THE ORIENTA_LISED IMAGINATION.

SIR ALFRED LYALL'S " Verses Written in India "* will be read with the liveliest enjoyment and admiration by a great number of his fellow-countrymen, less on account of their poetical form,—which is good, though not supremely good,—than on account of the keen vision they embody into the general effect produced by our great Oriental dependency on the' imagination of a man of large powers and of a broadly contemplative nature. From first to last, the stamp of the East is upon these verses, and the only pieces which are not stamped with that stamp,—the translation from the German, one of the adaptations from Horace, and "Amon in Extremis," —miss the effect of originality too. Indeed, the attempt to express the rustic deserter's passion, and impatience with his spiritual adviser, is curiously ineffective. The real merit of these verses is the singularly strong impres- sion they give us not merely or mainly of the Indian soldier's life, and of the scenery which leaves its im- print on his brain, but of the effect produced by the spectacle of India, as well as by the spectacle of our work in India, and of the profound contempt with which the true Oriental mind regards it, on a man of high speculative power and not very deep or tenacious moral beliefs. There is nothing like the daily spectacle of a great world with which one has no intimate sympathy and no close affinity, rushing on its way, year after year, before one's eyes, and eyeing us with a singular mixture of external respect and interior scorn, for implanting and deepening that sense of the illusory nature of all earthly aims and the futile issue of all earthly energies, with which Sir Alfred Lyall's volume is saturated from the first page to the last. It is not merely that the vision of a world towards which he seems to discharge so external a function, —rather the function of a disinterested mitigating agency, a guardian angel of very limited powers, than the function of an actor in its dramas,—tends to deepen that con- ception of fateful and inexorable sequence which every mighty array of energies over which we have no control tends to produce upon us, but still more that the glimpse which such a man as Sir Alfred Lyall obtains of the utterly superficial character of the English influence in India, and of the wonder and aversion with which our efforts are on the whole viewed, compels him to regard himself and

• llega.n Paul and Co.

his -countrymen in the light in which most of the natives of India regard them, as emissaries from an alien sphere, whom a singular freak of destiny has compelled to descend, almost like aerolites, upon it, producing some explosive thunder and a great disturbance of the atmosphere and quaking of the soil, but with as little evidence of free choice on their own part, and as much appearance of being storm-driven, as characterised the plundering hordes of Mahrattas who used to descend upon the richest provinces of India before oar rule began. A great thinker has said that when once men really begin to look at themselves from the outside, as external phenomena, they lose the sense of free agency and begin to believe that all their actions are inexorably determined by the long line of antecedent causes, just as they regard the motion of the earth and the changes of the tides as inexorably determined by the physical forces therein embodied. If this be true, as we think it is, it is not hard to understand why men like Sir Alfred Lyall, with lively imaginations, who have closely watched the impressions produced by the English rulers of India on the people,—the shallowness of the moral impression produced,—the despondent resignation with which the natives of India have recognised our superior force,—the speculative scorn with which they have regarded our pride in conquest and in the organisation of government,--should look even at themselves, as Mr. Kinglake says that the Oriental races look upon us, as "curious, unaccountable, uncomfortable works of God, which may have been sent for some good pur- pose, to be revealed hereafter." However, our agnostic poet would hardly have added the latter clause, though he would not go quite so. far in the confidence of his negations as to declare the dubious surmise as to "some good, purpose" to be hereafter revealed, strictly impossible. Take, for instance, this vivid and cynical little poem on " The Land of Regrets." First the poet speculates on the motives that lead the Anglo- Indian to India in precisely the same mood in which, no doubt, he has discerned that the acuter natives speculate, putting " piety " on the same level as a motive with " dullness " and " debts," in other words, treating it as involving not an atom more real freedom of choice and action : then he describes the oppressive effect on the mind produced by Eastern magnificence and superstition, the vain worships, the reckless processions, the myriad echoes of meaningless cries, that go up from that toiling and suffering land ; then he glances at the long history of war and conquest, and the teeming philosophies of illusion which have characterised the Indian past ; and finally he comes back to the glamour which the story of these things produced on the English imagination, and to the disappointment which must follow the man who yields to it, and sums up the whole life of the Anglo-Indian as a blunder in his last verse :— "THE LAND OF REGRETS.

(' Yea, they thought scorn of that pleasant land.'—Psalms.) What far-reaching Nemesis steered him From his home by the cool of the sea ?

