Mr. Spender's The Changing East is undoubtedly an im- portant
volume, and he wins one's heart by wishing " that a much larger number of serious English people would make it an object to go to India at least once in their lives and-endea- vour to enter into the lives and thought of the people." Instead, " one _sees the massed battalions of winter tourists descending on India and darting through the country with scarcely a side-glance at its people and institutions."
But one wonders whether even the patient scrutiny of the author is enough to pierce to the hidden heart of India ? Mr. Spender met all kinds and conditions of men, and he spoke with them all with insight, sympathy, and great journal- istic consciousness of the material points at issue, but, Liss ! what he says of his meeting with Mr. Ghandi may be taken as true of his contact with the spiritual life of Ghandi's country : " Nothing could have been more friendly than his welcome and our parting, but I 'hore away the impression of a mind working on a plane with which I could not establish contact." It is no small thing, at any rate, that Mr. Spender realizes this. He displays little of the arrogance of some of our philosophers before the posterity of the writers of the Upanishads. Yet perhaps Count Keyserling and Sister Nivedita are alone among Western authors able to convey something of the mystical quality of the East to our minds. Mr. Spender has intuition and capacity, but he is no teller of the Unseen.
One cannot blame him, indeed one must congratulate him on his account of the political and social life of India to-day. That is not the true India, but it is at any rate the India with which we are immediately and practically concerned in our democratic experiment.
Of Egypt Mr. Spender writes with a wide and intimate knowledge : what he says of that country, and, indeed, of all the East where British interests are concerned, will do much to encourage men of good will of every creed and colour.
A great journalist was lost in the late Lord Curzon : every page of his posthumous volume contains some vivid picture or delightful story. There is tremendous vitality and joy of life in these pages and a startling but wholly delightful descent from that aloofness that surrounded his official life.
For instance, he tells us that from his windows on Carlton House Terrace he sees grooms exercising horses in the wake of a detachment of Guards in order that at the Trooping of the Colour " these animals might not betray their more eminent riders.". The sight reminds him of an incident in distant Korea and also of a Viceroy (one of the author's pre- decessors), who, when holding the New Year's parade on the Maidan in Calcutta was already in his position, mounted, and in full sight of the enormous crowd, when the rattle of the feu de joie running along the long line of troops, caused his steed to start ; off fell his tope and was caught by the strap round his neck, and in this absurd plight he was carried at full gallop across the parade ground until arrested by the ' thin redline of 'eroes ' on the far side." ..The book is full of such vivid sketches, it teems also with a quiet fun which sometimes broadens to an after-dinner story such as this : " Sometimes the universal Anglo-Indian custom of condensing composite titles into initials (for instance the Agent to the Governor- General became A.G.G.) operates as a snare, for on one occasion a very popular political officer, on returning from leave to the State to which he was accredited, found the Welcome extended to him on a triumphal arch expressed in the following abbreviated form : Let us give a big W.C. To our popular A. G. G. ! "
The author had a correspondent, he tells us, who applied to him among other adjectives the following : orpulent, predominant, refulgent, sapient, mellifluous, complaisant, superfine and delicious-hearted, and described himself as " anxiously awaiting like a peacock that is longing for drops of rain, to receive his kingdom from the so-called just and benign British Government."
There iss, an excellent chapter on` ;the " cradle. of Polo,''`, thawing 'Lcird Cnrzon's wide and varied and very human knowledge, but had he been able to revise the proofs he would not have written " Meadowbank " .for Meadow Brook. Such. slips are few; one could forgive a hundred of them for glorious descriptions—unsurpassed I venture to think in travel bOoks, and equalled only by the best of IKinglake and Treves-- such as that in the chapter beginning ". Most perfect and most graceful among the ruins of Samarktind is the cluster of mosques and mausoleums that bear the name of Shah Zindeh, the Living King. Their walls and grained ceilings are still aglow with the pageantry of the ancient titles, ultramarine and sapphire and orange and puce." In the words of the literary executors " we commend these travel sketches for their charm, their gaiety, their information and their style. . . They give to the reader a delightful portrait of the author, a man of wide sympathies, of subtle perceptions, of genial humour." The frontispiece is the last portrait taken of Lord Curzon on his way to a Cabinet meeting, and shows the man' as he really was, and not as some of us believed him to be, who came only into contact with the Viceroy at a Simla levee,; or at the presentation Of cups after a polo tournament.
There are few more fascinating figures in history than that' virile and versatile descendant of Tamerlane, Babur, the Tiger, who conquered India, wrote excellent poetry, swam. every river he met on his marches, and discussed philosophy. with the first Guru of the Sikhs. Mr. Edwards' little book gives a very sympathetic and amusing sketch of the man, While not palliating his bibulous propensities in middle life, he brings out clearly the great renunciation that occurred before the fateful battle of Delhi, when he gathered his noble-, men and soldiers before his tent on the plain of Panipat; foreswore intoxicants for ever, and made a pyramid of the flagons and feasting vessels of his army. " All who come to the feast of life," said he, " must drink the cup of death," and the courage with which he accepted that draught is well known. He came to his son Humayum's sickbed, and perambulating round it thrice, cried out, 0 God, if a life may he exchanged for a life, I who am Babur give my life and my being for Humayum." As he spoke he felt Humayum's fever grip him, and he knew that his prayer was answered.' He left his son cured and himself died. There is nothing original in Mr. Edwards' book, but a great deal that has never, been better told. We would,have to go Lack to Miss Gabrielle, Festing's When Kings Rode to Delhi for as picturesque a, narrative of the Moghuls.
One of the most interesting- pictures in Mr. N. C. Mehta's really fascinating book of Moghul and Hindu paintings is the Jain pictorial epistle, lent to him by Muni Jinvijayaji of the Gujarat Vidyapith, which describes (as it actually was, and not as Jehangir's Court artists would have it be) an Imperial Moghul Durbar at Agra. There is a European in one of the pictures (" a rather pathetic figure," Mr. Mehta says) in red trousers and a broad-brimmed hat. Who way he ? A Jesuit ? A follower of Sir Thomas Roe ? An itinerant. Florentine mason ? We shall never know.
There is much in Mr. Mehta's book which is quite new to me—Abul Hasan's masterly and delicate trotting bullock:. for instance, which is one of the finest and freest of all the miniatures I have seen, and a later painting (of Shahjehan's. school), depicting a pious conclave in the Himalayas. All amateurs of Moghul painting who saw Messrs. Kuehnel and Goetz's reproductions of the Jehangir school will welcome Mr. Mehta's contribution to their knowledge of a fascinating :period: of Oriental art.
F. Y. B.
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