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.'
But Bijli's intrusion into the harem is a grave breach of etiquette;
she is detected, and told to be gone, though the lady bears her no
malice. The incident brings home to her a sense of degradation; she
asks the Nawab to marry her, and her discontent is increased by his
refusal, until at last she escapes secretly from his house. The Nawab
follows, and finds her in a hut on the bank of a flooded river which
has stopped her flight; but after a really pathetic interview she
returns to her free life--and 'thus ended the romance of Bijli the
Dancer.'
In this short story, written with much truth and feeling, the style
and handling rises above the commonplace device of dressing up
European sentimentality in the garb and phraseology of Asia; and we
have, so far as can be judged, a fairly real picture of the inner and
the emotional side of native life in India, sufficiently tinged with
romantic colouring. The fascination which professional dancers often
exercise over natives of the highest rank is a well-known feature of
Indian society; and although the dancer is always a courtesan, yet to
invest her with a capacity for tender and honourable affection is by
no means to overstep the limits of probability. We have noticed this
book because it proves that the study of native manners, and
sympathetic insight into their feelings and character, still survive
among Anglo-Indians, albeit officials; and because it stands out in
quiet relief among tales of fierce wars and savage mutiny; it neither
chronicles the heroic deeds of Englishmen, nor does it devote even a
single page to the loves, sorrows, or comic misadventures that break
the monotony of a British cantonment.
_The Chronicles of Dustypore_, by H. S. Cunningham, takes us back
again from the sombre, half-veiled interior of an Indian household,
into the fierce light which beats upon English society at some station
in the sun-dried plains of the Punjab. We have here a sketch, half
satirical, half in earnest, of official work and ways, with one or two
personages that can be easily identified from among the provincial
notabilities of twenty years ago. The book, which had considerable
success in its time, will still provide interest and amusement for
those who enjoy an exceedingly clever delineation of familiar scenes
and characters; and it is in the main as true and lively a picture of
Anglo-Indian life as when it was first written. Here is the summer
landscape of the Sandy Tracts, a region just annexed to British
administration after the usual skirmish with, and discomfiture of, the
native ruler:
'Vast plains, a dead level but for an occasional clump of palms or
the dome of some despoiled and crumbling tomb, stretched away on
every side and ended in a hazy, quivering horizon that spoke of
infinite heat. Over these ranged herds of cattle and goats,
browsing on no one could see what; or bewildered buffaloes would
lie, panting and contented, in some muddy pool, with little but
horns, eyes, and nostrils exposed above the surface. Little
ill-begotten stunted plants worked hard to live and grow and to
weather the roaring fierce winds. The crows sat gasping,
open-beaked, as if protesting against having been born into so
sulphurous an existence. Here and there a well, with its huge
lumbering wheel and patient bullocks, went creaking and groaning
night and day, as if earth grudged the tiny rivulet coming so
toilfully from her dry breast, and gave it up with sighs of pain.
The sky was cloudless, pitiless, brazen. The sun rose into it
without a single fleck of vapour to mitigate its fierceness ... all
day it shone and glistened and blazed, until the very earth seemed
to crack with heat and the mere thought of it was pain.'
Such is the environment in which many English officers live and labour
for years; and this is the side of Anglo-Indian existence that is
unknown to, and consequently unappreciated by, the rapid tourist, who
runs by railway from one town to another during the bright cold winter
months, is delighted with the climate and the country, takes note of
the deficiencies or peculiarities of Anglo-Indians, and has a very
short memory for their hospitality. The narrative carries us, as a
matter of course, to a Himalayan Elysium, with its balls, picnics, and
its flirtations, among which the leading lady of the piece is drawn to
the brink of indiscretion, but steps happily back again into the
secure haven of domestic felicity. A good deal of excellent light
comedy and sparkling dialogue will always maintain for this novel a
creditable place upon the Indian list; and as an indirect illustration
of the social wall that separates ordinary English folk from the
population which surrounds them, it is complete, since we have here a
story plotted out upon the stage of a great Indian province which
contains absolutely no mention of the natives beyond occasional
necessary reference to the servants.
