenly devoted to the "old Pantaloon," as Mrs. Steel calls him, in Delhi, and they never had a leader of their own from first to last. Our explanation that the children of Skew hate the sons of Japhet, and writhe under their ascendency, but rise against it only when they see a chance, which was presented in India by the attenuation of the white army, is more satisfactory than Mrs. Steel's, bat, like hers, it leaves the grand problem totally unsolved. Why does Shem hate Japhet, and yet feel ready to obey him ? That is what we want the novelist to tell us in such a fashion as will bring conviction, and leave us either determined to cure the source of the disease which it indicates in ourselves, or to give up that useless expenditure of energy and govern indifferent to periodical insurrection. We shall be told some day, we sup- pose, and if ever we are it will be by a novelist who can place before us the " native " alive, a consistent and reasonable being, his inconsistencies being linked together by some visible mental thread. We try in vain to find the thread in hirs. Steel's characters, wonderfully as their inconsistencies are described. Abool is precisely what Abool would have been—a drunken Humayoon ; but to the average English- man he will never, for want of the clue, seem a human
being like himself. Some ray of 1;glit is wan' in showing East and West to each other, and until the dramatic genius appears who can see both and understand both it will remain wanting. Meanwhile we must be con- tent with sketches instead of creations, and among them, as we have said, Mrs. Steel's are as yet entitled to the first place. At least, it would be the first place if poets like Sir A. Lyall, and in one passage Matthew Arnold, and in a song or two Rudyard Kipling, had not thrown gleams of bewildering light a little farther into the secret than any novelist has done. Those gleams, however, intense as they are, only serve to show that there is a secret, and leave it to be revealed till the Shakespeare or Scott of the East arise, and bid us see that the man who represents all of his kind, Hamlet or John Balfour of Barley, is at last before us, a man of flesh like ourselves.
Previous page
