STUDENTS OF ASIA.

THE veil which has so long shrouded India, or rather its people, from their conquerors is getting torn at last. It is one of the many peculiarities of the British Empire in India that it has produced almost all kinds of ability except that of the illuminating writer. There have been many and excellent historians, but they have been, with the exception of Tod, Grant Duff, and Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone, rather in- structive than attractive writers, and have told their readers facts without ever bringing before their minds the people whose acts and sufferings they supposed themselves to be narrating. Even of the English in India the general impression is in- accurate, the atmosphere of steady and fruitful toil in which they live being, for instance, almost entirely imperceptible in any description of their lives ; and of the "natives," with their many-coloured characters, their strange and bizarre impulses, and their. often most picturesque careers, no description giving light has until quite recently ever appeared. It has long been perceived that such description, to be really Illuminating, must take the form of fiction; and Indian novels, " Tara " always excepted, have been so bad, so clumsy, or so strictly limited to the dominant caste that observers, in despair, have cried that until a native novelist arose the object, which is thaesome One should do for India, or a province of India, what Walter Scott did for Scotland, would never be attained. There would, that is, be no revealing book which men living under other skies and other conditions would feel at once to be full of previously unperceived truth. The present writer, who has, so far as he blows, read everything ever published in English about India, was certainly of that opinion, but he is inclined to retract it now. The 'true sacer rates, the man who will finally rend the veil and make the peoples of India intelligible to Englishmen, may not have appeared, but his forerunners certainly have, and have at least dis- abused the world of the error that the task cannot be performed by Europeans. Three novelists are at this moment widely read, each one of -whom pours -a flood of- light' upon Indian native society, so that the figures which compose it, previously scarcely seen, or Co seen as to create an utterly false impression, stand out as clearly as if they were Englishmen living under the conditions which sur- round them at home. First among them,•of course; is Mr. Rndyard 'Xipling, who has just issued in " Kim " a story which we greatly fear, though there are still years of time before him, he will never be able to surpass. " Kim is a wonderful book. It is, so to speak, choked with India, its figures are Indian, its incidents are Indian, its

atmosphere, with its bewildering overplus of light, its over- powering scents, scents, and its sharp, startling contrasts, is entirely Indian; yet from a dozen readers Whom we have cross.

examined, men and women who know nothing of India, we have always received the same answer; that they have been at once faicinated and enlightened. The reader is in an Indian bazaar all the time, with its congested life; and yet every figure is distinct, while one or two are painted so that once graspe I they live for ever in his imagination. We should

not ourselves hesitate to say that while Scott, who drew Cristal Nixon, might have painted Mahbub Ali, the brutal horse-dealer, spy, potential murderer, and vulgar debauchee, 'et kind with a kindness, shrewd with a shrewdness, daring with a daring beyond those of lilurope, even 'the mighty master could not have drawn the Lama. The soul of the saintly searcher after light, and after a non-existent river, super: Stitious yet above superstition, utterly feeble yet impossible te stop, a wandering beggar ignorant as a fish yet with the heart, and in some limited degree the brain, of a St. Paul, would have been as much beyond Scott's range Of insight as would have been his true position among his countrymen. No lefty character so absolutely Asiatic has ever been drawn-40? Morier, who drew almost as well, drew without sympathy labia heart—yet the Lama is known to be true by English devourers of novels, who as they read of him feel all their ideas of Aiiaties enlarged and made kindlier, they kilo* not why. We are not about to write a second review of "Kim," but only to say that Mr. Rudyard Kipling has torn a bit out ef the veil, and that for him who looks through there ie regards what he sees no further bewilderment or sense of haze.