For a strong contrast to _Dustypore_, both in subject and style of
treatment, we may take a story which merits notice, even though it be
hardly long enough to be ranked among Indian novels. _The Bond of
Blood_, by R. E. Forrest (1896), draws, like _Bijli the Dancer_, its
incidents and their environment exclusively from Indian life; and the
book may be placed high in this class of difficult work, which few
have ventured to attempt, and where success has been very rare. It is
a study of peculiarly local manners, that may be also called
contemporary; for though the period belongs to the early years of this
century, yet the sure drawing from life of a skilful hand may still be
verified by those readers who actually know the customs and feelings
at the present day of the Rajput clans, among whom primitive ideas and
institutions have been less obliterated in the independent States than
in any other region of India. The descriptive and personal sketches
attest the writer's gift of close observation; there is good
workmanship in all the details; his sentences hit the mark and are
never overcharged or superfluous. The tale is of a dissipated Rajput
chief, to whom a moneylender has lent a large sum upon a bond which
has been endorsed by the sign-manual of the family Bhat, or hereditary
bard, herald, and genealogist--an office of great repute and
importance in every noble Rajput house. Debauchees and cunning
gamblers empty the chief's purse; the moneylender, an honest man
enough in his way, is obliged to press him for the sum due; until at
last the bewildered chief is persuaded by one of the gamblers to
declare flatly that he will not pay at all, whereupon the creditor
falls back upon the surety. Now the Bhat has pledged upon the bond not
his property but his life, according to an ancient and authentic
custom among Rajput folk, as formerly throughout India, whereby a man
who has no other means of enforcing a just claim against a powerful
debtor has always the resource of bringing down upon him a fearful
curse by committing suicide before his door. The Rajput chief pretends
that the bond is illegal and void, being founded upon an obsolete
custom disallowed by the English rulers; but in truth he has brought
himself to believe that the blood penalty will not really be paid, and
he is struck with horror when the Bhat, after formal and public
warning, stabs his own mother in the chief's presence, whereupon the
curse falls and clings to the family. We may add that the substitution
of the Bhat's mother for himself as an expiatory victim is in
accordance with accepted precedents on such occasions, while it makes
room for a pathetic situation, and greatly enhances the dramatic
interest of the closing scene. Here we have the antique Oriental
version of the story in Shakespeare's _Merchant of Venice_, where
Shylock takes the same kind of security from Antonio, upon whose
person he subsequently demands execution of his bond of blood; nor
does the law refuse it to him. But the Hindu custom is so far milder
than the Venetian code that the Rajput Shylock could not have rejected
a tender of full payment in cash. Mr. Forrest's tale might be turned
into an effective stage-tragedy if the main incident were not too
shockingly improbable for Europeans, although to an Indian audience it
would be credible enough. The final scene of the mother's death is
stamped on the reader's imagination by the writer's power of giving
intense significance not only to the speech but to slight movements of
the actors, so that the mental picture becomes almost objective, while
the strained expectation of the crowd makes itself felt by the force
of the words.
'"Will you redeem the bond?" asks the herald once more.
'"Say 'No,'" exclaims Takht Singh.
'"No," shouts Hurdeo Singh (the chief).
'"Then blood must be shed at your door, and the life forfeit paid
at your threshold, so that the curse may alight upon you and your
house."
'He draws the dagger from its sheath. He had not laid his hand
upon its handle in the same manner that he would have laid it on
the hilt of his sword, but the reverse way to that; he puts the
palm of his hand under it and not over it, so he could best use it
in the way he intended to use it--so could he best strike the blow
he meant to strike.
'"Begone! Begone!" shouts Hurdeo Singh, waving him away with his
hand.
'The people around stand fixed as statues, eyes straining, necks
craning. The herald stretches his left arm behind his mother, and
she, throwing open her _chudder_, leans back against it....
'The money-lender had given a sudden cry, stretched out his hand,
uttered some words.