When he left the fair country that reared him, When he left her, his mother, for thee, That restless, disconsolate worker Who strains now in vain at thy nets, 0 sultry and sombre Noverca!

O Land of Regrets !

What lured him to life in the tropic ? Did he venture for fame or for pelf ?

Did he seek a career philanthropic ?

Or simply to better himself ? Bat whate'er the temptation that brought him, Whether piety, dulness, or debts, He is thine for a price, thou hest bought him, O Land of Regrets !

He did list to the voice of a siren, He was caught by the clinking of gold, And the slow toil of Europe seemed tiring, And the grey of his fatherland cold ; He must haste to the gardens of Circe ;

What ails him, the slave, that he frets In thy service ? 0 Lady sans merci

O Land of Regrets !

From the East came the breath of its odours And its heat melted soft in the haze, While he dimly descried thy pagodas, O Cybele, ancient of days ; Heard the hum of thy mystic processions, The echo of myriads who cry, And the wail of their vain intercessions, Through the bare empty vault of the sky.

Did he read of the lore of thy sages ?

Of thy worship by mountain and flood ? Did he muse o'er thy annals ? the pages

All blotted with treason and blood ; Thy chiefs and thy dynasties reckon ?

Thy armies—he saw them come forth O'er the wide stony wolds of the Dekhan, O'er the cities and plains of the North.

He was touched with the tales of our glory,

He was stirred by the clash and the jar Of the nations who kill con amore,

The fury of races at war; 'Mid the crumbling of royalties rotting Each cursed by a knave or a fool, Where kings and fanatics are plotting He dreamt of a power and a rule ; Hath he come now, in season, to know thee ; Hath he seen, what a stranger forgets, All the graveyards of exiles below thee, o Land of Regrets ?

Has he learnt how thy honours are rated?

Has he cast his accounts in thy school? With the sweets of authority sated, Would he give up his throne to be cool, Doth he curse Oriental romancing, And wish he had toiled all his day, At the Bar, or the Banks, or financing, And got damned in a common-place way ?

Thou hast tracked him with duns and diseases, And he lies, as thy scorching winds blow, Recollecting old England's sea breezes, On his back in a lone bungalow ;

At the slow coming darkness repining—

How he girds at the sun till it sets, As he marks the long shadows declining O'er the Land of Regrets.

Let him cry, as thy blue devils seize him, O step-mother, careless as Fate, He may strive from thy bonds to release him, Thou hast passed him his sentence—Too Late ; He has found what a blunder his youth is, His prime what a struggle, and yet Has to learn of old age what the truth is In the Land of Regret."

That is a poem which, we venture to say, will become historical as a summary of the more cynical view of Anglo-Indian enterprise and effort in " The Land of Regrets." And what that poem gives in little, the whole volume expands. Here, for instance, in the striking little poem which opens the book, Sir Alfred Lyall gives ns the genuine Mahommedan's view of the results of our rule in India. We select the last three verses :- "Tell me, ye men of Islam, who are rotting in shameful ease, Who wrangle before the Feringhee for a poor man's last rupees, Are ye better than were your fathers, who plundered with old

Cheetoo,

And who fleeced the greedy traders, as the traders now fleece you?

Yes, and here's one of them coming, my father gave him a bill ; I have paid the man twice over, and here I'm paying him still ; He shows me a long stamp-paper, and must have my land, must he ?

If I were twenty year younger he'd get six feet by three.

And if I were forty years younger, with my life before me to choose,

I wouldn't be lectured by Kars, or bullied by fat Hindoos ; But I'd go to some far-off country where Musalmiins still are men, Or take to the jungle, like Cheetoo, and die in the tiger's den."

Then in the most remarkable of these poems,—the most remarkable, at least, viewed from the English side of the picture,—he paints the reverie of an Anglo-Indian in the Mutiny, who is going to die because he will not profess his belief in Mahommed, although he is a thorough agnostic, and has no Christian faith to make fidelity to any higher religion either a duty or a ground of eternal hope,—

"Leaving my life in its full noonday,

And no one to know why I flung it away."

Then come brief, vivid pictures of the sultry, monotonous, ex- ternal life in India ; then a sketch of Rajpoot rebels' detestation of the dull English regime, as keen and clear as that of the Mahommedan brigand with which the book opened. Then come the meditations of a Hindoo Prince, penetrated, of course, by the philosophy, or rather the despair of philosophy, contained in the creed that all is illusion ; then we have a living portrait of a Rajpoot chief's conception of life and war and pleasure ; then, again, little etchings of Indian life, with the picture of English sports thus watched by a Mahom- medan "Near me a MusaimAu, civil and mild, Watched as the shuttlecocks rose and fell, And he said, as he counted his beads and smiled, God smite their souls to the depths of hell."

