Chapter V: Part 5

It has not been thought necessary, in this biographical edition, to issue the several volumes in the order of the dates at which they were written; nor has the attempt been made to preserve some serial continuity of their style or subject. The arrangement, moreover, serves to accentuate unnecessarily the undeniable imparity of Thackeray's different books; for _Punch_ and the _Sketch Books_ are interposed between _Barry Lyndon_ and _Esmond_; while even the wild and wicked Lyndon hardly deserved to be handcuffed in the same volume with Fitzboodle, whom in the body he would have crushed like an insect. Yet the classification of Thackeray's novels might be easily made, for _Barry Lyndon_, _Esmond_, _The Virginians_, and _Denis Duval_ fall together in one homogeneous group, having a strong family resemblance in tone and treatment, and following generally the chronological succession of the periods with which they are concerned. If to Esmond is awarded the precedence that is due to him not by seniority, but by importance, we have the wars of the eighteenth century between England and France from Marlborough's campaigns down to Rodney's great naval victory of 1783, in which Duval was destined to take part. These works represent Thackeray's very considerable contribution to the Historic School of English novelists; and we may count them also a valuable commentary upon English history, for without doubt every luminous illustration of past times and personages acts as a powerful stimulant to the national mind, by exciting a keener interest in the nation's story and a clearer appreciation of its reality. Chateaubriand has affirmed that Walter Scott's romances produced a revolution in the art of writing histories, that no greater master of the art of historical divination has ever lived, and that his profound insight into the mediaeval world, its names, the true relation between different classes, its political and social aspects, originated a new and brilliant historical method which superseded the dim and limited views of scholarly erudition. For Thackeray we make no such extensive or extravagant claims; but it may be said that the dramatic conception of history in his novels and lectures was of great service to his readers and hearers by the vivid impressions which they conveyed of the life, character, and feelings of their forefathers, of their failings, virtues, and memorable achievements. Some material objections may be taken to the system of teaching by graphic pictures in Thackeray, as in Carlyle's _French Revolution_, and in both cases the philosophy leaves much to be desired, for the writer's own idiosyncrasy colours all his work. Yet when we remember how few are the readers to whom the accurate Dryasdust, with his careful research and well attested facts, brings any lasting enlightenment, we may well believe that very many owe their distinct ideas of the state of England and its people during the last century to Thackeray's genius for carefully studied autobiographical fiction.

To the four historical novels mentioned above let us add three novels of nineteenth-century manners--_Vanity Fair_, _Pendennis_, _The Newcomes_--and we have seven books (one incomplete) upon which Thackeray's name and fame survive, and will be handed down to posterity. The list is by no means long if it be compared with the outturn of Scott and Bulwer-Lytton, or of his foremost contemporary Dickens; and Stevenson, who resembles him in the subdued realistic style of narrating a perilous fight or adventure, has left us a larger bequest. But they are amply sufficient to build up for him a lasting monument in English literature; and their very paucity may serve as a warning against the prevailing sin of copious and indiscriminate productiveness, by which so many second-rate novelists of the present day exhaust their powers and drown a respectable reputation in a flood of writing, which sinks in quality in proportion to the rise in quantity.

How far the character and personal experiences of an author are revealed or disguised in his writings is a question which has often been discussed. Bulwer once endeavoured, in a whimsical essay, to prove that men of letters are the only people whose characters are really ascertainable, because you may know them intimately by their works; but herein he merely touched upon the general truth or truism that society at large judges every man only by his public performances, and does not trouble itself at all about anything else. In the category of those who display in their writings their tastes and prejudices, their feelings and the special bent of their mind, we may certainly place Thackeray, who was a moralist and a satirist, very sensitive to the ills and follies of humanity, and impressionable in the highest degree. For such a man it was impossible to refrain from giving his opinions, his praise or his blame, in all that he wrote upon everything that interested him; and in portraying the society which surrounded him, he inevitably portrayed himself. He displayed as much as any writer the general complexion of his intellectual propensities and sympathies; and we can even trace in him the existence of some of the minor human frailties which he was most apt to condemn, an unconscious tendency which is not altogether uncommon. But he is essentially a high-minded man of letters, acutely sensitive to absurdities, impatient of meanness, of affectation, and of ignominious admiration of trivial things; a resolute representative of the independent literary spirit, with a strong desire to see things as they are, and with the gift of describing them truthfully. He repudiated 'the absurd outcry about neglected men of genius'; and in a letter quoted by Mrs. Ritchie he writes:

'I have been earning my own bread with my own pen for near twenty
years now, and sometimes very hardly too; but in the worst time,
please God, never lost my own respect.'

His delicacy of feeling comes out in a letter from the United States, where he was lecturing--

'As for writing about this country, about Goshen, about the
friends I have found here, and who are helping me to procure
independence for my children, if I cut jokes upon them, may I
choke on the instant'--

having probably in remembrance, as he wrote, Charles Dickens and the _American Notes_.

On the other hand, he was not free from the defects of his qualities, mental and artistic, from the propensity to set points of character in violent relief, or from the somewhat unfair generalisation which grows out of the habit of drawing types and distributing colours for satirical effect.