'When Hurdeo Singh had beheld the herald raise his right arm, his
own had gone up with it, and from his mouth had come the cry,
"Don't! Don't."
'But it was too late. The herald had raised his arm, turned round
his head, and plunged the sharp stiletto into his mother's breast.'
It would be scarcely possible in an article that ranges over the light
literature of Anglo-India to omit mentioning the name of Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, who is the most prominent and by far the most popular of
Anglo-Indian authors. Yet our reference to his writings must be very
brief, since most of them lie beyond the scope of our present subject;
for although Mr. Kipling's short stories are famous, and he is a
consummate artist in black and white, yet in the complete edition of
his volumes up to date there is, in fact, but one full-sized Indian
novel, and for this he is only responsible in part. Nor, assuming that
the Indian chapters of the _Naulakha_[14] may be ascribed to him,
would it be fair criticism to treat them as good samples of his work,
or as illustrating his distinctive genius. The attempt in this story
to bring together West and East, and to strike bold contrasts by
setting down a Yankee fresh from Colorado before the palace gate of a
Maharaja in the sands of western Rajputana, is too daring a venture;
and the plot's development, though here and there are some touches of
true vision and some vigorous passages, labours under the weight of
its extravagant improbability. The American's restless energy, brought
face to face with Oriental immobility, expresses itself in the
following way:
'It made him tired to see the fixedness, the apathy, and
lifelessness of this rich and populous world, which should be up
and stirring by rights--trading, organising, inventing, building
new towns, making the old ones keep up with the procession, laying
new railroads, going in for fresh enterprises, and keeping things
humming.
'"They've got resources enough," he said. "It isn't as if they had
the excuse that the country's poor. It's a good country. Move the
population of a lively Colorado town to Rhatore, set up a good
local paper, organise a board of trade, and let the world know what
is here, and we'd have a boom in six months that would shake the
empire. But what's the use? They're dead. They're mummies. They're
wooden images. There isn't enough real, old-fashioned, downright
rustle and razzle-dazzle and 'git up and git' in Gokral Seetaram to
run a milk-cart."'
Such indeed might be the sentiments of an eager speculator who found
himself among primitive folk. But the discord of ideas puts the whole
piece so completely out of tune as to produce only a harsh and jarring
sensation; the rough Western man is thoroughly out of his element, and
flounders heavily, like a cockney among mediaeval crusaders. This must
be taken in fairness to be the result of collaboration, for in his own
short stories Mr. Kipling never commits solecisms of the kind; on the
contrary, he excels in the shading of strong local colours, and in
the rapid, unerring delineation of characters that stand out in clear
relief, yet blend with and act upon each other when they encounter.
But Mr. Kipling's volumes would require a separate article to
themselves, so that we will merely take this occasion of recording our
wish that he may some day turn his unique faculty of painting real
Indian pictures toward the composition of a novel which shall _not_ be
about Anglo-Indian society (for the thin soil of that field has
already been over-harrowed), but shall give a true and lively
rendering of the thoughts which strike an imaginative Englishman when
he surveys the whole moving landscape of our Indian empire, watches
the course of actual events, and tries to forecast its probable
destiny.
It has been manifestly impossible in this brief article to do more
than touch upon a few books that may illustrate the prominent
characteristics, and the general place in light literature, of Indian
novels. This must explain why we have omitted several other works, of
which _Transgression_[15] is the latest. In this tale we have a sketch
of life on the North-West Frontier at the present day, with some
well-known incidents of the Afridi War of 1897-98 introduced, and so
coloured from the writer's own point of view as to convey, under a
thin varnish of fiction, some sharp and sarcastic criticism on the
management of affairs, the politics of the Government, and the
personal behaviour of certain officials, who can be at once
identified. Although the book is not without interest as a true
account of hazardous and stirring frontier duties, we are bound to
repeat our warning that this abuse of the novel for controversial
purposes is not only unfair, but profoundly inartistic. No literary
success, but failure and the confusion of styles, lies that way.
