Hindu literature Part 71

KASYAPA.--At last, my daughter, thou art happy, and hast gained thy heart's desire. Indulge, then, no feeling of resentment against thy partner. See, now, Though he repulsed thee, 'twas the sage's curse That clouded his remembrance; 'twas the curse That made thy tender husband harsh towards thee.

Soon as the spell was broken, and his soul Delivered from its darkness, in a moment Thou didst gain thine empire o'er his heart.

So on the tarnished surface of a mirror No image is reflected, till the dust That dimmed its wonted l.u.s.tre is removed.

KING.--Holy father, see here the hope of my royal race.

[_Takes his child by the hand_.

KASYAPA.--Know that he, too, will become the monarch of the whole earth.

Observe, Soon, a resistless hero, shall he cross The trackless ocean, borne above the waves In an aerial car; and shall subdue The earth's seven sea-girt isles.[44] Now has he gained, As the brave tamer of the forest-beasts, The t.i.tle Sarva-damana; but then Mankind shall hail him as King Bharata, And call him the supporter of the world.

KING.--We cannot but entertain the highest hopes of a child for whom your highness performed the natal rites.

ADITI.--My revered husband, should not the intelligence be conveyed to Kanwa, that his daughter's wishes are fulfilled, and her happiness complete? He is Sakoontala's foster-father. Menaka, who is one of my attendants, is her mother, and dearly does she love her daughter.

SAKOONTALa [_aside_].--The venerable matron has given utterance to the very wish that was in my mind.

KASYAPA.--His penances have gained for him the faculty of omniscience, and the whole scene is already present to his mind's eye.

KING.--Then most a.s.suredly he cannot be very angry with me.

KASYAPA.--Nevertheless it becomes us to send him intelligence of this happy event, and hear his reply. What, ho there!

PUPIL [_entering_].--Holy father, what are your commands?

KASYAPA.--My good Galava, delay not an instant, but hasten through the air and convey to the venerable Kanwa, from me, the happy news that the fatal spell has ceased, that Dushyanta's memory is restored, that his daughter Sakoontala has a son, and that she is once more tenderly acknowledged by her husband.

PUPIL.--Your highness's commands shall be obeyed. [_Exit._

KASYAPA.--And now, my dear son, take thy consort and thy child, re-ascend the car of Indra, and return to thy imperial capital.

KING.--Most holy father, I obey.

KASYAPA.--And accept this blessing-- For countless ages may the G.o.d of G.o.ds, Lord of the atmosphere, by copious showers Secure abundant harvest to thy subjects; And thou by frequent offerings preserve The Thunderer's friendship! Thus, by interchange Of kindly actions, may you both confer Unnumbered benefits on earth and heaven!

KING.--Holy father, I will strive, as far as I am able, to attain this happiness.

KASYAPA.--What other favor can I bestow on thee, my son?

KING.--What other can I desire? If, however, you permit me to form another wish, I would humbly beg that the saying of the sage Bharata be fulfilled:-- May kings reign only for their subjects' weal!

May the divine Saraswati, the source Of speech, and G.o.ddess of dramatic art, Be ever honored by the great and wise!

And may the purple self-existent G.o.d, Whose vital Energy pervades all s.p.a.ce, From future transmigrations save my soul!

[_Exeunt omnes_.

[43] A sacred range of mountains lying along the Himalaya chain immediately adjacent to Kailasa, the paradise of Kuvera, the G.o.d of wealth.

[44] According to the mythical geography of the Hindoos the earth consisted of seven islands surrounded by seven seas.

BALLADS OF HINDOSTAN

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

BY

TORU DUTT

INTRODUCTION

If Toru Dutt were alive, she would still be younger than any recognized European writer, and yet her fame, which is already considerable, has been entirely posthumous. Within the brief s.p.a.ce of four years which now divides us from the date of her decease, her genius has been revealed to the world under many phases, and has been recognized throughout France and England. Her name, at least, is no longer unfamiliar in the ear of any well-read man or woman. But at the hour of her death she had published but one book, and that book had found but two reviewers in Europe. One of these, M. Andre Theuriet, the well-known poet and novelist, gave the "Sheaf gleaned in French Fields" adequate praise in the "Revue des Deux Mondes"; but the other, the writer of the present notice, has a melancholy satisfaction in having been a little earlier still in sounding the only note of welcome which reached the dying poetess from England. It was while Professor W. Minto was editor of the "Examiner," that one day in August, 1876, in the very heart of the dead season for books, I happened to be in the office of that newspaper, and was upbraiding the whole body of publishers for issuing no books worth reviewing. At that moment the postman brought in a thin and sallow packet with a wonderful Indian postmark on it, and containing a most unattractive orange pamphlet of verse, printed at Bhowanipore, and ent.i.tled "A Sheaf gleaned in French Fields, by Toru Dutt." This shabby little book of some two hundred pages, without preface or introduction, seemed specially destined by its particular providence to find its way hastily into the waste-paper basket. I remember that Mr. Minto thrust it into my unwilling hands, and said "There! see whether you can't make something of that." A hopeless volume it seemed, with its queer type, published at Bhowanipore, printed at the Saptahiksambad Press! But when at last I took it out of my pocket, what was my surprise and almost rapture to open at such verse as this:--

"Still barred thy doors! The far East glows, The morning wind blows fresh and free.

