BOOKS.

SIR ALFRED LYALL.*

Tins is a plain, straightforward biography of a subtle personality. It is arguable that such a personality would have been better suited with a more highly analytical method than Sir Mortimer Durand commands, or at all events employs; but Lyall's own calmness and reticence in writing of men and history make one think that he would have liked a biography not other than Sir Mortimer Durand has written. It does not insist, belabour, or embroider, yet gives Lyall's character clearly and, we think, justly. Not all English people who knew Lyall as a man of letters, fragile-looking, and absorbed in ideas, thought of him as a firm and successful administrator in India, still less as a dashing young volunteer who rejoiced in battle in the Mutiny, was mentioned in despatches, and said, in fact, that he had never enjoyed himself so much in his life. On the other hand, many well- informed Englishmen who knew Lyall's record as an admini- strator had no inkling of the deep impression which he had made on the British in India by his poems of Indian life. He was a man to outward seeming dispassionate and sceptical, with a tinge of indifference and cynicism. How came it about, then, that he wrote poems which touched men's hearts p The paradox is a thing to be explained by a biographer, and Sir Mortimer Durand helps us by proving very clearly that Lyall had a faculty for deep emotion which must have informed even his casual thoughts when he himself was quite unaware of the process. Sir Mortimer Durand says that he never saw anyone in authority so overcome by emotion as Lyall when he heard of his countrymen being massacred in some unfortunate affair with natives. The conclusion is that Lyall wrote better than he knew when he penned those poems about Indian life so discerning and so faithful that Englishmen • Life of the Right Hon. Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall, P.C., X.C.B., &c. By Sir Mortimer Durand. With Illustrations. London: William Blackwood and Boss. 1.16e.1

could not help learning them by heart and repeating them from one end of India to the other. Poems are not learned and treasured in that way unless they have the kernel of truth in them. Remembering this, we find explanation of the genesis of his well-known poem, " The

Land of Regrets," astonishing. In a letter to Mr. Holland he says :— "I hope you will understand that ` The Land of Regrets' was something of a cynical parody. I have no such pangs myself, though, on the whole, I wish I had gone to Cambridge. But the youth of the Civil Service have lately set up dismal mailings, and I gave them those verses to comfort them. Young Competition Wallah comes out much elated at having won his appointment, and prepared to distinguish himself at once among the provincials, also he marries very early, so he soon gets worn by the drudgery and pinched by poverty."

Sir Mortimer Durand has wisely avoided State papers, and has written from the diaries and letters and from intimate personal knowledge of his subject. He has the invaluable gift of brevity, and though in his book he accompanies Lyall from boyhood to the grave he has not written a lengthy volume. At Eton Lyall's achievements were an early but sure mark of the character of his manhood. It was a curious fact that though he did not rise to eminence in any single pursuit, intellectual or athletic, everyone recognized his brilliance

He was essentially a boy of indolent temperament, and yet combined with this indolence there was such unconquerable intellectual vivacity and curiosity that in manhood these

qualities carried him far, just as Thackeray's did, in spite of his constitutional inclinations. After Eton he went to Hailey- bury, then the training college for the East India Company and again he won a reputation for brilliance, though his actua accomplishment was less than generally earns such a reputa- tion. He had no high opinion of the Haileybury system, and in one letter he describes it as a " well-organized humbug." We must mention that Sir Mortimer Durand has unearthed the germ of Lyall's well-known poem, " Theology in Extremis" (which many people think his best), in a contribution to the Haileybury Observer. Neither at Eton nor at Haileybury was Lyall popular. He was reserved, and did not suffer fools gladly, and it is probable that young men were alarmed by his habit of irony and estranged by his use of unusual words. He was intensely critical, and had such a supreme sense of the ridicu- lous that he was sometimes unable to conquer his laughter on the most inconvenient occasions. It is strange to reflect that this same youth was afterwards for a period of many years

one of the most sought-after and popular men in London society. The social world is happily wiser than callow youth.

London recognized the invariably illuminating quality of Lyall's talk, his wide reading, his penetrating knowledge of Indian religious cults and of folklore, and it rejoiced in his quick humour. Everyone was sensible of something being added to the atmosphere when Lyall entered a room full of people.

When Lyall arrived in India he instantly took a dislike to the Hindus and conceived a contempt for their religion. In a letter to his mother be recorded his feelings, and suggested that she might keep the letter to quote against him if he ever changed his mind. How much he changed we know ! Above all writers on India he became enthralled by the study of obscure native customs and religious cults. When Lord Morley of Blackburn was editing the Fortnightly he wrote to Lyall about his paper on " The Relations of Religion to Asiatic States," which appeared in the Fortnightly :— " The paper interests me, and will interest other people, extremely. It is quite in the vein of your other pieces, and is as successful as any of them in the strange luminousness with which it brings obscure and unintelligible phenomena of queer religions into visible order. You are the only living master of this gift, which is worth a million times more than any amount of abstract theory-spinning about the Three Stages, &c. Your sharp concluding sentence makes me long for the time when you shall think it seemly to say your say about the politics of Christianity. You must come to that business some day and I hope that I may be there to see. It goes without saying that I welcome your paper for the Fortnightly—thrice and four times welcome. It shall go in, of course whenever you please. The sooner the better, so far as I am concerned."

