That mischief-making deity, the god of Love, who delights in getting
others into trouble, got himself, once upon a time, if we may trust the
poets, into trouble of no ordinary kind. For seeing, as he thought,
his opportunity, he attempted to inflame Maheshwara himself with
passion for the virgin Daughter of the Snow, who was standing shyly
just in front of him, like an incarnation of irresistible seduction,
raised to the highest power by the contrast between her coarse bark
garments and the perfect beauty of the figure they enclosed. And then
it was that the biter was bit, and Love himself was suddenly reduced to
ashes for his impudence by a pulverising glance from the angry
Maheshwara's terrible third eye, that opened for an instant, for
unhappy Love's discomfiture, like the door of a blast-furnace upon a
moth. And the pale young Moon looked out upon it all, from the hair of
the angry god; the pale new Moon, that very Digit, who gives the title
to our story, being therein described as so superlatively lovely, as to
be capable of causing the very god of Love to rise from his own ashes.
For it is to be remembered that Love's ashes are no common ashes: they
have in them something of the phoenix; they are always ready to revive.
The beautiful lament of Rati (Love's wife), over the ashes of her
husband (overheard by Kálidás), was really, had she only known,
superfluous. He was sure to come to life again. Or, to speak plain
English, a great passion is immortal: its very ashes are never
absolutely dead. Breathe close upon them, and, as one of our own poets
has said, it may be flame will leap. And this is the solid reason why
the old Hindoo sages denoted both Love and Recollection by one and the
same word. Memory, remembrance, regret, reminiscence;--all these are
clearly closely akin, near relatives of Love. What is indifferent to
us we soon forget; but we remember what we love, and the longer, in
proportion as we love it more. And thus it comes about, that the most
formidable obstacle to the would-be sage, the candidate for honours, as
we might call him, in renunciation of the world, is his own
recollection, his memory of the past. The object of the sage,
according to the old Hindoo doctrine, is to become absolute master of
himself (_jitátmá_), to render himself completely superior, or rather
indifferent, to the "attachment" of all mundane clogs. The ordinary
mortal is a prisoner, tied, bound in bondage, or _attached_ (_sakta_),
to and by the objects of delusion and sense. Whoever aims at
emancipation must first, by a long and strenuous course of penance and
austerity, sever these attachments, till even though he still remains
among them, they run off him like water from a duck; and he goes on
living, according to the classic formula, like a wheel that continues
to revolve when the original impetus has ceased, or like a branch that
goes on swaying after the departure of the bird. He is awake, as
opposed to those who still remain blinded by illusion; he is _free_, as
contrasted with the bound; his soul is unattached. But now, there is
one thing, from which it may very well be doubted, whether even any
sage, no matter what his elevation, was ever wholly free--regret. The
strongest soul possesses the most powerful recollection, and unless
madness intervene, to cut the thread by obliterating memory, there are
things that refuse to be forgotten. And where recollection is, there
is sure to be were it but a vestige of regret; for memory is love. And
what, then, is it, that is of all things most peculiarly the object of
regret; that laughs at all efforts to reduce it to oblivion and
nonentity; that refuses to be driven into the _oubliettes_ of any soul?
Needless to say, a woman. And therefore it is, that she is regarded,
in Oriental mysticism, as beyond all other things the enemy of
emancipation; the clog _par excellence_; the fetter of the soul; the
everlastingly regretted, the unforgettable and unforgotten; the
irreducible residuum; the inextinguishable spark among the ashes of the
past. Was it not Swift, among whose papers, after his death, was found
a packet, labelled in his own handwriting: _Only a woman's hair_? And
did not Coriolanus find in this the thing to thwart him, the obstacle
that stood between his resolution and the overthrow of Rome? But we
need not go to history or fiction to prove a thing endorsed by the
experience of almost every man and woman since the beginning of the
world. Everybody knows, what one has said, that youth is a blunder:
manhood a struggle: old age a regret. Death is preceded by a sigh; did
ever anybody die, who had absolutely nothing to regret? And regret, in
the language of the old Hindoos, is nothing but the ashes of dead love,
not utterly extinct; and therefore, since all love is more or less
divine, _the ashes of a god_.