Should not the hour that wakes the rose Awaken also thee?

"All look for thee, Love, Light, and Song, Light in the sky deep red above, Song, in the lark of pinions strong, And in my heart, true Love.

"Apart we miss our nature's goal, Why strive to cheat our destinies?

Was not my love made for thy soul?

Thy beauty for mine eyes?

No longer sleep, Oh, listen now!

I wait and weep, But where art thou?"

When poetry is as good as this it does not much matter whether Rouveyre prints it upon Whatman paper, or whether it steals to light in blurred type from some press in Bhowanipore.

Toru Dutt was the youngest of the three children of a high-caste Hindoo couple in Bengal. Her father, who survives them all, the Baboo Govin Chunder Dutt, is himself distinguished among his countrymen for the width of his views and the vigor of his intelligence. His only son, Abju, died in 1865, at the age of fourteen, and left his two younger sisters to console their parents. Aru, the elder daughter, born in 1854, was eighteen months senior to Toru, the subject of this memoir, who was born in Calcutta on March 4, 1856. With the exception of one year's visit to Bombay, the childhood of these girls was spent in Calcutta, at their father's garden-house. In a poem now printed for the first time, Toru refers to the scene of her earliest memories, the circling wilderness of foliage, the shining tank with the round leaves of the lilies, the murmuring dusk under the vast branches of the central casuarina-tree. Here, in a mystical retirement more irksome to a European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, the brain of this wonderful child was moulded. She was pure Hindoo, full of the typical qualities of her race and blood, and, as the present volume shows us for the first time, preserving to the last her appreciation of the poetic side of her ancient religion, though faith itself in Vishnu and Siva had been cast aside with childish things and been replaced by a purer faith.

Her mother fed her imagination with the old songs and legends of their people, stories which it was the last labor of her life to weave into English verse; but it would seem that the marvellous faculties of Toru's mind still slumbered, when, in her thirteenth year, her father decided to take his daughters to Europe to learn English and French. To the end of her days Toru was a better French than English scholar. She loved France best, she knew its literature best, she wrote its language with more perfect elegance. The Dutts arrived in Europe at the close of 1869, and the girls went to school, for the first and last time, at a French pension. They did not remain there very many months; their father took them to Italy and England with him, and finally they attended for a short time, but with great zeal and application, the lectures for women at Cambridge. In November, 1873, they went back to Bengal, and the four remaining years of Toru's life were spent in the old garden-house at Calcutta, in a feverish dream of intellectual effort and imaginative production. When we consider what she achieved in these forty-five months of seclusion, it is impossible to wonder that the frail and hectic body succ.u.mbed under so excessive a strain.

She brought with her from Europe a store of knowledge that would have sufficed to make an English or French girl seem learned, but which in her case was simply miraculous. Immediately on her return she began to study Sanscrit with the same intense application which she gave to all her work, and mastering the language with extraordinary swiftness, she plunged into its mysterious literature. But she was born to write, and despairing of an audience in her own language, she began to adopt ours as a medium for her thought. Her first essay, published when she was eighteen, was a monograph, in the "Bengal Magazine," on Leconte de Lisle, a writer with whom she had a sympathy which is very easy to comprehend. The austere poet of "La Mort de Valmiki" was, obviously, a figure to whom the poet of "Sindhu" must needs be attracted on approaching European literature. This study, which was ill.u.s.trated by translations into English verse, was followed by another on Josephin Soulary, in whom she saw more than her maturer judgment might have justified. There is something very interesting and now, alas! still more pathetic in these st.u.r.dy and workmanlike essays in unaided criticism.

Still more solitary her work became, in July, 1874, when her only sister, Aru, died, at the age of twenty. She seems to have been no less amiable than her sister, and if gifted with less originality and a less forcible ambition, to have been finely accomplished. Both sisters were well-trained musicians, with full contralto voices, and Aru had a faculty for design which promised well. The romance of "Mlle. D'Arvers"

was originally projected for Aru to ill.u.s.trate, but no page of this book did Aru ever see.