The success of " The Old Pindari " and other poems pub- lished by Lyall in India helped him to promotion over the heads of his seniors. Oddly enough, Lyall himself was the last man to be convinced that his poetry could have impressed those in authority, but fortunately his chiefs really had the dis- crimination to discern in the popular verses the thorough

observation and grasp of Indian habits and methods of thought. Later his appointment to the Indian Home Secre- taryship was traceable to his contributions to the Fortnightly. From his start as an assistant magistrate Lyall became successively the head of a district, the head of a division, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces. Sir Mortimer Durand does not pretend that when Lyall was a high official he was popular as such. Lyall once questioned Sir Mortimer Durand closely

as to the cause of his unpopularity.

"Lyall smiled and said: . . . But a Lieutenant-Governor is never popular. I am not popular.' He went on to put the point plainly. Tell me,' he said ; 'you need not be afraid of hurting my feelings. You must have heard what people say. Isn't it the case !' As a fact I had received, with great regret, some rather unfavourable answers to my remarks about him; and thinking that perhaps I could help him by telling him the exact truth, I answered : Well, as you ask me, I don't think that among Europeans you are popular.' Why is it? What do you think is the reason? I should like to know.' `They say you are suspicious, that you don't trust your men, and let them see that you don't trust them.' He seemed taken aback, and said: Suspicious? I am not suspicious really, but . . ..' Then he stopped and thought, and broke into one of his silent laugh's. Yes,' he said, they are qnite right. I am suspicious—damned suspicious.' I protested, as I had protested before when people had said so, for to me he had always been the most trusting and pleasant of chiefs; but he would not have it. He was particularly friendly, and thanked me for telling him the truth, which he said he would bear in mind. I went away that night rather unhappy, fearing I had hurt him, and perhaps seemed ungrateful ; but he never showed the smallest resentment, and throughout the rest of our visit was as cordial as a man could be. On this subject it may be as well to quote a passage from one of his letters. He says : 'F. H.'s remark about *my being " suspicious " is curious, because true, though I did not know I showed it in the way he mentions. I feel myself constantly suspecting that officers are shirking their work, and my eye is almost too quick in detecting little tricks played to mislead me in minor matters of business, but I didn't know I greeted people auspiciously when they bid me good day. However, it's good to know.'" If Lyall did not always seem to support his fellow officials with thoroughness, the defect was in Sir Mortimer Durand's judgment much more apparent than real. Lyall was in fact not a man of enthusiasms. When the measures of his co-workers were criticized he could not help feeling that there was something to be said for the critics. He never regarded any solution of a difficulty as sent from Heaven ; it was more natural to him to see round a question than to see through it. - What might have seemed to be fidelity to an official friend would have been in a sense unfaithfulness to his own mental habit.

At the age of fifty-three Lyall retired from India and spent the rest of his life—fully occupied, in spite of his native indolence, with the India Council and committee work in useful causes and literary work—in England and principally in London. We believe that his poems, rough in finish though some of them are, and faulty in music, will survive because they have the vital combination of force and truth. We will conclude by quoting a few appreciations of Lyall's literary work by men whose opinions are worth having. Leslie Stephen wrote of Lyall :— "' Eastern Studies' is, I think, the most interesting work of the kind I have ever read. . . When I came back from America last time I made a reputation on board by reciting one of his poems, ' Theology in Extremis,' at a sort of penny reading... . I have never been the object of so many attentions before or since, and gave my autograph to a dozen ladies."

Mr. James Bryce wrote to Lyall about his book, British Dominion in India:—

" Your 'British Dominion in India,' which I have now finished, has interested me extremely. Indeed, if you will allow me to say so, I do not remember to have come across a book which contains so concise an account of a mass of facts, so complicated as to breed confusion in most minds, connected and interpenetrated by so many weighty reflections. One would have to go outside our tongue or our time to find parallels. As you tell me it has not sold very widely, the cause of this would seem to lie in the merits that have struck me, the conciseness which strains the attention of an average languid or hasty reader (as most men are), and the reflections which give the book the character rather of a. philo- sophical study than of a narrative. You are almost austere in your exclusion of the juicy parts of history, and of the dilutions which the modern reader is accustomed to. You nowhere con- descend to his liking for picturesque descriptions of events, and very seldom even to the demand for the characterization of distinguished men. If you were re-writing the book it might perhaps appeal more to the ' general reader' if this severe restraint were relaxed, and you were to let yourself go here and there in descriptive passages. But as regards the serious student, you

give him, as it seems to me, exactly what he wants, and cannot (so far as I know) find in any other book about India."

The feature of this book is that it does not regard the British conquest as a series of casual events, but as an ordered, designed, and inevitable plan, of which the causes can be definitely stated and the logical development clearly traced. Of Lyall's book on Tennyson in the " English Men of Letters " series Lord Morley wrote :— " I have read the book with real delight. It is a true master- piece, and shows that only a poet can judge a poet with true inward feeling and effect. It is absolutely free from the defects that disfigure nine criticisms out of ten. It is just, it is respectful and appreciative, it is full of poetic and meditative charm of its own, it is suffused with a continuous and enchanting Tennysoniau atmosphere."