In regard to his religion, it appears to have been of the rationalistic eighteenth-century order in which moral ideas are entirely dominant, to the exclusion of the deeply spiritual modes of thought; and we may say of him, as of Carlyle, that his philosophy was more practical than profound. The subjoined quotation is from a letter to his daughter:

'What is right must always be right, before it was practised as
well as after. And if such and such a commandment delivered by
Moses was wrong, depend upon it, it was not delivered by God, and
the whole question of complete inspiration goes at once. And the
misfortune of dogmatic belief is that, the first principle granted
that the book called the Bible is written under the direct
dictation of God--for instance, that the Catholic Church is under
the direct dictation of God, and solely communicates with Him--that
Quashimaboo is the directly appointed priest of God, and so
forth--pain, cruelty, persecution, separation of dear relatives,
follow as a matter of course.... Smith's truth being established in
Smith's mind as the Divine one, persecution follows as a matter of
course--martyrs have roasted over all Europe, over all God's world,
upon this dogma. To my mind Scripture only means a writing, and
Bible means a book.... Every one of us in every part, book,
circumstance of life, sees a different meaning and moral, and so it
must be about religion. But we can all love each other and say "Our
Father."'

This is true, stout-hearted, individualistic liberty of believing--an excellent thing and wholesome, though it by no means covers the whole ground, or meets all difficulties. The logical consequence is a strong distaste for theology, and no very high opinion of the priesthood, wherein we may probably find the root of Thackeray's proclivity, already mentioned, toward unmerited sarcasm upon the clergy. In the Introduction to _Pendennis_ is a letter written from Spa, in which he says, 'They have got a Sunday service here in an extinct gambling-house, and a clerical professor to perform, whom you have to pay just like any other showman who comes.' It does not seem to have occurred to Thackeray that the turning of a gambling-house into a place of prayer is no bad thing of itself, or that you have no more right to expect your religious services to be done for you in a foreign land without payment than your newspapers or novels.

But these are blemishes or eccentricities which are only worth notice in a character of exceptional interest and a writer of great originality. Thackeray's work had a distinct influence on the light literature of his generation, and possibly also on its manners, for it is quite conceivable that one reason why his descriptions of snobbery and shams appear to us now overdrawn, may be that his trenchant blows at social idols did materially discredit the worship of them. His literary style had the usual following of imitators who caught his superficial form and missed the substance, as, for example, in the habit which arose of talking with warm-hearted familiarity of great eighteenth-century men, and parodying their conversation. It was easy enough to speak of Johnson as 'Grand Old Samuel,' and to hob-nob with Swift or Sterne, seeing that, like the lion's part in _Pyramus and Thisbe_, 'you can do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring.'

Thackeray will always stand in the front rank of the very remarkable array of novelists who have illustrated the Victorian era; and this new edition is a fresh proof that his reputation is undiminished, and will long endure.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] _The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, with Biographical Introductions by his daughter_, Anne Ritchie. In 13 volumes. London, 1898.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1898.

[11] Now Lady Ritchie.

THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST[12]

For the last one hundred and fifty years India has been to Englishmen an ever-widening field of incessant activity, military, commercial, and administrative. They have been occupied, during a temporary sojourn in that country, in acquiring and developing a great dominion. No situation more unfavourable to the development of imaginative literature could be found than that of a few thousand Europeans isolated, far from home, among millions of Asiatics entirely different from them in race, manners, and language. Their hands have been always full of business, they have been absorbed in the affairs of war and government, they have been cut off from the culture which is essential to the growth of art and letters, they have had little time for studying the antique and alien civilisation of the country. It seldom happens that the men who play a part in historical events, or who witness the sombre realities of war and serious politics, where kingdoms and lives are at stake, have either leisure or inclination for that picturesque side of things which lies at the source of most poetry and romance. And thus it has naturally come to pass that while Englishmen in India have produced histories full of matter, though often deficient in composition, and have also written much upon Oriental antiquities, laws, social institutions, and economy, they have done little in the department of novels.

That a good novel should have been produced in India was, therefore, until very recent times improbable; that it should have been successful in England was still less to be expected. For the modern reader will have nothing to do with a story full of outlandish scenes and characters; he must be told what he thinks he knows; he must be able to realise the points and the probabilities of a plot and of its personages; he wants a tale that falls more or less within his ordinary experience, or that tallies with his preconceived notions. Accordingly, any close description of native Indian manners or people is apt to lose interest in proportion as it is exact; its value as a painting of life is usually discernible only by those who know the country. The popular traditional East was long, and indeed still is, that which has been for generations fixed in the imagination of Western folk by the _Arabian Nights_, by the legends of Crusaders, and by pictorial editions of the Old Testament. It is seen in the Oriental landscape and figures presented by Walter Scott in _The Talisman_, which every one, at least in youth, has read; whereas _The Surgeon's Daughter_, where the scene is laid in India, is hardly read at all. Of course there are other reasons why the former book is much more liked than the latter; yet it was certainly not bad local colouring or unreality of detail that damaged _The Surgeon's Daughter_, for Scott knew quite as much about Mysore and Haidar Ali as he did about Syria in the thirteenth century and Saladin. But in _The Talisman_ he was on the well-trodden ground of mediaeval English history and legend; whereas the readers of his Indian tale found themselves wandering in the fresh but then almost unknown field of India in the eighteenth century.

