The French and the English View of India

WRITING from Darjeeling, at the foot of the Himalayas, M. André Chevrillon¹ thus speaks of the English colony there, and what he says applies equally to every place where two or three English are gathered together in a foreign land : “ These people are in England here ; they have brought with them not only their institutions and their customs and their prejudices, but all their native surroundings and their own country’s atmosphere. Contact with a wholly different world has no effect upon them. At bottom, no race is less capable of adaptation, less flexible ; none persists so continuously in its type and in its personality. Hence its moral energy, its will power, set upon a few immutable ideas; hence also the limits of its sympathy and of its intelligence. The English ignore the native, make no attempt to understand him. From the height of their civilization they look down upon him as a half-savage and a heathen. . . . This evening, at table d’hôte, a young officer, spending a few days here, summed up his impressions of a visit to a Llama temple as follows : ‘ A dirty, stinking hole, which I was only too glad to get out of.’ ”

A little before, enlarging upon life in an English boarding-house in India, a boarding-house “genteel and respectable,” faithfully copied after those of Eastbourne and Scarborough, whose mistress presides over roast beef and substantial pieces of the national pudding, and where the young people sing ballads in the drawing-room after dinner, and flirt a little, and make plans for excursions, and for meetings at lawn-tennis courts and on football grounds. M. Chevrillon had exclaimed : “ Consider the French colonist, generally unmarried, in Tunis and Tonquin ! What ennui is his ! I How he feels his exile ! ” This is because the Frenchman has a thin skin ; alien influences, ideas and habits different from those to which he is used, penetrate his pores. He finds it difficult to be himself in unsympathetic surroundings. Thereby arise a discomfort and an irritation, the acuteness of which races less dependent on open channels of communication with the outside cannot readily conceive or make fair allowance for. Here M. Chevrillon has put his finger upon one of the great reasons — it is possibly the great reason, from which spring all the others — why the French have been ineffectual colonizers, while the English are preëminent in that capacity; for it is the man who supplies from his inner consciousness all that he needs, and never even suspects that others not like unto him may have secrets of life worth knowing, who impresses himself strongly on fluid and unorganized masses. And here likewise, one cannot but believe, M. Chevrillon has put his finger incidentally on the reason why a Frenchman of the best sort, who has had a sound training of a serious kind, stands a good chance, in a relation of travels among strange peoples, in a strange land, of being more receptive, more sensitive, and more enlightened than one of Anglo-Saxon blood making a similar record.

Dans l’Inde, we think, well illustrates this point. The most dramatic spectacle of modern times is the disintegration of the ideals of outworn races before the aggression of our Western civilization; and, curiously enough, it is the one to whose profound and thrilling interest the thinkers of the day are generally most indifferent. The invasion goes on steadily in Japan, in Egypt, in India; the conquest of that ideal of human life which makes the greatest well - being in this mortal passage depend upon the greatest variety of artificial needs, supplied as perfectly as possible by mechanical and material appliances without number, increases daily in magnitude and thoroughness ; but the peoples whose work all this is rarely give any truly intelligent reflection to its bearings, and to the questions which it suggests. They move onward blindly, as if pushed by some fatalistic force. Occasionally a voice is raised, like that of Lafcadio Hearn, warning us that humanity cannot have struggled, and dreamed, and lived, and loved, all these centuries, under other suns and other conditions, without having evolved certain different ideals of existence, some of which must have their value ; and that we may lose much that is precious, and that may be of incalculable benefit to the final ends of man, by the self-satisfied denseness with which we pursue our own way in ignorance of any such possible guidings toward truth. But, after all, no one listens. The case of India is especially remarkable. The conflict between modern and ancient civilizations there should possess a significance for us that it nowhere else possesses ; for of the two hundred and fifty millions of people in that vast country many are our Aryan kin, and, as Robert Louis Stevenson said of the Chinese, watched the stars before our more immediate forefathers kept pigs. Yet the Anglo-Saxons who are to-day fashioning these older brothers into the new forms developed by Occidental wisdom give us no light on a hundred points that we should like to know about. Nothing is, in general, more exasperating than the English book about India, with so naive a self-complacency does it pass over the enigmas which we divine, confusedly, in that silent mass of humanity moving darkly just below the thin surface of the British domination. Occasionally a work like the recently published correspondence of that classical missionary, Bishop French of Lahore, gives us a hint of what a contribution to the thought of the end of the century a man might make who possessed enough specific knowledge of the Hindus and their literature, and enough modern culture and critical faculty of the highest type, to treat, synthetically, the religious and social problems called up by the contact of the new civilization with the old. Certainly, in his picturesquely written volume of travel, M. André Chevrillon has not attacked such large matters ; but his book constantly reminds the reader of their presence, and turns him to speculating upon them. For, as a nephew of Taine, M. Chevrillon has been brought up in a school alive to the more significant manifestations of the human mind, and intent upon apprehending as far as may be the secret of them.

