The Young Barbarians, when Rome's ecclesiastical polity got hold of
them, were persuaded by their anxious foster-mother to sell their
Scandinavian birthright of imagination for an unintelligible, theopathic
mess of mystic Graeco-Syrian pottage. But the "demons," though driven
generally from the field, lurked about in holes and corners, watching
their opportunity. They took refuge in bypaths, leaving the high road:
they lay in ambush in a thicket, whence nothing ever could dislodge
them: that of fairy tales and fables.
In India, the "demons," _i.e._ the fairy tales and fables, have never
had to hide. But the fairy tales of India differ from the fairy tales of
England, much as their fairies do themselves. The fairies of Europe are
children, little people: and it is to children that fairy stories are
addressed. The child is the agent, as well as the appeal. In India it is
otherwise: the fairy stories are addressed to the grown-up, and the
fairies resemble their audience: they are grown up too. They form an
intermediate, and so to say, irresponsible class of beings, half-way
between the mortals and the gods. These last two are very serious
things: they have their work to do: not so the fairies, who exist as it
were for the sake of existence--"art for art's sake"--and have nothing
to do but what people who have nothing to do always do do--to get
themselves and other people into mischief. They are distinguished by
three noteworthy characteristics. In the first place, they are
_possessors of the sciences, i.e._ magic, and this it is which gives
them their proper name (_Widyadhara_),[1] which is almost equivalent to
our _wizard_. Secondly, every Widyadhara can change his shape at will
into anything he pleases: they are all _shape-changers_ (_Kamarupa_).
And finally, their element is air: they live in the air, and are thus
denominated _sky-goers, sky-roamers, air-wanderers_, in innumerable
synonyms. These are the peculiar attributes of the fairies of Ind.
[Footnote 1: Some kindly critics of these stories have objected to the
W, here or elsewhere. The answer to this is, that European scholars have
taught everybody to pronounce everything wrong, by _e.g._ introducing
into Sanskrit a letter that it does not contain. There is no V in
Sanskrit, nor can any Hindoo, without special training, pronounce it: he
says, for instance, _walwe_ for _valve_.]
Like many other persons in India (and out of it) who are far from being
either fairies or wizards, they are extraordinarily touchy, and
violently resentful of scorn or slight: things not nice to anybody, but
the Wizards are not Christians, and generally take dire revenge. A very
trifling provocation will set them in a flame. The Widyadhari lady is
jealousy incarnate. Jealousy, be it noted, is a thing that many people
much misunderstand. Ask anyone the question, where in literature is
jealousy best illustrated, and ninety-nine people in a hundred will
reply, Othello. But, as Pushkin excellently says, Othello is not
naturally a jealous man at all: he is his exact antipodes, a confiding,
unsuspicious nature.[2] Jealousy not only distrusts on evidence; it
distrusts before evidence and without it; it anticipates evidence and
condemns without a trial: it does not wait even for "trifles light as
air," but constructs them for itself out of nonentity. Its essence is
causeless and irrational suspicion. Your true jealous nature never
trusts anything or anybody for an instant. Othello is of noble soul: no
jealous man ever was or could be. With women, it is not quite the same;
but even here, real nobility of character excludes the possibility of
jealousy, because it trusts, until it is deceived, and then its glass is
shattered, and its love gone beyond recall: sympathy is annihilated.
Compare Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth: the one, the noblest, the
other, the meanest creature that ever sat upon a throne. Mary trusted
even Darnley till she discovered that he was beneath every sentiment but
one: Good Queen Bess never trusted anyone at all. _Mauvaise espece de
femme!_
[Footnote 2: This "detached reflection" of Russia's national poet is
endorsed by Dostoyeffsky, the greatest master of jealousy that the world
has ever seen.]
And so, they are not much to be depended on, these Wizards; anybody
taking up with one of them, male or female, had better be careful. You
can never tell where you are with them; their affection is unstable;
they are fickle, as might be expected from creatures of the air: their
feelings are as variable as their shapes. They can be just as hideously
ugly as unimaginably beautiful. The stories that deal with them contain
a moral entirely in harmony with all Indian ideas: it is a mistake not
to stick to your own caste. When two of different castes are thrown
together, the trouble inevitably begins. The gipsies, who came
apparently from Sind, brought this notion into Europe, in a form not
previously familiar to it. That difference of kind is insurmountable, is
the fundamental axiom of Indian theory and practice. The owl to the owl,
the crow to the crow: otherwise, Nemesis and catastrophe. _A Syrup of
the Bees_[3] is another instance.
[Footnote 3: The title has a secondary meaning (with reference to its
place in the series), _she that is loaded with the nectar of Maheshwara,
i.e._ the moon that he wears.]
* * * * *
Everywhere to-day we hear people singing a very different song: from all
sides is dinned into our ears the cant of humanity, "our common
humanity." In the meantime, men differ in many ways more than they
agree, and the differences of humanity are practically far more vital
than the common base. Just as, though all men have weight, yet
gravitation simply by reason of its universality does not constitute an
element of politics, and is altogether a negligible quantity, fact
though it be, so is it with humanity: the generic identity is nothing,
the peculiar distinctions all. The world is not like a plain, but an
irregular region such as that of the Alps or Himalaya, consisting of
inaccessible peaks that separate deep valleys, at the bottom of which
live parcels of humanity drowned in thick fogs or mists of totally
different colours and intensities, that distort and transmogrify
everything they see: so that if here and there any single individual
succeeds in climbing, by dint of toil or special circumstances, to the
tops, where in the clear ether all the situation lies spread out in its
truth before his eye, he will find that he has thereby only cut himself
absolutely off from communion and sympathy, not only with the denizens
of his own valley, but that of all the others too. From that moment he
ceases to be intelligible to the rest. No reasoning of his can ever
touch them, or succeed in opening their eyes, because their error is not
one of reason, but of perception: they cannot, because they do not, see
things as he sees them: the mists,[4] with all their refraction and
delusive transformation, are always there. Say what he will, he will not
awake them: he will gain nothing in return for all his efforts but
ridicule, abuse, or neglect. So Disraeli, in his generation, seemed to
himself to be like one pouring, from a golden goblet, water upon sand.
