Reviews

(Pall Mall Gazette, December 11, 1888.)

Writers of poetical prose are rarely good poets.  They may crowd their page with gorgeous epithet and resplendent phrase, may pile Pelions of adjectives upon Ossas of descriptions, may abandon themselves to highly coloured diction and rich luxuriance of imagery, but if their verse lacks the true rhythmical life of verse, if their method is devoid of the self-restraint of the real artist, all their efforts are of very little avail.  ‘Asiatic’ prose is possibly useful for journalistic purposes, but ‘Asiatic’ poetry is not to be encouraged.  Indeed, poetry may be said to need far more self-restraint than prose.  Its conditions are more exquisite.  It produces its effects by more subtle means.  It must not be allowed to degenerate into mere rhetoric or mere eloquence.  It is, in one sense, the most self-conscious of all the arts, as it is never a means to an end but always an end in itself.  Sir Edwin Arnold has a very picturesque or, perhaps we should say, a very pictorial style.  He knows India better than any living Englishman knows it, and Hindoostanee better than any English writer should know it.  If his descriptions lack distinction, they have at least the merit of being true, and when he does not interlard his pages with an interminable and intolerable series of foreign words he is pleasant enough.  But he is not a poet.  He is simply a poetical writer—that is all.

However, poetical writers have their uses, and there is a good deal in Sir Edwin Arnold’s last volume that will repay perusal.  The scene of the story is placed in a mosque attached to the monument of the Taj-Mahal, and a group composed of a learned Mirza, two singing girls with their attendant, and an Englishman, is supposed to pass the night there reading the chapter of Sa’di upon ‘Love,’ and conversing upon that theme with accompaniments of music and dancing.  The Englishman is, of course, Sir Edwin Arnold himself:

      lover of India,
Too much her lover! for his heart lived there
How far soever wandered thence his feet.

Lady Dufferin appears as

Lady Duffreen, the mighty Queen’s Vice-queen!

which is really one of the most dreadful blank-verse lines that we have come across for some time past.  M. Renan is ‘a priest of Frangestan,’ who writes in ‘glittering French’; Lord Tennyson is

      One we honour for his songs—
Greater than Sa’di’s self—

and the Darwinians appear as the ‘Mollahs of the West,’ who

      hold Adam’s sons
Sprung of the sea-slug.

All this is excellent fooling in its way, a kind of play-acting in literature; but the best parts of the book are the descriptions of the Taj itself, which are extremely elaborate, and the various translations from Sa’di with which the volume is interspersed.  The great monument Shah Jahan built for Arjamand is

Instinct with loveliness—not masonry!
Not architecture! as all others are,
But the proud passion of an Emperor’s love
Wrought into living stone, which gleams and soars
With body of beauty shrining soul and thought,
Insomuch that it haps as when some face
Divinely fair unveils before our eyes—
Some woman beautiful unspeakably—
And the blood quickens, and the spirit leaps,
And will to worship bends the half-yielded knees,
Which breath forgets to breathe: so is the Taj;
You see it with the heart, before the eyes
Have scope to gaze.  All white! snow white! cloud white!

We cannot say much in praise of the sixth line:

Insomuch that it haps as when some face:

it is curiously awkward and unmusical.  But this passage from Sa’di is remarkable:

When Earth, bewildered, shook in earthquake-throes,
With mountain-roots He bound her borders close;
   Turkis and ruby in her rocks He stored,
And on her green branch hung His crimson rose.

He shapes dull seed to fair imaginings;
Who paints with moisture as He painteth things?
   Look! from the cloud He sheds one drop on ocean,
As from the Father’s loins one drop He brings;—

And out of that He forms a peerless pearl,
And, out of this, a cypress boy or girl;
   Utterly wotting all their innermosts,
For all to Him is visible!  Uncurl

Your cold coils, Snakes!  Creep forth, ye thrifty Ants!
Handless and strengthless He provides your wants
   Who from the ‘Is not’ planned the ‘Is to be,’
And Life in non-existent void implants.

Sir Edwin Arnold suffers, of course, from the inevitable comparison that one cannot help making between his work and the work of Edward Fitzgerald, and certainly Fitzgerald could never have written such a line as ‘utterly wotting all their innermosts,’ but it is interesting to read almost any translation of those wonderful Oriental poets with their strange blending of philosophy and sensuousness, of simple parable or fable and obscure mystic utterance.  What we regret most in Sir Edwin Arnold’s book is his habit of writing in what really amounts to a sort of ‘pigeon English.’  When we are told that ‘Lady Duffreen, the mighty Queen’s Vice-queen,’ paces among the charpoys of the ward ‘no whit afraid of sitla, or of tap’; when the Mirza explains—

      âg lejao!
To light the kallians for the Saheb and me,

and the attendant obeys with ‘Achcha!  Achcha!’ when we are invited to listen to ‘the Vina and the drum’ and told about ekkas, Byrâgis, hamals and Tamboora, all that we can say is that to such ghazals we are not prepared to say either Shamash or Afrîn.  In English poetry we do not want

   chatkis for the toes,
Jasams for elbow-bands, and gote and har,
Bala and mala.

This is not local colour; it is a sort of local discoloration.  It does not add anything to the vividness of the scene.  It does not bring the Orient more clearly before us.  It is simply an inconvenience to the reader and a mistake on the part of the writer.  It may be difficult for a poet to find English synonyms for Asiatic expressions, but even if it were impossible it is none the less a poet’s duty to find them.  We are sorry that a scholar and a man of culture like Sir Edwin Arnold should have been guilty of what is really an act of treason against our literature.  But for this error, his book, though not in any sense a work of genius or even of high artistic merit, would still have been of some enduring value.  As it is, Sir Edwin Arnold has translated Sa’di and some one must translate Sir Edwin Arnold.

With Sa’di in the Garden; or The Book of Love.  By Sir Edwin Arnold, M.A., K.C.I.E., Author of The Light of Asia, etc.  (Trübner and Co.)

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