Appearances: Being Notes of Travel — Inside the Classic

ahometans were conciliation and tolerance itself. I knew that the speaker himself had secured the election of Mahometans to all the seats in the Council. But I refrained from referring to the matter. Then there was caste. A Hindu will not eat with a Mahometan, and this was taken as a personal insult. I suggested that the English were equally boycotted; but that we regarded the boycott as a religious obligation, not as a social stigma. But, like the Irish Ulstermen, he was not there to listen to argument. He rolled on like a river. None of us could escape. He detected the first signs of straying, and beckoned us back to the flock. "Mr. Audubon, this is important." "Mr. Coryat, you must listen to this." Coryat, at last, grew restive, and remarked rather tartly that no doubt there was friction between the two communities, but that the worst way to deal with it was by recrimination. He agreed; with tears in his eyes he agreed. There was nothing he had not done, no advance he had not made, to endeavour to bridge the gulf. All in vain! Never were such obstinate fellows as these Hindus. And he proceeded once more to "multiply examples." As we said "Good-bye" in the small hours of the morning he pressed into our hands copies of his speeches and addresses. And we left him perorating on the steps of the hotel.

A painfully acquired mistrust of generalisation prevents me from saying that this is _the_ Mahometan point of view. Indeed, I have reason to know that it is not. But it is a Mahometan point of view in one province. And it was endorsed, more soberly, by less rhetorical members of the community. Some twenty-five years ago, they say, Mahometans woke to the fact that they were dropping behind in the race for influence and power. They started a campaign of education and organisation. At every point they found themselves thwarted; and always, behind the obstacle, lurked a Hindu. Lord Morley's reform of the Councils, intended to unite all sections, had had the opposite effect. Nothing but the separate electorates had saved Mahometans from political extinction. And precisely because they desired that extinction Hindus desired mixed electorates. The elections to the Councils have exasperated the antagonism between the two communities. And an enemy might accuse the Government of being actuated, in that reform, by the Machiavellian maxim "Divide et impera."

What the Hindus have to say to all this I have not had an opportunity of learning. But they too, I conceive, can "multiply examples" for their side. To a philosophic observer two reflections suggest themselves. One, that representative government can only work when there is real give and take between the contending parties. The other, that to most men, and most nations, religion means nothing more than antagonism to some other religion. Witness Ulster in Ireland; and witness, equally, Ulster in India.

From the gallery of the high hall we look down on the assembled society of the cantonment. The scene is commonplace enough; twaddle and tea, after tennis; "frivolling"--it is their word; women too empty-headed and men too tired to do anything else. This mill-round of work and exercise is maintained like a religion. The gymkhana represents the "compulsory games" of a public school. It is part of the "white man's burden." He plays, as he works, with a sense of responsibility. He is bored, but boredom is a duty, and there's nothing else to do.