These are the serious obstacles which have discouraged Anglo-Indians from attempting the pure historical romance. They knew the country too well for concocting stories after the fashion of Thomas Moore's _Lalla Rookh_, with gallant chieftains and beauteous maidens who have nothing Oriental about them except a few set Eastern phrases, turbans, daggers, and jewellery. They could not use the true local colour, the real temper and talk of the Indian East, without great risk of becoming neither intelligible nor interesting to the English public at large. It may be said that before our own day there has been only one author who has successfully overcome these difficulties--Meadows Taylor, who wrote a romantic novel, now almost forgotten, founded upon the history of Western India in the seventeenth century. The period was skilfully chosen, for it is the time of the Moghul emperor Aurungzeb's long war against the Mohammedan kingdoms in the Dekhan, and of the Maratha insurrection under Sivaji, which eventually ruined the Moghul empire. The daring murder of a Mohammedan governor by Sivaji, the Maratha hero who freed his countrymen from an alien yoke, is still kept in patriotic remembrance throughout Western India. Nor is there anything in such a natural sentiment that need give umbrage to Englishmen; although the liberality of a recent English governor of Bombay who headed a list of subscriptions for public commemoration of the deed, betrayed a somewhat simple-minded unreadiness to appreciate the significance of historical analogies.

Meadows Taylor has treated this subject with very creditable success. He had lived long in that part of the country; he knew the localities; he was unusually conversant with the manners and feelings of the people, and he had the luck to be among them before the old and rough state of society, with its lawless and turbulent elements, had disappeared. He had himself been in the service of a native prince whose governing methods were no better, in some respects worse, than those of the seventeenth century; and his possession of good natural literary faculty made up in him a rare combination of qualifications for venturing upon an Indian romance. The result has been that _Tara_ has not fallen into complete oblivion, though one may doubt whether it would now be thought generally readable. Although written so late as 1863, the influence of Walter Scott's mediaeval romanticism shows itself in the chivalrous language of the nobles, and in a somewhat formal drawing of the leading figures, as if they were taken from a model. But all the details are truly executed. There are sketches of scenery, of interiors, of dress, arms, and manners, which are clearly the outcome of direct observation; and the incidents have a genuine flavour. The misfortune is that these are just the sterling qualities which require special knowledge and insight for their appreciation, and are therefore missed by the great majority of readers. The following picture of a party of Maratha horsemen returning from a raid may be taken as an example:

'There might have been twenty-five to thirty men, from the youth
unbearded to the grizzled trooper, whose swarthy, sunburnt face,
large whiskers and moustaches touched with grey, wiry frame, and
easy lounging seat in saddle, as he balanced his heavy Maratha
spear across his shoulder, showed the years of service he had done.
There was no richness of costume among the party; the dresses were
worn and weather stained, and of motley character. Some wore
thickly quilted white doublets, strong enough to turn a sword-cut,
or light shirts of chain-mail, with a piece of the mail or of
twisted wire folded into their turbans; and a few wore steel
morions with turbans tied round them, and steel gauntlets inlaid
with gold and silver in delicate arabesque patterns. All were now
soiled by the wet and mud of the day. It was clear that this party
had ridden far; and the horses, from their drooping crests and
sluggish action, were evidently weary. Four of the men had been
wounded in some skirmish, for they sat their horses with
difficulty, and the bandages about them were covered with blood.'

No Indian novel, indeed, has been written which displays greater power of picturesque description, or better acquaintance with the distinctive varieties of castes, race, and habits, that make up the composite population of India. It was for a long time the only Indian novel in which the _dramatis personae_ are entirely native.

Although _Tara_ is unique as an Indian romance, there is another story which renders Indian life and manners with equal fidelity. _Pandurang Hari_ was written by a member of the Indian Civil Service, and first published in 1826, though it reappeared in 1874, with a preface by Sir Bartle Frere. Here again the scene is in Western India, among the Marathas; but the period belongs to the first quarter of this century. It purports to be a free translation from a manuscript given to the author by a Hindu who had in his youth served with the Maratha armies, and latterly fell in with the Pindaree hordes, from whom he heard tales of their plundering raids. He eventually joins a band of robbers, and leads a wandering, adventurous life in the hills and jungles of the Dekhan, until the general pacification of the country by the British permits or obliges him to settle down quietly. The merit of the book consists entirely in its precise and valuable delineation of the condition of the country when it was harried by the freebooting Maratha companies, and in certain glimpses which are given of Anglo-Indian life in those rough days; for the writer, unlike Meadows Taylor, has no literary power, and can only relate accurately what he has seen or has carefully gathered from authentic sources.

We have thus only two novels worth mention which have preserved true pictures of the times before all the wild irregularity of Indian circumstance and rulership had been flattened down under the irresistible pressure of English law and order. The historical romance has shared the general decline and fall of that school in Europe; while as for the exact reproduction of stories dealing entirely with native life, very few Anglo-Indians would now attempt it, for such a book would find very scanty favour in England. Nearly all recent Indian novels have for their subject, not native, but Anglo-Indian society; the heroes and heroines, in war or love, in peril or pastime, are English; the natives take the minor or accessory part in the drama, and give the prevailing colour, tragical or comical, to the background. One of the best and earliest novels of this class is _Oakfield_, written about 1853 by William Arnold, a son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, who, after spending some years in one of the East India Company's sepoy regiments, obtained a civil appointment in India, and died at Gibraltar on his way homeward. Some pathetic lines in the short poem by Matthew Arnold called _A Southern Night_ commemorate his untimely death. The book is remarkable for the autobiographic description, too austere and censorious, of life in Indian cantonments, or during an Indian campaign, before the great Mutiny swept away the old sepoy army of Bengal. It represents the impression made upon a young Oxonian of high culture and serious religious feeling by the unmannerly and sometimes vicious dissipation of the officers' mess in an ill-managed regiment stationed up the country.