What, then, are the conclusions which we may draw from this brief
survey of the more prominent and typical Indian novels? To the
repertory of English fiction, which is perhaps the largest and most
varied that any national literature contains, they have undoubtedly
made a not unworthy contribution; for we may agree that fiction has
some, if not the highest, value when it produces an animated
representation of life and manners, even upon a limited and distant
field. In the present instance the narrow range of plot and character
that may be observed in the pure Anglo-Indian novel reflects the
uniformity of a society which consists almost entirely, outside the
Presidency capitals on the sea-coast, of civil and military
officials--a society that is also upon one level of class and of age,
for among the English in India there are neither old men nor boys and
girls; the men and women are in the prime of life, with a number of
small children. This age-limit lops off from both ends of human
existence a certain proportion of the characters that are available
for filling up the canvas of the social novelist at home. And it is in
truth a peculiar feature, not only of Anglo-Indian society, but of the
Anglo-Indian administration, because the enforced retirement of almost
every officer after the age of fifty-five years greatly diminishes the
influence of weighty and mature experience exercised by the senior men
in the services and government of most countries. In regard to the
equality of class it may be observed that here also the lack of
variety produces a similar dearth of materials; we miss the
picturesque contrasts of rich and poor, of townsfolk and country folk,
of the diverse groups which make up a European population. The 'short
and simple annals of the poor' cannot be woven into the Indian
tapestry which records higher and broader scenes; the peasantry, for
example, whose quaint figures and idioms are so useful in English
novels, do not come into the Anglo-Indian tale. They cannot be blended
in fiction with the foreign element because they are wholly apart in
reality. In short, the whole company that play upon the exclusively
Anglo-Indian stage belong to one grade of society, and the hero is
invariably a military officer.
The most popular of Anglo-Indian novels are probably those which deal
in exact reproduction of ordinary incidents and conversation, related
in a sprightly and humorous style. This accords with the taste of
present-day readers, many of whom take up a book only for the
momentary amusement that it gives them, and are well content with
interminable dialogues that do little more than echo, with a certain
spice of epigram and smart repartee, the commonplaces interchanged
among clever people at a country house or in a London drawing-room.
Nevertheless, we believe that Anglo-Indian fiction is seen at its best
in the novel of action, since war and love-making must still, as
formerly, rule the whole kingdom of romance; since as emotional forces
they are the same in every climate and country. Each successive
campaign in India, from the first Afghan War to the latest expedition
across the Afridi frontier, has furnished the Anglo-Indian writer with
a new series of striking incidents that can be used for his heroic
deeds and dire catastrophes, for new landscapes and figures, all of
them bearing the very form and stamp of impressive reality. If he is
artist enough to avoid abusing these advantages, if he is neither an
extravagant colourist nor a mere copyist or compiler, he has this
fresh field to himself, he can give us a stirring narrative of
frontier adventures, he can sketch in the aspect of a country or the
distinctive qualities of a people that have preserved many of the
features which in Europe have now vanished into the dim realms of
early romance. His danger lies, as we have seen from some examples
already quoted, in the temptation to make too much use of the
attractive materials that are readily found to hand in military
records or in such a real tragedy as the Sepoy mutiny, so that the
novel is liable to become little more than authentic history related
in a glowing, exuberant style of writing and portraiture.
In short, the Indian novel belongs to the objective outdoor class; it
is full of open air and activity, and the introspective psychological
vein is almost entirely wanting. There are, indeed, passages which
indicate that peculiar sense of the correlation, so to speak, of the
environment with the moods and feelings of men, the influence upon the
human mind of nature--a sense which has inspired some of our finest
poetry, and which is so well rendered by the best Russian novelists,
by Tourgueneff and by Tolstoi. One work of Tolstoi's, _Les Cosaques_,
might be especially recommended for study to the Anglo-Indian novelist
of the future, as an example of the true impress that can be made upon
a reader's mind by the literary art, when it succeeds in giving vivid
interest to the picture of a solitary officer's life upon a dull and
distant frontier.