The scene is commonplace. Yes! But this afternoon a band is playing. The music suits the occasion. It is soft, melodious, sentimental. It provokes a vague sensibility, and makes no appeal to the imagination. At least it should not, from its quality. But the power of music is incalculable. It has an essence independent of its forms. And by virtue of that essence its poorest manifestations can sink a shaft into the springs of life. So as I listen languidly the scene before me detaches itself from actuality and floats away on the stream of art. It becomes a symbol; and around and beyond it, in some ideal space, other symbols arise and begin to move. I see the East as an infinite procession. Huge Bactrian camels balance their bobbing heads as they pad deliberately over the burning dust. Laden asses, cattle, and sheep and goats move on in troops. Black-bearded men, men with beard and hair dyed red, women pregnant or carrying babies on their hips, youths like the Indian Bacchus with long curling hair, children of all ages, old men magnificent and fierce, all the generations of Asia pass and pass on, seen like a frieze against a rock background, blazing with colour, rhythmical and fluent, marching menacingly down out of infinite space on to this little oasis of Englishmen. Then, suddenly, they are an ocean; and the Anglo-Indian world floats upon it like an Atlantic liner. It has its gymnasium, its swimming-bath, its card-rooms, its concert-room. It has its first and second class and steerage, well marked off. It dresses for dinner every night; it has an Anglican service on Sunday; it flirts mildly; it is bored; but above all it is safe. It has water-tight compartments. It is "unsinkable." The band is playing; and when the crash comes it will not stop. No; it will play this music, this, which is in my ears. Is it Gounod's "Faust" or an Anglican hymn? No matter! It is the same thing, sentimental, and not imaginative. And sentimentally, not imaginatively, the Englishman will die. He will not face the event, but he will stand up to it. He will realise nothing, but he will shrink from nothing. Of all the stories about the loss of the _Titanic_ the best and most characteristic is that of the group of men who sat conversing in the second-class smoking-room, till one of them said, "Now she's going down. Let's go and sit in the first-class saloon." And they did. How touching! How sublime! How English! The _Titanic_ sinks. With a roar the machinery crashes from stem to bow. Dust on the water, cries on the water, then vacuity and silence. The East has swept over this colony of the West. And still its generations pass on, rhythmically swinging; slaves of Nature, not, as in the West, rebels against her; cyclical as her seasons and her stars; infinite as her storms of dust; identical as the leaves of her trees; purposeless as her cyclones and her earthquakes.

The music stops and I rub my eyes. Yes, it is only the club, only tea and twaddle! Or am I wrong? There is more in these men and women than appears. They stand for the West, for the energy of the world, for all, in this vast Nature, that is determinate and purposive, not passively repetitionary. And if they do not know it, if they never hear the strain that transposes them and their work into a tragic dream, if tennis is tennis to them, and a valse a valse, and an Indian a native, none the less they are what a poet would see them to be, an oasis in the desert, a liner on the ocean, ministers of the life within life that is the hope, the inspiration, and the meaning of the world. In my heart of hearts I apologise as I prolong the banalities of parting, and almost vow never again to abuse Gounod's music.

A few lamps set on the floor lit up the white roof. On either side the great hall was open to the night; and now and again a bird flew across, or a silent figure flitted from dark to dark. On a low platform sat the dancers, gorgeously robed. All were boys. The leader, a peacock-fan flashing in his head-dress, personated Krishna. Beside him sat Rhada, his wife. The rest were the milkmaids of the legend. They sat like statues, and none of them moved at our entry. But the musicians, who were seated on the ground, rose and salaamed, and instantly began to play. There were five instruments--a miniature harmonium (terrible innovation), two viols, of flat, unresonant tone, a pair of cymbals, and a small drum. The ear, at first, detected little but discordant chaos, but by degrees a form became apparent--short phrases, of strong rhythm, in a different scale from ours, repeated again and again, and strung on a thread of loose improvisation. Every now and again the musicians burst into song. Their voices were harsh and nasal, but their art was complicated and subtle. Clearly, this was not barbarous music, it was only strange, and its interest increased, as the ear became accustomed to it. Suddenly, as though they could resist no longer, the dancers, who had not moved, leapt from the platform and began their dance. It was symbolical; Krishna was its centre, and the rest were wooing him. Desire and its frustration and fulfilment were the theme. Yet it was not sensual, or not merely so. The Hindus interpret in a religious spirit this legendary sport of Krishna with the milkmaids. It symbolises the soul's wooing of God. And so these boys interpreted it. Their passion, though it included the flesh, was not of the flesh. The mood was rapturous, but not abandoned; ecstatic, but not orgiastic. There were moments of a hushed suspense when hardly a muscle moved; only the arms undulated and the feet and hands vibrated. Then a break into swift whirling, on the toes or on the knees, into leaping and stamping, swift flight and pursuit. A pause again; a slow march; a rush with twinkling feet; and always, on those young faces, even in the moment of most excitement, a look of solemn rapture, as though they were carried out of themselves into the divine. I have seen dancing more accomplished, more elaborate, more astonishing than this. But never any that seemed to me to fulfil so well the finest purposes of the art. The Russian ballet, in the retrospect, seems trivial by comparison. It was secular; but this was religious. For the first time I seemed to catch a glimpse of what the tragic dance of the Greeks might have been like. The rhythms were not unlike those of Greek choruses, the motions corresponded strictly to the rhythms, and all was attuned to a high religious mood. In such dancing the flesh becomes spirit, the body a transparent emblem of the soul.