Oakfield, a clergyman's son, carefully bred up in Arnold's school of indifference to dogma and strictness in morals, finds himself oppressed by the hollow conventionality of religious and social ideas at home, and sees no prospect of a higher level in the ordinary English professions. He leaves Oxford abruptly for an Indian cadetship, and sets out with the hope of finding wider scope for work and the earnest pursuit of loftier ideals in India. He is intensely disappointed and disgusted at finding himself, on joining his regiment, among men who have very slight education and wild manners, whose talk is coarse, who gamble, fight duels, dislike the country, and care nothing for the people. The aims and methods of the Government itself appear to him eminently unsatisfactory, being chiefly directed towards such grovelling business as revenue collection, superficial order, and public works, with little or no concern for the moral elevation of the people. When his friends urge him to study for the purpose of rising in the service, civil or military, he asks: 'What then? What if the extra allowances have really no attraction? I want to know what the life is in which you think it good to get on. It seems to me that my object in life must be not so much to get an appointment, or to get on in the world, as to work, and the only work worth doing in the country is helping to civilise it.'

We have here the interesting, though not uncommon, case of a youthful enthusiast transported as if by one leap--for the sea voyage is a blank interval--from England to the Far East, from a sober and disciplined home to a loose society, from the centre of ancient peace and calm study to a semi-barbarous miscellany of races under an elementary kind of government. Ovid's banishment from Rome to the shores of the Euxine, to live among rude Roman centurions and subject Scythians, could have been no greater change, though Ovid and Oakfield are not comparable otherwise. The sight of a great Hindu fair on the river bank at Allahabad, as surveyed from the deck of a steamer, strikes him with that ever-recurrent feeling of a great gulf fixed between Europeans and natives: 'What an inconceivable separation there apparently and actually is between us few English, silently making a servant of the Ganges with our steam engines and paddles, and these Asiatics, with shouts and screams worshipping the same river!'

He meets a cool and capable civilian, who expounds to him the practical side of all these questions and administrative problems; and he makes a few military friends of the higher stamp, who stand by him in his refusal to fight a duel and in the court-martial which follows. Then comes the second Sikh war, with a vivid description, evidently by an eye-witness, of an officer's share in the hard-fought action at Chillianwalla, and of the other sharp contests in that eventful campaign. It is an excellent example of the skilful interweaving of real incident with the texture of fiction, showing the clear-cut lines and colour of actual experience gained in the fiercest battle ever won by the English in India:

'The cavalry and horse-artillery dashed forward, and soon the
rolling of wheels and clanking of sabres were lost in one continual
roar from above a hundred pieces of artillery. On every side the
shot crashed through the jungle; branches of trees were shattered
and torn from their stems; rolling horses and falling men gave an
early character to this fearful evening.... The 3rd Division
advanced, with what fatal results to the gallant 24th Regiment is
well known.... Either by an injudicious order, or, as stated in the
official despatch, by mistaking a chance movement of their
commandant for a signal, the 24th broke into a double at a
distance from the guns far too great for a charge; they arrived
breathless and exhausted at the guns, where a terrific and hitherto
concealed fire of musketry awaited them. The native corps came up
and well sustained their European comrades; but both were
repulsed--not until twenty-one English officers, twelve sergeants,
and 450 rank and file of the 24th had been killed or wounded....
Oakfield counted the bodies of nine officers lying dead in as many
square yards; there lay the dead bodies of the two Pennycuicks side
by side; those of the men almost touched each other.'

The transfer of Oakfield to a civil appointment in no way diminishes his dissatisfaction at the spectacle of a Government that has no apparent ethical programme and misconceives its true mission:

'The Indian Government is perhaps the best, the most perfect, nay,
perhaps the only specimen of pure professing secularism that the
civilised world has ever seen since the Christian era, and
sometimes, when our eyes are open to see things as they are, such a
secularism does appear a most monstrous phenomenon to be stalking
through God's world.... When the spirit of philosophy, poetry, and
godliness shall move across the world, when the philosophical
reformer shall come here as Governor-General, then the spirit of
Mammon may tremble for its empire, but not till then.'

Yet, notwithstanding the author's solicitude for India's welfare, the natives make no figure at all in his story; they are barely mentioned, except where Oakfield denounces the unblushing perjury committed daily in our courts; and one can see that he does them the very common injustice of measuring their conduct by an ideal standard of morality. Anglo-Indian officials leave their country at an early age, in almost total ignorance of the darker side of English life, as seen in a police court or wherever the passions and interests of men come into sharp conflict. But this is just the side of Indian life that is brought prominently before them, at first, as junior magistrates and revenue officers, who sometimes do not care to look into any other aspects of it; and in consequence they stand aghast at the exhibition of vice and false-swearing. A London magistrate transferred to Lucknow or Lahore would find much less reason for astonishment.

