MR. STEEVENS'S INDIAN IMPRESSIONS.
MR. G. W. STEEPENS, who wrote "With Kitchener to Khartum," has accompanied Lord Curzon to India as special correspondent for the Daily Mall, and we have waited with great interest for his letters. He has a singular power which is not, that we know of, possessed in the same degree by any living writer, that of so photographing a scene in words that the reader sees with his eyes, and receives impressions as clear-cut and definite as if he had himself been present. If be describes a pond you see not only every piece of duckweed floating in it—that is nothing, several writers can do that—but the precise extent to which that duckweed affects the sheen of the water, and your unconscious estimate of its limpidity or foulness. It is a very curious literary gift, because it seems to he independent not only of the writer's intellect, but of his sympathies. We have not an idea after reading hundreds of pages of his writing whether Mr. Steevens is an intellectual man or not, and have gathered an impression, which perhaps we ought not to record about a man of whom we know nothing but his work, that he positively dislikes the East, which he can paint as if he loved it. He has certainly no feeling whatever for its past, regarding the antiquities of Egypt, for instance, as unpleasing lumber, and we are greatly mistaken if the specialty of Asia, the absolute and inextricable mixture of savagery and civilisation on the same spots, and even in the same men, does not positively revolt him. He would like to whip all those picturesque figures into the tame decency of the Strand, to compel everybody to wear trousers, to terminate all those marvellous contrasts of appearance, hearing, and conduct, and say to all' Be English, or be French, or be German,' but he at all events E nropean and respect the becoming. A great caricaturist, Signor Pellegrini, once confessed to us, however, that the secret of his wonderful power of drawing eminent English. men was his incurable inner dislike of them, and this may be as regards Asia the root in Mr. Steevens of the admirable faculty which nevertheless is there. He has not been a week in India, and has sent home, we think, only six letters, and already it is patent to every Anglo-Indian that an artist is at work who will recreate for them the scenes to which, though perhaps they hardly saw them at the time, and have lived for years since in the podded monotony of European life, they recur with a tireless interest and pleasure which is the secret of the British estimate of them as bores with exag- gerated reputations. The perception of the fact will give them pleasure, for careless as most of them seem about English ideas as to "their" Empire—we never met an Anglo- Indian yet without this sense of separate and peculiar pos- session—they feel very keenly the depth of English ignorance, and lament the absence hitherto of any revealing pen. We have been predominant in India for a hundred and forty-two years, dating, as the Indians date, from Plassey, we have conquered the Continent, have reduced it to order, have super- seded its laws by our Codes, have remodelled its taxation, have altered all the conditions of its intercommunication, superseding the ox-cart and the runner by the telegraph and the railway, and have modified, perhaps to an unsuspected extent, its intellectual ideals, but we have never yet produced a book about it which the Englishman can read and think that he realises India as he realises Russia, or even in some cases —we have met many—as he realises China. There are books of course by the score, but they are mostly dull and all snippety, giving sketches of little bits of a panorama which is not only endless, but changes with every hundred miles. Travel in the Near East gives no help, nor travel in Algiers, nor, strange to say, as Mr. Steevens has already perceived, • travel in Egypt. The " secluded continent " remains absolutely separate, with its congeries of barbarisms and civilisations so unspeakably different, and yet somehow all bound to one another by some spiritual relation, which we can describe if we like as " the comity of India," and when we have so described it understand as little as before. There are great books on its architecture, splendid books on its flora, elephantine books on its ethnology, learned books and thoughtful books—chiefly in German—on its philosophies, and of course infinite booklets, mostly unreadable, on its recent history ; but the book which will bring even the external features of Indian life home to us here in London,
as, for example, the external aspects of life in Mexico have been brought home, does not exist.
Perhaps even Mr. Steevens, with his wonderful perception of all that his eyes see, will not succeed, for he has, we see, caught the impression which comes by degrees to all the more thoughtful Anglo-Indians, that of bewilderment, though he does not yet feel its usual consequence,—a hopelessness leading first to indifference, and then to a positive refusal to see, a deliberate and permanent closing of the eyes of the mind, which is the note of a large section of the Anglo- Indian world. The continent is so vast, the differences of races, creeds, and degrees of civilisation so amazing, the welter of languages so confusing, the spaces so unusual— great spaces being usually empty, while these are often ant- hills—the cities so utterly unlike each other—Calcutta is about as like Benares as Kew is like Nuremberg, while between Benares and Delhi there is less resemblance than between Rome and Milan—that the power of sight and the power of thinking are alike overtaxed, and avenge themselves by striking in the strangest and most complete way. If that bewilderment comes to Mr. Steevens he will simply come home— to the wrath of the Daily Mail—and declare that the task set him is impossible ; that no human mind can correlate in any kind of order scenes so various; or comprehend, much less explain, how one and the same people, working with the same loom, has produced Jeypore and Calcutta, damascened satin and thin muslin; or show a connection between the white- robed myriads of Bengal, with their placid calm, their tireless industry, their capacity for any intellectual work, and their inability to build—native Calcutta is a mat and pole village the size of East London—with the fierce restlessness of the many-hued population of the North, with its energy, its admiration for courage, and its power of erecting buildings before which English architects like Fergusson stand lost in admiration and despair. His per- plexity will only be increased by residence, for he will find that the hundred contrasts he sees extend to intellectual life ; will discover astronomers who can predict eclipses yet believe that they are caused by a dog which swallows the moon; will meet serene men, sometimes talking the purest of softened English, who are convinced that they have passed through many lives ; and above all, will discover that the word "savages," by which he describes the labouring class, is of all words the most inaccurate. They are while working savages in dress, and have often little more knowledge ; but these bare-limbed workers obey rigid laws of their own, are less capable of violent crime than our own dock-labourers, and hold without exception certain ideas which are those of a profound though erroneous philosophy. If profound obedience to unwritten law, a power of measureless self-sacrifice for the good of their souls, absolute temperance, and steady industry so long as wages are paid are marks of savagery, the coolies of India are savages, but not otherwise. We will, however, hope better things; that Mr. Steevens will treat each scene he sees as a drama by itself, that he will not allow himself to be carried in Lord Curzon's train; that, above all, when he has seen Calcutta he will be tempted to go eastward for a month instead of northward, and describe one or two of the ten thousand Bengalee villages on whose never-ceasing in- dustry the Empire really rests. Without the sixty million white-robed toilers of Bengal India would be the nightmare of financiers ; yet they have never been described by a vivifying pen, possibly never will be until, after some great war, the road which must connect Calcutta—" where you can buy tigers' teeth "—with a British Indo-China is found to pass for hundreds of miles through the Bengal interior. Mr. Steevens has only to look out from Dacca and say what he sees, and he will not only produce a fascinating picture, but perform one of the most important of political services. Bengal Proper, the mainstay of the Indian Empire, is its least known province.
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