After that the play, I confess, was a drop into bathos. We descended to speech, even to tedious burlesque. But the analogy was all the closer to mediæval mysteries. In ages of Faith religion is not only sublime; it is intimate, humorous, domestic; it sits at the hearth and plays in the nursery. So it is in India where the age of Faith has never ceased. What was represented that night was an episode in the story of Krishna. The characters were the infant god, his mother, Jasodha, and an ancient Brahmin who has come from her own country to congratulate her on the birth of a child. He is a comic character--the sagging belly and the painted face of the pantomime. He answers Jasodha's inquiries after friends and relations at home. She offers him food. He professes to have no appetite, but, on being pressed, demands portentous measures of rice and flour. While she collects the material for his meal, he goes to bathe in the Jumna; and the whole ritual of his ablutions is elaborately travestied, even a crocodile being introduced in the person of one of the musicians, who rudely pulls him by the leg as he is rolling in imaginary water. His bathing finished, he retires and cooks his food. When it is ready he falls into prayer. But during his abstraction the infant Krishna crawls up and begins devouring the food. Returning to himself, the Brahmin, in a rage, runs off into the darkness of the hall. Jasodha pursues him and brings him back. And he begins once more to cook his food. This episode was repeated three times in all its detail, and I confess I found it insufferably tedious. The third time Jasodha scolds the child and asks him why he does it. He replies--and here comes the pretty point of the play--that the Brahmin, in praying to God and offering him the food, unwittingly is praying to him and offering to him, and in eating the food he has but accepted the offering. The mother does not understand, but the Brahmin does, and prostrates himself before his Lord.

This is crude enough art, but at any rate it is genuine. Like all primitive art, it is a representation of what is traditionally believed and popularly felt. The story is familiar to the audience and intimate to their lives. It represents details which they witness every day, and at the same time it has religious significance. Out of it might grow a great drama, as once in ancient Greece. And perhaps from no other origin can such a drama arise.

It was at Benares that we met him. He led us through the maze of the bazaars, his purple robe guiding us like a star, and brought us out by the mosque of Aurungzebe. Thence a long flight of stairs plunged sheer to the Ganges, shining below in the afternoon sun. We descended; but, turning aside before we reached the shore, came to a tiny house perched on a terrace above the ghat. We took off our shoes in the anteroom and passed through a second chamber, with its riverside open to the air, and reached a tiny apartment, where he motioned us to a divan. We squatted and looked round. Some empty bottles were the only furniture. But on the wall hung the picture we had come to see. It was a symbolic tree, and perhaps as much like a tree as what it symbolised was like the universe. Embedded in its trunk and branches were coloured circles and signs, and from them grew leaves and flowers of various hues. Below was a garden lit by a rising sun, and a black river where birds and beasts pursued and devoured one another. At our request he took a pointer and began to explain. I am not sure that I well understood or well remember, but something of this kind was the gist of it. In the beginning was Parabrahma, existing in himself, a white circle at the root of the tree. Whence sprang, following the line of the trunk, the egg of the universe, pregnant with all potentialities. Thence came the energy of Brahma; and of this there were three aspects, the Good, the Evil, and the Neuter, symbolised by three triangles in a circle. Thence the trunk continued, but also thence emerged a branch to the right and one to the left. The branch to the right was Illusion and ended in God; the branch to the left was Ignorance and ended in the Soul. Thus the Soul contemplates Illusion under the form of her gods. Up the line of the trunk came next the Energy of Nature; then Pride; then Egotism and Individuality; whence branched to one side Mind, to the other the senses and the passions. Then followed the elements, fire, air, water, and earth; then the vegetable creation; then corn; and then, at the summit of the tree, the primitive Man and Woman, type of Humanity. The garden below was Eden, until the sun rose; but with light came discord and conflict, symbolised by the river and the beasts. Evil and conflict belong to the nature of the created world; and the purpose of religion is by contemplation to enable the Soul to break its bodies, and the whole creation to return again to Parabrahma, whence it sprung.