Then we have a disagreeable tale of the Mutiny, relating an

English wife's unfaithfulness and her husband's murder, in the fiercest moment of the struggle ; then some admirable glimpses of Afghan troubles, and Abdur Rahman's soliloquy upon them ; then a Mahommedan fanatic's scornful sermon to the feeble Mahommedans of Lower Bengal ; then one or two readings of Jewish history, and of the feelings of the Roman rulers of Judam ; and then more pictures of the message of the West to the East,—a very dreary message of civil order and material prosperity,—and of the East to the West, a very scornful repudiation of all interest in that prosperity. Finally, in a poem on " Siva," which precedes " The Land of Regrets" already given, Sir Alfred Lyall sums up the lower Hindoo creed, the belief in the sensuous transformation of life into death and death into life, of love into cruelty and cruelty into love, of pleasure into pain and pain into pleasure,—in a word (as the god Siva is supposed to put it), of the vital thrill which passes through minds and bodies,—now in the form of agony, and now again in that of ecstasy,—as

" the play of power that stirs In the dance of my wanton worshippers."

And finally Siva goes on to declare that all higher worships are dreams of the human heart :-

" Though the world repent of its cruel youth,

And in age grow soft, and its hard law bend, Ye may spare or slaughter ; by rage or ruth All forms speed on to the far still end ; For the gods who have mercy, who save or bless, Are the visions of man in his hopelessness."

We do not, of course, intend in any way to suggest that the poet personally adopts the dramatically expressed doctrine here expounded for us ; but the poetry of this striking little volume

is certainly more or less deeply overshadowed by the fear that so it may be. It looks as if the immense scale on which the spectacle had been presented to him of what seem almost like spectral hosts of human beings flitting across the stage from birth to death without one clearly-discerned gleam of moral life properly so called, had so possessed the poet's imagination as to render it impossible for him to find in his own consciousness of duty and freedom any true key to the enigma of human existence.

He is fascinated and almost magnetised into the conviction that we are all of ns such spectres as these, and such spectres only; that our so-called freedom and conscience are, as the Hindoo philosophy loves to teach, mere illusions ; that our pieties are no better than our desires and ambitions, perhaps only transformed desires or ambitions; that our English idea of " beneficent " rule in India is only the triumph of one sort of materialistic illusion over another, and another perhaps no worse than itself, or possibly even less ignoble; that in giving India civil order and peace and trade, we are but substituting an ideal of life which does not really touch the hearts of the

natives for one which does, though the latter may involve more bloodshedding and more suffering ; and, in a word, that the Englishman, in spite of his loyalty to English ideas of life and honour, is a strange excrescence in India, and makes no really

useful impression on the country of which he regulates the superficial order. Often it is useful and wholesome to see our- selves as others see us ; but it is never useful and wholesome unless we can combine with it the art of seeing others as we see ourselves, and so rectifying that false philosophy of illusion which springs from regarding the world as a pageant to which we have no clue, and including ourselves as a part of that pageant, even though to ourselves, taken alone, we could certainly find a clue. The truth is, that though the external view of life and history is almost essential for the purpose of taking any comprehensive intellectual view of the effects of human action and energy, it is as incapable of telling us anything in relation to the origin and character of that energy, as a sweeping glance at a prairie would be incapable of telling us how a blade of grass grows, and what is the nourishment which feeds it. Historical surveys give no real insight into the individual life of man. It is the microscopic, not the telescopic view of things, which reveals the secret of growth. It is the subjective and not the objective view of human motive and action which reveals the secret of human deterioration or improvement.

To study in such a field as that of India what man can do for himself and for his fellows, is like sweeping the heavens with a telescope to discover the genesis of a world. Such a survey as Sir Alfred Lyall gives us in his poems is sure to end in a plaintive " Vanity of Vanities." He should have corrected this brilliant but misleading glance over a bewildering field of human toil and penury and luxury by a study of individual

effort and purpose, wherever he could get a glimpse of it, and 'then he could not have spread before us so dismaying a picture of human lives driven like leaves before the wind. After all, the interior view of human action, though contracted, does shed light on the genesis of society and on the character and -tendency of social changes. The exterior view, though it be dazzling and in the highest degree impressive, sheds no light on the propagation of that multitude of individual germs out of which society grows.