Studies in Literature and History
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