By the Banyans of Bengal
An Indian Day. By Edward Thompson. (Knopf. 7s. 6f1.) EVERY book that conveys a sincere impression of the startling contrasts and mysterious splendours of India, and of Hu! dangerous issues proceeding from its various reactions to an alien governance, has a special claim to the attention, for, to be effective at all, it must possess peculiar qualities of tact and liberality of opinion. An Indian Day, by virtue of these qualities, should bring home to any unprejudiced mind both the immense difficulty of unravelling the enigma of that great dominion, and the extraordinary fascination of the enigma itself.
It seems unfair of the publisher to describe this novel as a " counterblast " to E. M. Forster's Passage to Lydia. The epithet is too gross to be applied to Mr. Thompson's tolerant, well-mannered book ; and nothing in its presentation seems very diametrically opposed to the matter of the more famous novel. Besides, the name of K M. Forster suggests an artistic eminence to which An Indian Day hardly aspires. Yet the narrative has a graceful competence ; and, when it lead through forest solitudes and lingers among ruined palaces, it glows and kindles into passages of real beauty. The love-story of Vincent Hamar, the judge who is exiled to Vishnugram, an outlying station in the jungle, because he has given a decision in favour of some natives again4 some Englishmen, from sheer sense of justice, not because of any imaginative sympathy, ostensibly is the main theme of the book but it is only faintly imagined. Ilainafs adoration is of so simple a kind that it seems to belong to an outworn convention ; and ..Hilda Mannering is unrealized. The author, when he remembers her, spends some eloquent passages on her spirited and beautiful bearing. But even . when he sends her racing swiftly across the mournful gleaming background of the Place of the Great Faithfulness, her figure appears too slight to cope with the tradition of :the queens who rode to sati, not without their dark flame of ecstasy.
Several other figures seem to claini the leading role, then relapse uncertainly. Alden, an unusual Missionary whose amiable weakness it is to give way to unseemly mirth at solemn meetings, is an attractive person. Neogyi, the collector of the district, an honourable Indian who tries to act according to the toile of the British Raj, and is not supported by that Raj, promises to become a sympathetic study ; but is also left half-sketched. PerhapS the story of the soul of Findlay, the isolated missionary, whose really enraptured religion merges into the pantheism of India, should have been the real motive of the book.
But there is a store of richly and deeply felt impressions in these pages. It may be that the mind of the author is more candid than subtle ; but, if he has won his particular India by earnest attention rather than by original grace, his descriptions have a curious quality of honesty in them. We say that he has really experienced all this—seen these excessive trees lanterned and mooned with crimson, these dizzying white-flowered mahuas linked with purple orchids, been drowned in the waves of sweetness from mango-groves, and heard the shrilling kokils make mad mirth in the rushing Indian dawn, till all this amazement of beauty; overpitched for unaccustomed English senses, has taken on true values for a patiently. adjusted and delicately attuned contempla- tion. The terrors of famine, aridity, plague —the Dance Of • the Destroyer—he also does not omit.
Many types meet and part during this Indian Day, nearly all of them tolerantly treated, except such as Deogheria, the fraudulent, hypocritical oppressor, beloved by English officialdom. The great moment of the book comes when Neogyi and Findlay sit with the Sadhu under the sacred banyan-tree. Findlay and the Sadhu at least both make their mystic peace with India ; and some kind of spiritual solution for the inextricable knot of her destiny seems vaguely indicated. In the last chapter it is something of an anti- climax to realise that Hamar and Hilda still exist. As a nova An Indian Day has distinct defects ; as a picture of life in India it is provocative of serious thought.
RACIIAEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
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