The ethical value of India's beautiful mythology is not sufficiently
appreciated in Europe, whose people seem to think that virtue was
discovered by themselves, and have learned from Xenophanes and Plato,
S. Paul, S. Augustine, and other shallow politicians to deny all
morality to polytheism,[1] condemning the whole of antiquity for the
vices of the old metropolis of Rome, which itself was no worse than
many modern cities. And India is a survival from antiquity. But it is
not, as some suppose, a sink of immorality; nor a barbarous _tabula
rasa_, as others seem to think, with everything to learn in ethics, on
which anything may be written that you please. The arrogance of
ignorance is the cause of these misunderstandings. The Hindoos have a
fable that the _chakora_, a legendary partridge, subsists on the beams
of the moon: and the bird is no bad emblem of themselves. In the ruin
of all their ancient glories, the one thing that remains to them is the
thesaurus of religion and mythology preserved, like palæozoic flies in
amber, in the crystal of their ancient tongue, whose presiding genius
is the moon. For with them it is not as with us. Here, in the young
nations of the West, literature and religion are not one thing, but
two, with essences and origins altogether different and distinct,
though now and then, a Milton or a Dante may, by welding them together,
produce something more analogous to Indian poetry. For in India
religion and literature are inseparable: they look back not to Greece
on the one hand and Judæa on the other, but to a sacred compound of the
two, all the nearer because it is their very own, whereas to us both
Greece and Judæa are foreign, not only the places but the tongues, and
likely in the immediate future to become still stranger than they are.
This is why nobody can possibly understand anything of India who is
ignorant of Sanskrit, which is the key to India, and from which all the
modern local idioms, be they Aryan or not, borrow almost everything
literary, religious, or philosophical that they contain.[2] And this
is just where all the missionaries stumble. Few or none of them
realise what it is they have against them: an obstacle which even
Ganesha could hardly overcome. You must obliterate the languages of
India, ancient and modern, before you can alter its religion. It will
not be easy, for when you have succeeded in consigning to oblivion both
Sanskrit and Pálí, which seems every day less probable, you will still
have to reckon with the vernaculars, with Tulsi Das and Tukarám, Kabir,
and a score of other Bibles of the Hindoo peoples, not to mention the
legion of their legends, stories, proverbs, festivals, and songs. Fed,
like his own _chakora_, upon these, the Hindoo of good caste finds it
impossible to reconcile his traditional conception of saintliness,
always ascetic, and based on renunciation, with the spectacle of
comfortable missionaries, admirably housed, riding good horses and
possessing coquettish wives whose ample wardrobes savour not of
sanctity but of Paris. Buddha, the missionary _par excellence_, was no
low-caste man, making a living out of his profession, but an aristocrat
who turned his back upon the world; and a dozen English dukes or earls
coming out to India to practise voluntary asceticism would do more to
convince the Hindoos of Christian religion and sincerity than any
number of missionary conferences, in which the real obstacle to
missionary effort, the fact, well known to the Hindoo, that he is
invited to accede to a religion abandoned by the intelligence of
Europe, is scrupulously hidden out of sight. From every line of his
old literature the Hindoo learns the essence of religion better than
any missionary can teach him. It is devotion: of a woman, to her
husband; of a man, to his duty, his _dharma_; his ancestors, his
family, his mother-tongue. Nothing ever will persuade a sane Hindoo of
reputable family to belong to a religion which bids him, by injunction,
sanction, or example, to abandon his ancestors, desert his family, eat
beef, drink spirits, and apply to the divorce court. So it is that we
see in India at the present day the very same phenomenon that was
exhibited in the agony of the ancient world, when Christianity was an
asylum for the outcaste and the criminal and the pariah, a refuge for
the destitute, like Romulean Rome in Livy's legend.
This old Sanskrit language, then, in which dwells the spirit of a
classic paganism not less beautiful, and holier than Hellas,
pre-Christian, idolatrous,[3] preserves among other things opposed to
Western modernism an element of charm, which in Europe too much
knowledge is destroying: the element of distance, of the unknown, of
that which is outside the map, beyond, afar. For us, the time is gone,
when, as Plutarch says, geographers filled up the emptinesses beyond
the limits known with bogs or deserts or wild beasts. But Hindoo
stories move in an enchanted land, a thing to dream over like "the
world as known to Homer," or the scraps of mythological geography in
Pindar's Odes, when, for example, Rhodes was not an island, but lay
lurking, before the gods divided earth, in the briny hollows of the
sea.[4] And as we pore on it, we feel ready to murmur with Voltaire,
that error has its worth as well as truth. Did the discovery of
America make up for the lost mystery that brooded like the spirit over
the waters of the dim Atlantic, when even Hibernia was half a myth,
_ultra quam ad occasum nulla invenitur habitabilis terra, nisi miranda
loca quæ vidit S. Brandanus in Oceano_?[5] The old literature of
India, its epics and _itihases_, are the very home of mythical
geography, of lotus lands, white islands, seas of milk, and distant
hills behind which, far beyond the sea, the suns go down to die, which
never even Sindbad saw. It is all one gigantic dream, fairy tale
reduced to a kind of system, where wild imagination is reality, and the
commonplace is not. Teach the Hindoo the earth goes round the sun; it
may be so: but in his heart there echoes some scrap of ancient poetry,
where every sun descends to rest behind the western hill. Would you
blame him for choosing rather to err with Kálidás and Walmiki, than go
right with some elementary manual of geography? For him, the dream is
the reality; and the spell is in the language in which these things are
written: who does not know the language cannot understand the spell.