The same criticism applies, for similar reasons, to Oakfield's unmeasured censure of the tone and habits prevalent among officers of the old Indian army; he probably knew nothing of regimental life in the English army sixty years ago, and therefore supposed the delinquencies of his own mess to be monstrous. It must be admitted, however, that morals and manners were loose and low in a bad sepoy regiment before the Mutiny. No two men could have differed more widely in antecedents or character than William Arnold and John Lang, whose novel, _The Wetherbys; or, A Few Chapters of Indian Experience_, was written a few years earlier than _Oakfield_. It deals with precisely the same scenes and society, at the same period, in the form of an Indian officer's autobiography. The book is clever, amusing with a touch of vulgarity, yet undoubtedly composed with a complete knowledge of its subject; for Lang was the editor of a Meerut newspaper, who took his full share of Anglo-Indian revelry, and who knew the Indian army thoroughly. Whereas in _Oakfield_ the tone rises often to righteous indignation, in _The Wetherbys_ it falls to a strain of caustic humour, and in the modern reader's mouth it might leave an unpleasant taste; yet the verisimilitude of the narrative would be questioned by no competent judge. As Oakfield fought at Chillianwalla, so Wetherby fights in the almost equally desperate battle of Ferozeshah, where the English narrowly escaped a great disaster; and here, again, we have a momentary ray of vivid light thrown upon the battlefield by a writer who had associated with eye-witnesses, though he was not one of them. It is difficult to give an extract from this part of the tale, because Lang's power lies not in description, but in characteristic conversation; so we may be content, for the purpose of bringing out the contrast between two very diverse styles, with a specimen of his comic talent, as exhibited in the injunctions laid upon her husband by the vulgar half-caste wife of a poor henpecked officer just starting for the campaign:

'Well, then,' she continued, 'keep out of danger. If your troop
wishes to charge into a safe place, let 'em. _You_ don't want
brevet rank, or any of that nonsense, I hope. Make as much bluster
and row as you like, but for Heaven's sake keep out of harm's
way.... You need not write to me every day, but every third or
fourth day, for the postage is serious. If you should happen to
kill any Sikhs, search them, and pull down their back hair; that's
where they carry their money and jewels and valuables. A sergeant
of the 3rd Dragoons, like a good husband, has sent his wife down a
lot of gold mohurs and some precious stones that he found tied up
in the hair of a Sikh officer. And, by the by, you may as well
leave me your watch. You can always learn the time of day from
somebody; and if anything happened to you, it would be sold by the
Committee of Adjustment, and would fetch a mere nothing.'

This is unquestionably a grotesque caricature; yet the ladies of mixed parentage were quaint and singular persons in the India of sixty years ago. As Arnold could hardly have failed to read _The Wetherbys_ before he wrote _Oakfield_, the book may have suggested to him the plan of going over the same ground upon a higher plane of thought and treatment. The two books stand as records of a state of society that has now entirely passed away, and from their perusal we may conclude that, among the many radical changes wrought upon India by the sweeping cyclone of the great Mutiny, not the least of them has been a thorough reformation of the native army.

When we turn to the Indian novels written after the Mutiny we are in the clearer and lighter atmosphere of the contemporary social novel. We have left behind the theoretic enthusiast, perplexed by the contrast between the semi-barbarism of the country and the old-fashioned apathy of its rulers; we have no more descriptions, serious or sarcastic, of rakish subalterns and disorderly regiments under ancient, incapable colonels; we are introduced to a reformed Anglo-India, full of hard-working, efficient officers, civil and military, and sufficiently decorous, except where hill-stations foster flirting and the ordinary dissipation of any garrison town. It is, however, still a characteristic of the post-Mutiny stories that they find very little room for natives; the secret of successfully interpreting Indian life and ideas to the English public in this form still awaits discovery. One of the best and most popular of the new school was the late Sir George Chesney, whose _Battle of Dorking_ was a stroke of genius, and who utilised his Indian experiences with very considerable literary skill, weaving his projects of army reform into a lively tale of everyday society abroad and at home. The scene of _A True Reformer_ opens at Simla, under Lord Mayo's vice-royalty, names and places being very thinly disguised; the hero marries a pretty girl, and starts homeward on furlough, thereby giving the writer his opportunity for bringing in a description of a railway journey across India to Bombay in the scorching heat of May:

'And now the day goes wearily on, marked only by the change of the
sun's shadow, the rising of the day-wind and its accompaniment of
dust, and the ever-increasing heat. The country is everywhere the
same--a perfectly flat, desert-looking plain of reddish brown hue,
with here and there a village, its walls of the same colour. It
looks a desert, because there are no signs of crops, which were
reaped two months ago, and no hedgerows, but here and there an
acacia tree. Not a traveller is stirring on the road, not a soul to
be seen in the fields, but an occasional stunted bullock is
standing in such shade as their trees afford. At about every ten
miles a station is reached, each exactly like the previous one and
the next following.... Gradually the sun went down, the wind and
dust subsided, and another stifling night succeeded, with uneasy
slumbers, broken by the ever-recurring hubbub of the stoppages.'