The multitudes, of both sexes, pressed in a devout frenzy along the banks of the Ganges, in the holy city of Benares, muttering, with eyes fixed by the tension of memory,innumerable mantras, as they stand in the water, throwing it heavenward three times when the sun rises, figuring with their fingers the manifold incarnations of Vishnu, are not merely so many fanatics, so many maniacs, to M. Chevrillon. That these and a thousand other external observances, repeated feverishly, mechanically, generation after generation for thirty centuries, drawing a whole race into the circle of their tyranny, must have produced at last a brain, a soul, in these people, as radically different from our own as if they belonged, not to another species, but to another humanity, is clear to him. And he would like to penetrate the psychological processes of the Hindu. He would like to understand what adjustments go on in the head of a rajah of Jeypore, who is a civilized man and a man of cultivation, who has given to Jeypore a university, a museum, and an industrial school, and who yet builds, out of his own exchequer, a temple to Krishna, in the last decade of the nineteenth century (a temple which employs over four thousand workmen for five years), and who sacrifices goats daily to Kali. Is this because the rajah detects a sense beneath the symbol, and an idea bidden in the religious forms whose appeal is to the multitude ? Or is he conscious of religious needs that are in disaccord with his newly received culture ? A riddle which teases M. Chevrillon, also, is that young Brahman, educated in an English school at Benares, preparing to follow the Allahabad University course in order to enter the British civil service ; yet while he discusses Indian autonomy, and reads Addison and Pope, Macaulay and Herbert Spencer, belonging to a caste from which he cannot issue, and worshiping Vishnu and Shiva, holding in his breath, pronouncing the mystical syllable Om, offering flowers to the sacred cows, How far beneath the skin does it go, that conversion to the religion and civilization of the West, even in those cases where England seems most visibly to be accomplishing the “ mission ” to which she refers continually and with such calm assurance ? Might not too complete an infusion of new blood here result, “ like a cross between animal species too distant, in abortions, monstrosities that are not viable ” ? Will the way be found to adapt historic Christianity to the mental conditions of the Hindus, — to make it, among them, the Asiatic faith which it was at its birth ? Will this Orientalized Christianity, not only in India, but in China and Japan, if ecclesiastical statesmen should arise great enough to consummate it, preserve for us, as in a durable vessel, some of the vanishing perfume of the deep philosophical intuitions of the Eastern sages, and, what is more essential, cause their highest ideals of asceticism and mansuetude to flow back, in a beneficent reaction, upon our more and more materialized Occidental life ? Or will the religion of the conquering Western races be accepted, by one uncivilized people after another, as a means of secular convenience, as synonymous with a place among the paramount nations, and quite without care for the spirituality of the message, thus merely spreading modern materialism farther and farther over the earth ?

M. Chevrillon stops before he reaches the last of these various and complicated conjectures. What he sees plainly — even while he can perceive that, next to the Hindu, “ grave, and silent, and delicately featured,” the ruling race, with its noisy laugh, and its athletic sports, and its hundred and one physical requirements, seems rude and coarse — is that the Anglo-Saxon really has a mission ; that he is the dominating factor of the hour because he possesses the moral attributes, the self-restraint, the perseverance, the love of truth, and the cleanliness of imagination that deserve dominion. With an excellent knowledge of the English people and the English language M. Chevrillon has a great admiration of the English character. It is a trait very significant in a Frenchman of his stamp. To those who read between the lines it is a trait which has its pathos ; for those qualities on which he dwells, to which he reverts again and again, are the ones in which his own race is most deficient, and for lack of which it seems to be losing its political place among the leading peoples of the world. Two “ Scotch Greys,” getting into a railway compartment with him, — muscular, well-disciplined bodies, clear - cut, energetic features, healthy complexions, frank and honest eyes, — help him to comprehend the ascendency of the Anglo-Saxon in India. It may argue narrow-mindedness in the English, and a want of the power of entering into opposite states of mind, that they should try to graft their active. practical notions of existence on the vague, abstracted, philosophizing Hindu soul, whose supreme teaching has ever been that reality is but an illusion and the shifting phantasmagoria of a dream ; but the endeavor is that of a people born to conquest, and splendidly fitted for it, all the same. A Wesleyan missionary, a flat - chested single lady, whom M. Chevrillon meets on the return journey to England, who paces the deck with the stride of a grenadier, and whose puritanical education has provided her with no trace either of the higher instruction or of culture, yet compels his appreciation and respect: “ Alone, without family ties, she is sufficient unto herself. Her existence is healthy, occupied, dignified ; it rests on a large, serious idea. She is helping to spread civilization, English civilization. She works for the ideal which her race has conceived. Life for her has a meaning. It is a battle against wrong.” Yes, these phrases are significant. One feels how keenly the writer wishes that they were also the keynote of French life and character to-day.