Why did it spring? He did not know. For good or for evil? He could not say. What he knew he knew, and what he did not know he did not. "Some say there is no God and no Soul." He smiled. "Let them!" His certainty was complete. "Can the souls of men be reincarnated as animals?" He shrugged his shoulders. "Who can say?" I tried to put in a plea for the life of action, but he was adamant; contemplation and contemplation alone can deliver us. "Our good men," I said, "desire to make the world better, rather than to save their own souls." "Our sages," he replied, "are sorry for the world, but they know they cannot help it." His religion, I urged, denied all sense to the process of history. "There may be process in matter," he replied, "but there is none in God." I protested that I loved individual souls, and did not want them absorbed in Parabrahma. He laughed his good cheery laugh, out of his black beard, but it was clear that he held me to be a child, imprisoned in the Ego. I felt like that, and I hugged my Ego; so presently he ministered to it with sweetmeats. He even ate with us, and smoked a cigarette. He was the most human of men; so human that I thought his religion could not be as inhuman as it sounded. But it was the religion of the East, not of the West. It refused all significance to the temporal world; it took no account of society and its needs; it sought to destroy, not to develop, the sense and the power of Individuality. It did not say, but it implied, that creation was a mistake; and if it did not profess pessimism, pessimism was its logical outcome. I do not know whether it is the religion of a wise race; but I am sure it could never be that of a strong one.

But I loved the saint, and felt that he was a brother. Next morning, as we drifted past the long line of ghats, watching the bright figures on the terraces and stairs, the brown bodies in the water, and the Brahmins squatting on the shore, we saw him among the bathers, and he called to us cheerily. We waved our hands and passed on, never to see him again. East had not met West, but at least they had shaken hands across the gulf. The gulf, however, was profound; for many and many incarnations will be needed before one soul at least can come even to wish to annihilate itself in the Universal.

At 6 A.M. we got out of the train at a station on the Ganges; and after many delays found ourselves drifting down the river in a houseboat. To lie on cushions, sheltered from the sun, looking out on the moving shore, to the sound of the leisurely plash of oars, is elysium after a night in the train. We had seven hours of it and I could have wished it were more. But towards sunset we reached our destination. At the wharf a crowd of servants were waiting to touch the feet of our hosts who had travelled with us. They accompanied us through a tangle of palms, bananas, mangoes, canes, past bamboo huts raised on platforms of hard, dry mud, to the central place where a great banyan stood in front of the temple. We took off our shoes and entered the enclosure, followed by half the village, silent, dignified, and deferential. Over ruined shrines of red brick, elaborately carved, clambered and twined the sacred peepul tree. And within a more modern building were housed images of Krishna and Rhada, and other symbols of what we call too hastily idolatry. Outside was a circular platform of brick where these dolls are washed in milk at the great festivals of the year. We passed on, and watched the village weaver at his work, sitting on the ground with his feet in a pit working the pedals of his loom; while outside, in the garden, a youth was running up and down setting up, thread by thread, the long strands of the warp. By the time we reached the house it was dusk. A lamp was brought into the porch. Musicians and singers squatted on the floor. Behind them a white-robed crowd faded into the night. And we listened to hymns composed by the village saint, who had lately passed away.