On reaching home Captain West learns, like the elder Wetherby in Lang's story, that an uncle has died leaving him a good income; so he enters Parliament, and the remainder of his autobiography is entirely occupied by an account of his efforts in the cause of army reform, which eventually succeed when he has overcome the scruples and hesitation of the prime minister--Mr. Merriman, a transparent pseudonym. The author's plan of endeavouring to interest his readers in professional and technical questions is very creditably carried out, for the book is throughout readable; and it also shows that on the subject of military organisation Chesney was often in advance of his time; but the scene changes from India to England so very early in the narrative that this novel takes a place on our list more by reason of its Anglo-Indian authorship than of its connection with India.

In _The Dilemma_, on the other hand, Chesney gives us a story with characters and catastrophes drawn entirely from the sepoy mutiny. The main interest centres round the defence of a house in some up-country station that is besieged by the mutineers, and for such a purpose the writer could supply himself, at discretion, from the abundant repertory of adventures and the variety of personal conduct--heroic, humorous, or otherwise astonishing--which had been provided by actual and recent events. We have here, indeed, a dramatic version of real history; and, since the original of an intensely tragic situation must always transcend a literary adaptation of it, the fiction necessarily suffers by comparison with the fact. Yet the novel contends not unsuccessfully with this disadvantage, and in the lapse of years, as the real scenes and piercing emotions stirred up by a bloody struggle fade into distance, the value of Chesney's work may increase. For it preserves a true picture, drawn at first hand, of the time, the circumstances, and the behaviour of an isolated group of English folk who, while living in a state of profound peace and apparent security, found themselves suddenly obliged to fight desperately for their lives against an enemy from whom no quarter, even for women and children, could be expected in case of defeat.

We may now take up a book of a very different kind, the production, not of an Anglo-Indian amateur, but of an eminent English novelist who has lived, though not long, in India--Mr. Marion Crawford. Here we are back again in the region of romance, for, although the story opens at Simla in Lord Lytton's reign and during the second Afghan War, Mr. Isaacs, the hero (whose name gives the book its title) is outwardly a Persian dealer in precious gems, but esoterically an adept in the mysteries of what has been called occult Buddhism. This queer science, as professed by a certain Madame Blavatsky, had much vogue in Northern India about 1879, particularly at Simla. To sceptics it appeared to be an adroit mixture of charlatanry and mere juggling tricks, with some elementary knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the true Indian Yogi, who seeks to attain supernatural powers by rigid asceticism, and who has really some insight into secret mental phenomena, being in this line of discovery the forerunner of the English Psychical Society.

The part played in this story by Mr. Isaacs, who is not in all respects an imaginary personage, might remind one of Disraeli's Sidonia. He is an enigmatic character, versed in the philosophy of the East and the West, who excels on horseback and in tiger shooting, yet can discourse mystically and can bring the mysterious influences at his command to bear upon critical situations. The novel has thus two sides: we have the usual sketch of Anglo-Indian society--the soldiers, the civilians, the charming young English girl whom Mr. Isaacs fascinates. But a writer of Mr. Crawford's high repute is bound to put some depth and originality into his Indian tale, and so we have the Pandit Ram Lal, who is somehow also a Buddhist, and who is Mr. Isaacs's colleague whenever occult Buddhism is to give warning or timely succour. The chief exploit occurs in a wondrous expedition to rescue and carry away into Tibet the Afghan Amir, Sher Ali, who had just then actually fled from Kabul before the advance of an English army; and it must be confessed that so fantastic an adventure sounds rather startling in connection with a bit of authentic contemporary history.

On the whole, whether we assume that the object of a novel is to illustrate history, or to present a faithful reflection of life and manners, or to render strenuous action dramatically yet not improbably--by whatever standard we measure Mr. Crawford's book, it cannot be awarded a high place on the list of Indian fiction. But we have run over this list so rapidly, touching only upon typical examples, that we are now among the latest writers of the present day; and we may take _Helen Treveryan_ (1892) as a very favourable specimen of their productions. Comparing it with earlier novels, we may remark, in the first place, that there is no great variety of plot or treatment, Anglo-Indian society being everywhere, and at most times, very much the same, except so far as closer intercourse with Europe softens down its roughness, materially and morally, increases the feminine element, and assimilates its outer form to the English model. _Helen Treveryan_, whose author is a very distinguished member of the Indian Civil Service, is, like all other novels of the kind, the narrative of the adventures, in love and war, of a young English military officer in India. The characters are evidently drawn from life; the main incidents belong to very recent Indian history; the description of society in an up-country station, with which the movement of the drama begins, is an exact and humorous photograph. A tiger hunt is done better, with more knowledge of the business, than a similar episode in Mr. Crawford's novel; and the passionate love between Guy Langley and Helen Treveryan is well painted in bright colours to intensify the gloom and pathos of Langley's death in battle.

As Chesney went to the sepoy mutiny for his scenes of tragedy and heroism, so Sir Mortimer Durand (we believe that the original pseudonym has been dropped) takes them from the second Afghan War, having been at Kabul with General Roberts in the midst of hard fighting, where he first placed his foot on the ladder which has led him upward to high places and unusual distinction. In the chapters describing the march upon Kabul, its occupation, the rising of the tribes, and their attack upon the British army beleaguered in the Sherpur entrenchments, we have simply a memoir of actual events, written with truth, spirit, and with the pictorial skill of an artist who understands the value and proportion of romantic details. The English commanders, the Afghan sirdars, and several other well-known folk are mentioned by name; the skirmishes and perilous situations are described just as they really occurred. No book could better serve the purpose of a home-keeping Englishman who might desire to see as in a moving photograph what was going on in the British camp before Kabul during the perilous winter of 1879-80, to hear the camp-talk, and to realise the nature and methods of Afghan fighting.

