A WANDERER IN THE EAST.*
THIS is a book of travel of real novelty as well as of genuine attraction. Mrs. Miln, the authoress, is a travelling actress, as her title purports, and visited Japan and China, Barmah and India, on a stroller's tour with her husband. So little of the footlights is there about it that it reads like the record of a delightful journey for pleasure and for information, with some acting and reciting thrown in at intervals by way of diversion. But if she is half as entertaining as an actress as she is as a narrator, we should have well liked to be amongst her audience when she recited Shakespeare and Tom Taylor to bewildered handfuls of Orientals, threw herself heartily into Robertsonian comedy, with a son of M.acready's as her soldier-lover, or " doubled " two impos- sible parts with the assistance of a stolid but admiring Ayah, who thought she was performing conjuring tricks. Very amusingly, too, does she play and describe the part of the cajoling wife to the husband and fellow-actor, whose pride and close attachment are pleasantly brought out throughout the book. The way in which he wanted to com- bine his resolution never to act Claude Melnotte under any Circumstances, with his equally strong resolve not to allow his wife to play Pauline to the Claude of any other man, and had to set against that the lady's equally firm resolve to appear as Pauline somehow, is described in a manner amusingly charac- teristic of the authoress. Needless to say that the lady finally succeeded, not only in appearing as Pauline, and investing the husband with the garments of Claude, but in making the recalcitrant lord and master buy her new frocks for the occasion. The lady must, indeed, be so pleasant a personage, that we quite regret that amongst the many photographs of Burmese and Chinese physiognomies which adorn her pages, she has been too modest to make a place for one of herself. It would have been appropriate to the book, and none the less so if it had been set forth with the husband and babies about whom she discourses so agreeably. But she has her say about everything, pronouncing soldiers to be the best housekeepers she has known, and the beat cook she ever met to have been a poet. She boldly informs her sex that they had better look after the laurels they are supposed to have, than hunt after new ones. And when she speaks in admiration of the sanctity of Burmese marriage, and introduces a tirade against English matrimony generally, we feel that she is rather taking a leaf out of the old comedies than presenting us with real sentiments of her own. The origin of the stage. 'view of marriage is, we imagine, rather more a matter of " situation " than anything else. So when Mrs. Miln informs us how she loved to sit still and look on at the packing, on the ground that she never will do anything that other people can do for her, we doubt much if her pages and her experiences sufficiently bear out the charge. Her spirit of fun is at times ! 'When We were afro/Zing Players in the Bast. By Louise Sordan 'With Illustrations. London: Osgood, MoLlve.ino, and Oo. 1894. fairly mutinous and infectious as such fun must be; and when, without prelude, she describes how she and her stage-manager had to fix up "the balcony" for a recitation, the parenthesis of "need I say what scene from Shakespeare we are going to enact ? " is as perfect an " aside" in its way as any she can have had to utter. And she has the actor's gift of working up her chapters dramatically. The East was her dream from the first, when she planned to see it with her father, till the day when with her husband she realised her dream, and seldom have the bright colourings of Art and Nature which amongst our sad-hued skies and sodden fields we associate with the region, found a more curious or a more sympathetic inter- preter. She goes so far as to express something like contempt for those who can afford to treat themselves to the East and fail to do it, though she will not emulate some of her sisters who take similar views of Norway to the extent of main- taining that everybody ought to go there whether they can afford it or not.
