SIR ALFRED LYALL.
THE man of letters in action is a permanently engaging character. The scholar-soldier, or the scholar-gipsy (for a gipsy worthy of the name and of Borrow, is a, man of action) affords the contrast in its pithiest form. Wolfe was not a scholar, to be sure, but be had the cravings of a scholar, and even in his case every reader likes best to remember that he quoted Gray's Elegy on his way to storm Quebec, and that some lines from Pope's Iliad were found in his pocket after death. Such contrasts usually come of personality working out its own fate; but occasionally a born scholar is driven by circum- stances into the field of action. Such a man was Sir Alfred Lyall. If he had been left to his own devices in England he would undoubtedly have been a man of letters only. As it happened, his school-boy triumphs in examinations im- pelled him to a means of livelihood in which the best appointments were the rewards of examination. From Eton he went to the old East India Company's College at Haileybury, and at an early age he was received into the administrative system of India. In that he remained work- ing laboriously at the task of governing till he retired with a greater knowledge of India than has been attained perhaps by any other man of our day. Yet all the time he was at heart a man of letters, a man of thought, who reckoned up the forces he was dealing with not in the handy phrases of a bureaucrat, but in the speculative terms of a philosopher. Of course the routine of governing must be done in the main by men who carefully and obediently follow the traditions of the system to which they belong, and symbolise their obedience by a ready and faithful acceptance of the principles, and perhaps the very words, which have been handed down to them. But there is room for the rarer figure of a Lyall who, while he works loyally with the machine, stands mentally a little apart from it, and exerts on it the influence of a pene- trating and detached mind. It is a fine justification of the system which rules India that Lyall should not only have been able to do his Indian service without any collision with formalism, but should have earned the highest honours the Civil Service had to offer. He was a dreamer and a poet, but he never rode his Pegasus up into that rarefied atmosphere where he became useless for mundane affairs.
Lyall went to India in 1856, and was near the heart of the Mutiny when it broke out in the following year. Driven from his district by the rebels, he joined the volunteer cavalry at Meerut, and fought in many skirmishes throughout the Mutiny. In 1878 he became Foreign Secretary, and held the office for four years. He recommended an understanding with Russia as the only possible method of settling the Afghan problem, and this was a very good example of his prescience and independent thinking. Till that time most people had regarded the continuance of the Russian menace as somehow a necessary part of the great burden of our anxieties in India. Lord Ripon, we have beard it said, remarked that Lyall used to see not only two sides of aquestion, but all the sides. The man who sees all round a question is, as we know, often paralysed as an administrator. Every possible course presents itself to his mind in turn as the best ; he has not the great administra- tive knack of coming to quick, confident decisions. Lyall was never paralysed, but his temperament unquestionably prevented him from being a remarkable administrator. As Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh he felt the way, however, towards such schemes of provincial autonomy as could only have been nurtured in the brain of one who appreciated perfectly the weakness and strength of native India. In 1888 he became a Member of the India Council and spent the rest of his life in England. But, in the meantime, his reputation had been established on solid foundations as a political philosopher of unmistakable originality and power. The chapters of his well-known book, 0 Asiatic Studies," had been published separately before and while he held the post of Foreign Secretary. This book displayed an unprecedented mastery of Indian laws, religions, and customs, and was a practical appeal for a closer study of native life. He found Hinduism to be an active and continually developing force which had something infinitely greater than an academic ntere st for students. It was to him a field of research, in
which he could trace the growth and filiation of the ideas that lie at the root of natural religion. His appealfor a more serious effort at understanding Indians might be compared with that of Matthew Arnold's younger brother in the fifties. It was sometimes said of Lyall that he took more pleasure in the company of Indians than in that of his countrymen. His " Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India" is a noble philosophical argument, proving that the British conquest of India was a rational and inherently justifiable un- dertaking, and the continuance of British rule a demonstrable necessity.
Lyall was sometimes called a pessimist. He was not that; his philosophical and historical works answer for him to the contrary. But a tinge of mysticism and a widely speculative habit of mind often took the form of a light and agreeable melancholy. One sees it over and over again in his verses telling of Indian experiences ; it is the man of letters speaking through the man of action. "The Old Pindari," the "Medi- tations of a Hindu Prince," "The Land of Regrets," among Lyall's poems are all household words with the intelligent observer of India. Let us quote from the verses called "Theology in Extremis,"which are among the roughest specimens of Ly a ll's art, and yet are exceptionally moving. Lyall understood his countrymen even as he understood Indians. He pictures the scene when certam captured Englishmen and women in the Mutiny were offered their lives if they would repeat the brief formula accepting the Mohammedan faith. Only one half- caste saved his life in that way. Lyall imagines a young Englishman soliloquising with himself as he takes the decision
to die, not because he has any particular religious convictions, but because he is proud and is sensible of the companionship of those to whom their faith is much —•
"Ay, but the word, if I could have said it, I by no terrors of hell perplext ; Hard to be silent and have no credit From man in this world, or reward in the next; None to bear witness and reckon the cost Of the man that is saved by the life that is lost.
I must be gone to the crowd untold Of men by the cause which they served unknown, Who moulder in myriad graves of old ;
Never a story and never a stone Tells of the martyrs who died like me, Just for the pride of the old countree.
One is reminded of that wonderful apostrophe to death with which another man of letters who was a splendid man of
action—Sir Walter Ralegh—ended his " History of the World."
" 0 eloquent, just, and mighty Death ! Whom none could advise thou bast persuaded ; what none bath dared thou East done ; and whom all the world hath flattered thou only East cast out of the world and despised ; thou Nast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of men, and covered it all over with thase two narrow
words—Hic Jacet."
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