This preoccupation with the moral state of France and its political importance is present as an abiding undertone in all those charming and vivid books of travel which so many French literary men excel in writing. It is, at least, present in the impressions de voyage of the more serious and representative of them. We see it again in M. Gaston Deschamps’s Sur les Routes d’Asie.²

M. Deschamps is a critic whose literary articles in Le Temps have given proof many times of his scant sympathy with decadent poets, and all those who hold the doctrine of art for art’s sake, regardless of moral effects, and a novelist who believes that there is no reason why a French novel should not be as clean as an English one. His travels in Greece and in Asia Minor have been connected with the epigraphical missions of the French School at Athens, and are rich, therefore, in interesting and delightful associations. For what more could a man of soul desire than to sail away, with one or two congenial companions, from that school by way of the purple isles of the Archipelago to the Levant? What more could he wish than to go from Smyrna with its dazzling light, the streets of its ancient quarters crowded with Armenians, Turks, Greeks, its caravans in a long line by the sea, to the sites of so many vanished cities of the pleasure-loving Ionians ; and, in search of buried inscriptions on broken fragments of forgotten marble, to penetrate to the heart of those lands along the Tigris and Euphrates where arose and fell so many prehistoric Asiatic kingdoms ?

Two facts especially attract M. Deschamps’s attention, in his Levantine travels : one is the persistent vitality of the Greek spirit, wherever it is encountered, in resistant strains, under the loose, somnolent Turkish domination ; the other is — and we might have expected it — the exact condition of the Catholic missions maintained by France in these countries, and the amount of influence which they exert. That the republic, which savagely enough pursues the French priest and the French sister on their native soil, in foreign lands encourages their efforts is well known ; nor is it ever claimed that the purpose in this is other than to increase French political prestige in the world at large. M. Deschamps can be very contemptuously bitter against those short-sighted radicals who would like to secularize the French schools and hospitals established in the island of Chios, at Cæsarea, Bagdad, Athens, all over the East. “These missions work in the interests of the Catholic religion, but they work also in the interests of France,” he says frankly. . . . “ Whatever may be one’s religious convictions, one cannot but admire these modest workmen, who labor so silently and without salary toward the diffusion of our language and our civilization, toward the maintenance of our good repute among nations.” We fancy that M. Deschamps belongs to the “ autochthonous ” school of French authors of which M. Jules Lemaître avows himself so stanchly to be a member. He would not, like the author of Dans l’Inde, hold up the Anglo-Saxon ideal of conduct to his countrymen for imitation, in these days when they are threatened, as he has somewhere observed, with “tragic destinies.” He would bid them, rather, nourish their imaginations with the finest, the best traditional attributes of their own race, and cultivate those. The good Lazarist Fathers at Smyrna, who took him over their busy school, where little Turks, little Armenians, were bending over French books, seem to him admirable enough in their jovial courage, their tact and subtlety, their debonair perseverance under difficulties, to serve as models and ensamples. These Fathers are showing forth the “ proudest and most amiable traits of the French nation to the mixed races that fall under the healthy spell of their virtue,” he remarks ; and he is sure that as much can be said for the faithful French Sisters of St. Joseph, and for the Sisters of Charity in charge of French military hospitals, whom he meets, cheerfully leading their life of sacrifice and exile, here and there on his journey.

Oh, the Sisters of St. Joseph! Who, indeed, that has ever known their thrifty écoles enfantines can forget them ? What images of old-time decorum, what reminiscences of placid, sound, and temperate influence, and motherly, comfortable care - taking, do the words evoke ! Is their system of education very progressive, very ambitious ? No one inquires. And in fact it matters little. There are centres in French life so humanizing, that make so powerfully for the most sane and reasonable and livable social aptitudes, that all mere instruction appears but as a secondary affair in comparison. The point is to lay stress on these centres; and the pity is that they are overlooked in favor of so much else that is more brilliant and less worthy.

M. Deschamps is right. The value of the best distinctively French civilization should be brought into relief ; it should he insisted on for the French themselves and for other people. It is impossible not to be aware that its elements are not quite those of the Anglo-Saxon civilization. It would take pages to define the difference, but every thoughtful person feels it. Every student of the history of man’s development must also desire that this humanizing force of the services of France may not be lost to the world, but may rather grow and increase. For one must return upon that word. The Anglo-Saxon organizes, the Latin humanizes. In that respect we feel, as we read M. Deschamps, that those small French religious communities scattered through the East are akin, in their action, to that same Greek spirit which, long after it could coerce, still could tame and refine the barbarians into subjection.