To be above the level of humanity is to be counted, till after you are
dead, as one who is below.
[Footnote 4: No mere learning will remove them. Pundits, as a rule, end
where they began, "lost in the gloom of uninspired research."]
And this is the exact condition in the India of to-day. The irony of
fate has thrown together, as though by some vast geological convulsion,
the dwellers in two valleys, one of whom sees everything through, so to
say, a red mist, and the other through a blue: they move about and mix
in a way together, totally unable to see things in the same light: and
all the while this melancholy cuckoo-cry of _common humanity_ fills the
air with its reiteration, and people persist in handling the situation
with a wilful and almost criminal determination to ignore what stares
them in the face, and by so doing, still further accentuate the very
thing they will not see. If you take two men who are infinitely far from
being brothers, and forcibly unite them, on the pretext that they are,
you will produce by irritation an enmity between them that would never
have existed, had they been let alone.
* * * * *
I stood, a little while since, on the very edge of a plateau, that fell
down sheer four thousand feet or more, into the valley of Mysore. Far in
the distance to the north, the dense dark green forest jungle stretched
away like a carpet, intersected here and there by Moyar's silver
streams, with here and there a velvet boss, where a rounded hill stood
up out of the plain. That carpet, as it seemed from the height, so
uniform and close in its texture, is made of great trees, under which
wander wild elephants in herds. To right and left, the valley ran both
ways out of sight, like a monster chasm with one side removed. And in
the air below, above, around, light wreaths and ragged fragments of
cloud and mist floated and streamed and drifted, casting the most
beautifully deep blue shifting shadows not only on the earth, but on the
air, like waterfalls of colour, half hiding and half framing the distant
view, and cutting the sunlight into intermittent fountains of a golden
semi-purple rain that fell and changed, now here, now there, now, as you
looked upon them, gone, now suddenly shooting out elsewhere to transform
every colour that they touched into something other than it was, like a
magic show suddenly thrown out by the Creator in the silent and
unfrequented solitude of his hills, for sheer delight and as it were
simply for his own amusement, not caring in the least whether there
might be any eye open to catch and worship such a beautiful profusion of
his power, or not. For, strange! the spell and mysterious appeal of all
such momentary glimpses lies, not in what you see, but in what you do
not hear: it is the dead silence, the stillness, that by a paradox seems
to be the undertone, or background, of moving mist and lonely mountain
peaks.
So as I stood, gazing, there came suddenly from the east, a whisper, a
mutter; a low sound, that suggested a distant mixture of wind and sea.
And I turned round, and looked, and I saw a sight that I never shall see
again; such a sight as a man can hardly expect to see twice, in the time
of a single life. Rain--but was it rain?--rain in a terrific wall, a
dark precipice of appalling gloom, rain that rose like a colossal
curtain from earth to heaven and north to south, was coming up the
valley straight towards me, and it struck me, as I saw it, with a thrill
that was almost dread. That was what the people saw, long ago, when the
Deluge suddenly came upon them. It came on, steadily, swiftly, like a
thing with orders to carry out, and a purpose to fulfil, cutting the
valley athwart with the edge of its solid front, sharp as that of a
knife laid on a slice of bread: a black ominous mass of elemental
obliteration, out of which there came a voice like the rushing of a
flood and the beating of wings, mixed with a kind of wail, like the
noise of the cordage of a ship, in a gale at sea. It blotted out
creation, and in the phrase of old Herodotus, day suddenly became night.
A moment later, I stood in whirling rain and fog that made sight useless
a yard away, as wet as one just risen from the sea, with a soul on the
very verge of cursing the Creator, for so abruptly dropping the curtain
on his show: forgetting, in my ingratitude, first, the favour he had
done me; secondly, how many were those who had not seen; lastly, and
above all, that it was the very dropping of that stupendous curtain that
gave its finishing touch and climax to the show. For he knows best,
after all. Introduce into Nature were it but a single atom of stint, of
parsimony, of preservation, of regret for loss; and the power, and with
it, the sublimity of the infinite is gone. Were Nature to pose, to
attitudinise for contemplation, even for the fraction of a second, she
would annihilate the condition on which reposes all her charm. Ruthless
destruction, even of her own choicest works, is the badge of her
inexhaustible omnipotence: add but a touch of pity, and you fall back to
the littleness and feebleness of man.
And I mused, as I departed: how can that be communicated to others,
which cannot even be described at all? And if so, in the things of the
body, how much more with the things of the soul? Who shall convey to the
souls that stumble and jostle in the foggy valleys, any glimpse of the
visions, denied to them, above; any spark of comprehension of the things
that they might discern, on the tops of the pure and silent hills, that
stand uncomprehended, kissing heaven above the fog?