In 1876, as we have said, appeared that obscure first volume at Bhowanipore. The "Sheaf gleaned in French Fields" is certainly the most imperfect of Toru's writings, but it is not the least interesting. It is a wonderful mixture of strength and weakness, of genius overriding great obstacles, and of talent succ.u.mbing to ignorance and inexperience. That it should have been performed at all is so extraordinary that we forget to be surprised at its inequality. The English verse is sometimes exquisite; at other times the rules of our prosody are absolutely ignored, and it is obvious that the Hindoo poetess was chanting to herself a music that is discord in an English ear. The notes are no less curious, and to a stranger no less bewildering. Nothing could be more naive than the writer's ignorance at some points, or more startling than her learning at others. On the whole, the attainment of the book was simply astounding. It consisted of a selection of translations from nearly one hundred French poets, chosen by the poetess herself on a principle of her own which gradually dawned upon the careful reader. She eschewed the Cla.s.sicist writers as though they had never existed. For her Andre Chenier was the next name in chronological order after Du Bartas. Occasionally she showed a profundity of research that would have done no discredit to Mr. Saintsbury or "le doux a.s.sellineau." She was ready to p.r.o.nounce an opinion on Napol le Pyrenean or detect a plagiarism in Baudelaire. But she thought that Alexander Smith was still alive, and she was curiously vague about the career of Sainte-Beuve.

This inequality of equipment was a thing inevitable to her isolation, and hardly worthy recording, except to show how laborious her mind was, and how quick to make the best of small resources.

We have already seen that the "Sheaf gleaned in French Fields" attracted the very minimum of attention in England. In France it was talked about a little more. M. Garcin de Ta.s.sy, the famous Orientalist, who scarcely survived Toru by twelve months, spoke of it to Mlle. Clarisse Bader, author of a somewhat remarkable book on the position of women in ancient Indian society. Almost simultaneously this volume fell into the hands of Toru, and she was moved to translate it into English, for the use of Hindoos less instructed than herself. In January, 1877, she accordingly wrote to Mlle. Bader requesting her authorization, and received a prompt and kind reply. On the 18th of March Toru wrote again to this, her solitary correspondent in the world of European literature, and her letter, which has been preserved, shows that she had already descended into the valley of the shadow of death:--

"Ma const.i.tution n'est pas forte; j'ai contracte une toux opiniatre, il y a plus de deux ans, qui ne me quitte point.

Cependant j'espere mettre la main a l'oeuvre bientot. Je ne peux dire, mademoiselle, combien votre affection--car vous les aimez, votre livre et votre lettre en temoignent a.s.sez--pour mes compatriotes et mon pays me touche; et je suis fiere de pouvoir le dire que les herones de nos grandes epopees sont dignes de tout honneur et de tout amour. Y a-t-il d'herone plus touchante, plus aimable que Sita? Je ne le crois pas. _Quand j'entends ma mere chanter, le soir, les vieux chants de notre pays, je pleure presque toujours_. La plainte de Sita, quand, bannie pour la seconde fois, elle erre dans la vaste foret, seule, le desespoir et l'effroi dans l'ame, est si pathetique qu'il n'y a personne, je crois, qui puisse l'entendre sans verser des larmes. Je vous envois sous ce pli deux pet.i.tes traductions du Sanscrit, cette belle langue antique.

Malheureus.e.m.e.nt j'ai ete obligee de faire cesser mes traductions de Sanscrit, il y a six mois. Ma sante ne me permet pas de les continuer."

These simple and pathetic words, in which the dying poetess pours out her heart to the one friend she had, and that one gained too late, seem as touching and as beautiful as any strain of Marceline Valmore's immortal verse. In English poetry I do not remember anything that exactly parallels their resigned melancholy. Before the month of March was over, Toru had taken to her bed. Unable to write, she continued to read, strewing her sick-room with the latest European books, and entering with interest into the questions raised by the Societe Asiatique of Paris, in its printed Transactions. On the 30th of July she wrote her last letter to Mlle. Clarisse Bader, and a month later, on August 30, 1877, at the age of twenty-one years six months and twenty-six days, she breathed her last in her father's house in Maniktollah street, Calcutta.

In the first distraction of grief it seemed as though her unequalled promise had been entirely blighted, and as though she would be remembered only by her single book. But as her father examined her papers, one completed work after another revealed itself. First a selection from the sonnets of the Comte de Grammont, translated into English, turned up, and was printed in a Calcutta magazine; then some fragments of an English story, which were printed in another Calcutta magazine. Much more important, however, than any of these was a complete romance, written in French, being the identical story for which her sister Aru had proposed to make the ill.u.s.trations. In the meantime Toru was no sooner dead than she began to be famous. In May, 1878, there appeared a second edition of the "Sheaf gleaned in French Fields," with a touching sketch of her death, by her father; and in 1879 was published, under the editorial care of Mlle. Clarisse Bader, the romance of "Le Journal de Mlle. D'Arvers," forming a handsome volume of 259 pages. This book, begun, as it appears, before the family returned from Europe, and finished n.o.body knows when, is an attempt to describe scenes from modern French society, but it is less interesting as an experiment of the fancy, than as a revelation of the mind of a young Hindoo woman of genius. The story is simple, clearly told, and interesting; the studies of character have nothing French about them, but they are full of vigor and originality. The description of the hero is most characteristically Indian:--