'He turned to the westward, and as he did so there was a flicker in
the darkness, where the rugged top of the Asmai Hill could just be
made out. For an instant there was perfect silence; then, as the
flame caught and flared, there rose from the men around him a low,
involuntary "A--h," such as one may sometimes hear at Lord's when a
dangerous wicket goes down. Then in the distance two musket shots
rang out, and after them a few more; but along the cantonment wall
all was silent; men stood with beating hearts awaiting the
onslaught. For some minutes the suspense lasted, and then suddenly
burst from the darkness a wild storm of yells, "Allah, Allah,
Allah," and fifty thousand Afghans came with a rush at the wall,
shouting and firing. The cantonment was surrounded by a broad
continuous ring of rifle-flashes, and over the parapet and over the
trenches the bullets began to stream.'

But the subjoined extract, which gives Langley's death, is a better example of the book's general style--cool, circumstantial, abhorrent of glitter or exaggeration, leaving a clear impression of things actually witnessed and done, a brief glimpse of one of the incidents that remain stamped on the brain of those who saw it, but are otherwise forgotten in war-time, after a day or two's regret for the lost comrade.[13]

'They were all weary, and marched carelessly forward in silence.
The night was closing fast, and a little fine snow was falling....
There was a sudden flash in the darkness to the right, a shot, and
then a scattering volley. Guy Langley threw up his arms with a cry,
and as the startled horse swerved across the road he fell with a
dull thud on the snow. There was a moment of confusion, but the
Sikhs, though careless, were good soldiers, and two or three of
them dashed towards the low wall from which the shots had come.
They were just in time to see four men running across a bit of
broken ground towards a deep water-cut, fringed with poplars. The
horsemen were very quick after them, being light men on hardy
horses; and one of the four Afghans, a big man in a dirty sheepskin
coat, lost his head, and ran down under a bit of wall; the other
three crossed the water-cut. The horsemen saw the position at once,
and rode after the man on their side of the trench. They were up to
him in a minute, and Atar Singh made a lunge at him with his lance;
but the Afghan avoided it, and swinging up his heavy knife cut the
boy across the hand. Before he could turn to run again a second
horseman was on him, and with a grim "Hyun--Would you?" drove the
lance through his chest.'

The dialogue is occasionally used to bring out contending views in regard to Indian politics, as might be expected from a writer who has thoroughly studied them. At a Simla dinner-party the conversation turns upon the question whether, in the event of a collision between the armed forces of Russia and England on the Indian frontier, the Anglo-Indian army could hold its own successfully against such a serious enemy. We have on one side the man of dismal forebodings, so well known in India, and against him the hopeful, resolute officer, who lays just stress on England's superior position, with all the strength and resources of India and the British empire at her back. One supremely important point in the discussion is, by consent of both speakers, the probable behaviour in such a crisis of the native Indian army; and we may here express our agreement with the view that our best native regiments would prove themselves faithful soldiers and formidable antagonists to the Russians. As is well said in the course of the argument, the Sikhs and Goorkhas faced us well when they fought us, 'and with English officers to lead them, why should they not face the Russians?... I believe the natives will be true to us if we are true to ourselves; some few are actively disloyal, but not the mass of them. If we begin to falter they will go, of course; but if we show them we mean fighting they will fight too.' This is the true political creed for Englishmen in India, outside of which there is no salvation, but the reverse.

It is perhaps to be regretted that so capable a writer upon Indian subjects has given us nothing of native life and character beyond a few silhouettes; and after Guy Langley's death, when the scene is transferred entirely to England, the story's interest decidedly flags. Yet we may fairly assign a high place in the series of Indian novels to _Helen Treveryan_, not only for its literary merits, but also for the historical value of the chapters which preserve the day by day experience of one who took his share in the culminating dangers and difficulties of an arduous campaign.

Mrs. Steel's book, _On the Face of the Waters_, has been so widely read and reviewed since it appeared, so lately as 1897, that another criticism of it may appear stale and superfluous; yet to omit mentioning in this article the most popular of recent Indian novels would be impossible. Here, at any rate, is a book which is not open to the remark that the Anglo-Indian novelist usually leaves the natives in the background, or admits them only as supernumeraries. For Mrs. Steel's canvas is crowded with Indian figures; their talk, their distinctive peculiarities of character and costume, their parts in the great tragedy which is taken as the ground-plan of her story, are so abundantly described as occasionally to bewilder the inexperienced reader. The scene of action is the Sepoy mutiny at Meerut and the siege of Delhi, and while the Indian _dramatis personae_ are mainly types of different classes and castes--except where, like the King of Delhi, they are historical--the English army leaders act and speak under their own names, as in Durand's book, being of course modelled upon the ample personal knowledge of them still obtainable from their surviving contemporaries in India.

The book, in fact, attempts, as is frankly stated in its preface, 'to be at once a story and a history.' And we observe that Mrs. Steel tells us, as if it were a credit and a recommendation to her work, that she 'has not allowed fiction to interfere with fact in the slightest degree.'