Mr. Hugh Clifford has done nearly as good work, though on &smaller scale. Heaven has not gifted him With genius like

Mr. Kipling's, which can in twenty lines make of a stranger a familiar friend ; but his lifelong residence. in 'the, Malak Peninsula, his power of keen observation, and his deen sympathy with the people have 'brought him. an almost equal revealing power. No one who reads-his four or five books of stories, all except one absorbing to the reader, and all, it is clear, founded on actual experiences, will ever again think that be

cannot understand Malays, or the rich tropical forest, "dense as a hedge," in the valleys of which they dwell; or will ever again lose interest in one of the strangest races of

Asia, 'which almost alone among Asiatics -has delighted in maritime adventure, which once conquered Madagascar, and

probably mach of Polynesia, which even now in the islands of the Archipelago furnishes the fiercest and most bloodthirsty of pirates, yet which at- home in Malaya is for the most part quiet, depressed, and even timid, and only occaisiOnally in Spasmodic bursts ' of rage resists the most. outrageous oppression. Mr: Clifford has lived with them almost as one of themselves, has

defended them, has- punished them; and paints them;- with their treachery and their fidelity, their patient endurance

and their incapacity of discipline, their courage and their cowardice, with the loving care which Scott bestowed on the LoWlandeis ; and se successfully that the reader understands; or rather feels, even the softer side of 'a people who it is

customary in Europe to suppose have none. He has -even absorbed sonic of their prejudices; and we know nothing more singular than his account Of the Chinese immigrants; whom the Malays regard, and treat, as beasts of-the field, and whom

Mr. Clifford regards as—well, human beings after all, entitled to "the white man's justice," but perhaps not quite deserting it. He makes the religion and the irreligion of the people he loves and pities, their virtues and their vices, the peejudices which have eaten into their brains, and their receptiveness on certain points, equally clear, and the result is that we know the Malay of the Peninsula•as we know any one of the peoples of Europe that has attracted us. That is not much? Nay, to know one Asiatic people as Mr. Clifford knows the Western Malays is to begin to understand Asia, to bridge over, et-least at one thin' point, the broad and deep Chasm 'of habits, thoughts, feelings, and aspirations which divides the West from the East. We know nothing of Mr. Hugh Clifford, not

even his career, except from his books, and them we have read

but recently, and by a sort of accident, but we feel impelled to add that we have rarely opened volumes which have left an equal impression of goodness and competence in their writer. He can fight, rule, punish, and pardon, and all to the benefit of those he tries to guide. If there are many like him in the service of the Colonial Office, they their Eastern agents, who somehow, escape to an unintelligible degree all European observation, as the India Office is ef its better-seen civilians. may he as proud of

We cannot quite class Mrs. Steel, or Mr. Joseph Colima, • who belongs to the group, though he writes of *the Malays of the Far East, with Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Hugh Clifford, as possessed to the fullest degree of the reveal- ing power. For the genius of the latter, and .espetiallY for his power of description, .*e have the highest adreire!; tion. ' He has the power. of penetrating into the ve.r) pal of a place, till scenes as strangely, foreign as those of the Archipelago are as visible as those of Surrey, of this is a very rare quality among those who write of Southern Asia—Trelawny possessed it, though in a less marvel- lous degree—but when it comes to men Mr. Conrad always seems to us to read into them something that comes from his own nature and brain. They think more deeply than typical Asiatics do, are stronger, simpler, less complex men and women. His characters may be, we doubt not are, true to the figures he has in his mind; but they are less typical, and produce less of the impression, as we read, that we are learn- ing to know a people. Mi.. Conrad, as the Blackwoods with their publisher insight quickly detected, is a much greater man as a litterateur than the world has as yet realised, but he does not tear down so large a bit of the veil as the writers with whom, nevertheless, we are comparing him, nor does Mrs. Steel. That lady's power of observation, strengthened by years of close experience, is most remarkable, and she often gives us sketches of interior native life which produce the impression of second-rate photographs; but she lacks sym- pathy, and her colours, which should be soft, have something metallic about them. She is often satiric, especially in her account of Eurasians, whom from the outside she describes with the most mordant of pens; and to the satirical and the hard the true life of Asia must remain in part sealed up. If we were to say exactly what we think, without the neces- sary qualifications, we should say that she saw through the weaknesses of Asiatics, but did not quite estimate their strengths. Still, she interests all who read of her characters, and we must include her among those who dissipate the prevalent belief that a revelation of Asiatic life will never be written by a European. The veil, it is clear, is of a substance which, though dense, can be pierced by those who possess the necessary eyes.