Your Mill[6] and your Macaulay argue on these matters like blind men
reasoning on colour. Only that grows never old, which never lived.
You cannot kill a dream, because it is already dead.
Down in the west of England, on the very edge of the sea, I know a
hill, which had it been in India, pagan India, would have been sacred
long ago to the Daughter of the Snow; so exactly does its giant sweep
of smooth green turf resemble the outline of a colossal woman's breast.
And there on a yellow evening, I lay and mused. And I said to my own
soul: This is not quite the golden glow of my Indian Eve, for it is
just a little chilly; and yet, yonder is a hill worthy to be haunted by
Párwati herself. Only the flowers would all be strange to her; for
certainly she would not recognise these primroses and buttercups, this
gorse. And yet, some things might deceive her; for surely she would
take Lundy Island for the very western mountain, behind which at this
very moment the sun is going down.
And as I pondered on her and her husband, all at once I exclaimed: O
Wearer of the Moony Tire, who art thyself the Past, the Present, and
the Future, didst thou for all thy knowledge of Time's secrets ever
dream, that one day thy worshippers would all fall under the direction
of this misty little island in a far-off northern sea? Was it irony in
the Creator, who makes and ruins even worlds in sport, to subject thy
dreaming millions to the Western men of business, less like them than
any other people on the surface of the earth? Had India's gods
deserted her, as once Judæa's did, or wert thou buried in a thousand
years of Yóg, when the Moguls and Maráthas, the Clives and the Dupleix
were fighting for the heavy crown glittering with barbaric pearl and
gold? And yet, what use in asking, since doubtless thou art far away
among thy own Himálaya's still undiscovered snows.
And as I spoke, I looked, and lo! there before me was the almost
imperceptible Digit of the Moon, hanging low in the evening sky just
over Lundy Island and the sea. And instantly I exclaimed: Aha!
Maheshwara, I was wrong, and I utterly forgot thy quality of universal
presence, for sure I am that where thy Digit is, thou art thyself not
far away. So then tell me, was it thy wish to punish thy devotees, or
was it by thy negligence they fell? And what shall be the end?
And as I gazed upon the Moon, I heard the laughter of the deity in the
thunder of the waves. And presently he said: Foolish Western, there
are many other things thou hast forgotten, as well as my ubiquity.
Dost thou not remember what one of thy own philosophers has said:
[Greek: Theòs anaítios, aitía d heloménou]? Or hast thou actually
forgotten the wisdom of all my own old Hindoo sages, that thou wouldst
saddle the responsibility for the ripening of the fruit of works, on
me? As my people's works have been, so is their condition: they are
but gathering the fruit of the tree of their own wrong-doing in a
previous existence. And the crimes of a former birth dog them like
death, and lie on them like a shadow: they only have themselves to
blame, and now there is no help for it, but in themselves. And they
must work out their own emancipation, not by petulance and violence,
but by penance and austerity.
And I listened in silence to the deity, and when he finished, I looked
up. And after a while, I said to myself: Now, surely, that crystal
moon is the diadem of deity; and the voice of God is the murmur of the
sea.
_Christmas, 1910._
[1] The old argument: there is immorality in the stones of the gods;
_ergo_, the men must be the same, is a monotheist calumny. Books like
Kingsley's _Roman and Teuton_, where all the vice is imputed to the
Roman, and all the virtue to the Teuton, are merely an inversion of the
fact. "The truth is," says Professor Lewis Campbell on Æschylus, "that
while religious custom lay upon the Greeks with a weight almost as deep
as life, the changing clouds of mythology rested lightly on their
minds, and were in their very nature, to some extent, the sport of
fancy and imagination." This is equally true of the Hindoos.
[2] The _dictum_ of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, whose India is merely a
misrepresented Anglo-India, that _there ain't no Ten Commandments_
there, is superficially a truism, and essentially a foolish libel. No
man has done more to caricature and misinterpret India, in the
interests of military vulgarity, than this popular writer, to whom
Hindoo India is a book with seven seals.
[3] The observations of Mr. Theophilus G. Pinches, on the means by
which, in ancient Babylon, "an enlightened monotheism and the grossest
polytheism could, and did, exist side by side," apply accurately to
India. (_The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records of
Assyria and Babylonia_, p. 10.)
[4] Olymp. vii.
[5] _Apud Bocharti Phaleg_. p. 184.
[6] James Mill's criticism of the Indian ethic is a criminal offence, a
sin against literature. The coryphæus of the Inductive Philosophy,
dogmatising on a language of which he could not even read a single word!