So varied and pleasant is the lady's guidance, that we find it difficult to select from the places into which she conducts us. But she has her say upon all questions, and it is worth listening to, free from the dogmatism which characterises so many travellers' utterances, but decided enough to show that she had views, and maintained them. Of the opium-habit she is a resolute defender as far as the East is concerned. "That we should wean Asia from the use of opium," she writes, "is impossible. What we are trying is preposterous ; worst of all, we are making ourselves ridiculous." She defends it mainly on the ground of the instinctive moderation of Orientals, declaring that it is but an "infinitesimal proportion" of them who indulge in any excess of the opium.habit. And from her observation she finds results so unmistakably happy to follow from the careful use of the drug, that she could find it in her heart to advocate its use for our own working classes but for the fatal habit of excess in everything, which would prevent their being trusted with it. But of the far more pernicious results of spirit - drinking she has no doubt at all, and the contrast which she draws is as effective as it is careful. "Self-denial," says the writer, has become by long usage second nature to the children of the East. Our Anglo-Saxon poor drain their pewter-mugs to the dregs." It would not be natural in this connec- tion if a writer of this tilting type did not have her unavoidable say against "the missionaries," who, rightly or wrongly, succeed in arousing a spirit of antagonism in divers minds and sundry quarters which one cannot but feel to be a matter for serious regret. "Why are they missionaries?" the lady asks very frankly. But such questions, often and naturally as they are asked by those who question our right of interference with the faiths and manners of strange and distant nations, must and do ignore the fact that their answer lies in the fixed belief that conversion and crusade are the essence of Christianity, right or wrong'; and that the soldiers of that faith hold to this duty before all things. Mrs. Miln's chief objection to the missionaries seems to lie not so much in their efforts to carry out their duty, as in their persistence in writing books on the subject. That the "literary missionary" ought to be extinguished is an article of her faith ; but we presume that with them as with all other classes of men all depends on the individual character. One of them at all events provides Mrs. Miln with a characteristic and odd little anecdote of a Chinese boy who was the one convert whom an Anglican had made in twenty years at Shanghai. The boy, Foo Sing, being his own boy, the clergyman parted with him reluctantly when he left China, and bestowed many gifts upon him. "What are you going to do now Dr. has gone?" said a friend of the Churchman. "Me," said Foo Sing, "me go chin chin my own jogs." Grave and effective in contrast is her description of a venerable Roman Catholic priest who bad been eminent for many years in China. In the full significance of the word, he admitted to have made no converts at all. "But," he said, "we have alleviated suffering and we have checked sin. We are paving the way for the spiritual success of the priests unborn. Rome, the spiritual, will not be made perfect and entire in a generation. Little by little we are gaining ground here. A Chinaman pretends a conversion he does not experience,—for the sake of the benefits we confer on him. His children grow accustomed to our blessed symbols and our holy rites. It is our great hope that his grandchildren or perhaps his great-grandchildren may become truly and entirely sons of the true Church. In the meantime we hope and pray and work, and do what good we may."
Marriages and funerals and ceremonials of all kinds, in the different parts of the East, come in for close and sympathetic description from our traveller, who was fairly fascinated by the ways and appearance of her own sex especially (Japan was evidently her favourite attraction, though it reads oddly now to be told that the " Japs " have no idea of fighting), and met with many pleasant courtesies from them on her way. The Burmese women, she writes, "are always pretty. Their taste in. dress is exquisite, and when a Burmese maiden lights the invitational lamp and site down to await her suitors, she makes a picture of pretty humanity, of which we women in Europe may well be envious." So much does her subject gain upon her here that she begins to wonder altogether if "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay" is anything better than a poet's rhapsody. But we fear that her advanced sisters will care little for such ,teaching when she gives them such a sentiment as this. "What has the world given women P what has civilisation 'given them P what can life give them P The past gave us • nothing, the present gives us nothing, and in the mys- terious bosom of the future lies for us, no greater benison than marriage. Sneer, senseless men and unsexed women, but that is truth,.Nature's greatest truth S" It is at least refreshing just now to read such a profession of faith as this, and it puts Mr. Miln in an attractive light, which her descrip- Lions of him quite endorse. He must be a quiet humourist, too, in his way, and calls her " James " when she misbehaves. And the acting of the two together must have led to many an amusing experience. But how in the world did the pair contrive to act ,Tulius Ccesar in China as well as Caste in an Indian barrack-room P Ibsen does not appear to be included in their moral or actual repertory. The author • of Bootle's Baby is not more in sympathy with the soldiers, and Mrs. Miln can write and moralise about the "sub." and the major as effectively, and as Kiplingly on the tongue, as the 'great Rudyard himself. All sorts of places and all sorts of natives give occasion for much pleasant description, for a keen eye for oddities is a main charm of the book. Hakin Baig's letter is a gem :—" Mr. — Noble Bur and gentlemen. Karachi city. Sir, you mated the Hotel Bill 15 Rupees. And you tolded to me I must say to Jamaiji he sold me crab wine—and what remark you make of it. I done all arrangements with Jamaiji. He said i don't care. I am not making myself wine. This fault of the shampain- maker. Please hear my prayer—you write, noble snr, to ,shampain-maker. He lives in Prance, his name is Mr. Cliquot." Most pleasantly we part with this charming and unaffected lady., Only in her farewell sentence did we think that the actress was going to assert herself at last ; and she shall reveal her secret for herself :—" I was born with a talent. Perhaps I will be forgiven for boasting of it, because I freely confess that it is the only talent I have ever had. I inherited it from my father, who had it to a very great degree. It is a talent that sometimes bring us sorrow ; but certainly no other talent brings half so much joy." No; it is not the talent of acting, but the talent of loving, that she claims. And her plea for her delightful book is that she loves the East. None the less, we should like to see Mrs. Miln act very much, though she gives us no hint of her own estimate, unless it is to be found when she tells us that she never saw Mrs. Bancroft act Polly Eccles, but that her friends tell her that she— Mrs. Miln—does not do it as well.
Previous page