'The reader may rest assured that every incident bearing in the
remotest degree on the Indian Mutiny, or on the part which real men
took in it, is scrupulously exact, even to the date, the hour, the
scene, the weather. Nor have I allowed the actual actors in the
great tragedy to say a word regarding it which is not to be found
in the accounts of eye-witnesses, or in their own writings.'

Is such minute matter-of-fact copying a virtue in the novelist? or is it not rather a defect arising out of a misunderstanding of the principles of his art? In our opinion the business of the novelist, even when he chooses an historical subject, is not to reproduce as many exact details as he can pick out of memoirs, official reports, and histories, but, on the contrary, to avoid making up his story out of a string of extracts and personal reminiscences, or at any rate to use his skill rather for disguising than for disclosing the precise verbal accuracy of his borrowed material. What would be thought of a naval romance that adopted, word for word, the authentic account of Nelson's death, or of a military novel that seasoned a full and particular account of Waterloo with a few imaginary characters and incidents? Any one who has observed how two fine writers, Thackeray and Stendhal, have brought that famous battle into the plot of their masterpieces (_Vanity Fair_ and _La Chartreuse de Parme_), will have noticed that they carefully avoid the crude and undisguised employment of detail, either in words or incidents; they allow fiction to interfere very constantly with fact in all petty matters of this sort; their art consists, not in historical accuracy, but in verisimilitude; they discard authentic phrases and incidents; they do not aim at precision, but at dramatic probabilities. But Mrs. Steel does not only draw too copiously, for a novelist, upon history; she also undertakes to pass authoritative judgments upon disputable questions of fact and situation, with which fiction, we submit, has no concern. She very plainly intimates that nothing but culpable inaction and want of energy prevented instant pursuit by a force from Meerut of the mutineers who made a forced march upon Delhi on the night of May 10, and whose arrival produced the insurrection in that city.

'Delhi lay,' she says, 'but thirty miles distant on a broad white
road, and there were horses galore and men ready to ride them--men
like Captain Rosser, of the Carabineers, who pleaded for a
squadron, a field battery, a troop, or a gun--anything with which
to dash down the road and cut off that retreat to Delhi.'

To argue the point in this review would be to fall into the very error on which we desire to lay stress, of attempting to deal with serious history in a light, literary way. We shall therefore be content with reminding our readers that Lord Roberts, who is perhaps the very best living authority on the subject, has come to the conclusion, after a careful survey of the circumstances, that the refusal of the Meerut commanders to pursue the mutineers was justifiable.

Yet Mrs. Steel's performance is better than her principles. The unquestionable success of _On the Face of the Waters_ is in no way due to her scrupulous exactitude in particulars, for if this had been the book's chief feature it would have failed. She has a clear and spirited style; she knows enough of India to be able to give a fine natural colour to the stirring scenes of the Sepoy mutiny, and to execute good character-drawing of the natives, as they are to be studied among the various classes in a great city. And whenever her good genius takes her off the beaten road of recorded fact her narrative shows considerable imaginative vigour. The massacres at Meerut and Delhi, the wild tumult, terror, and agony, are energetically described; and her picture of the confusion inside Delhi during the siege is admirably worked up, remembering that she wrote forty years after the event, at a time when the people and even the places had very greatly changed. The storming of the breach at the Kashmir gate by the forlorn hope that led the English columns is dexterously brought into an animated narrative; and although that story has been much better told in Lord Roberts's autobiography, we need not look too austerely on the crowd of readers who find history more attractive under a thin and embroidered veil of fiction.

A still more recent novel, entitled _Bijli the Dancer_ (1898), should be mentioned here, not only for its intrinsic merits, but also because the author has boldly faced the problem of constructing a story out of the materials available from purely native society, the stock themes and characters of Anglo-India being entirely discarded. Bijli is a professional dancing girl, whose grace and accomplishments so fascinate a great Mohammedan landholder of North India, that he persuades her to abandon her profession and to abide with him as his mistress. This arrangement is correctly treated in the book as quite consistent with the maintenance of due respect and consideration for the Nawab's lawful wife, who occupies separate apartments, and, according to Mohammedan ideas in that rank of society, has no reasonable ground for complaint. Yet Bijli, though she has every comfort, and is deeply attached to her lord, grows restless in her luxurious solitude; she pines for the excitement and triumphs of singing and dancing before an assembly. So, in the Nawab's absence, she takes professional disguise, and sings with a lute in the harem before his wife. To those who would like to see a Mohammedan lady of high rank in full dress, the following description of costume may be commended:

'She was dressed and adorned with scrupulous care; her eyebrows
trimmed of every stray hair that might deform the beauty-arch; the
lids pencilled with lampblack; the palms of her hands and the soles
of her feet stained with henna; not one stray lock encroached on
the straight parting of her glossy hair.

'She wore gold-embroidered trousers of purple satin, loose below
the knee and full over the ankles, and fastened round her waist by
a gold cord with jewelled tassels. A black crape bodice adorned
with spangles and gold edging confined her full bosom, and an open
vest of grey gauze with long, tight sleeves hung loosely over her
waistband. Upon the back of her head was thrown a veiling-sheet of
the fine muslin known as the dew of Dacca. Her feet and hands, arms
and wrists and neck, were adorned with numerous rings, jewels, and
chains, and from her nose was hung a ring of gold wire, on which
was strung a ruby between two grey pearls.'