CHAPTER XI

ANCIENT BALLADS AND LEGENDS OF HINDUSTAN

‘THE Soul of India’ is a familiar phrase in modern times, and it stands for a soul which is above all else intensely religious. In India we see to-day, as perhaps nowhere else save among the simpler peoples of Catholic Europe, a piety which is entirely devoid of self-consciousness. The Mohammedan turns aside from his work in the crowded bazaar to perform his devotions, utterly oblivious of the stranger’s curious eyes. The devout Hindu performs his rites and lays his offerings at a wayside shrine, or prostrates himself, measuring his length in the dust in fulfilment of a vow, also perfectly indifferent to the public eye. Such acts are commonplace in India and are innocent of even a suggestion of parade. It is not surprising, therefore, that piety in some form or other should be the theme of the Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, and that in them the religious note should sound strongly.

It is to her mother’s influence that we owe these beautiful little Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, the leading characteristic of which is ‘a Vedic solemnity and simplicity of temper’. This is their charm, and it is interesting to speculate where her unique gifts would have led her, if she had had the same opportunities for cultivating and expressing her powers as Dr. Rabindranath Tagore.

These poems, according to Mr. Edmund Gosse,¹ ‘will be ultimately found to constitute Toru’s chief legacy to posterity’. They are the result of about a year’s study of Sanskrit. Toru’s first experiments were translations into English of two stories taken from the Vishnu Purana—the sacred book containing an account of the god Vishnu. The first, ‘The Legend of Dhruva,’ from the Dhruvapakhyanam, was published in the Bengal Magazine of October 1876. The second, ‘The Royal Ascetic and the Hind’ from Bharatopakhyanam, in the Calcutta Review of January 1877. Toru’s studies in Sanskrit extended to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—the Iliad and Odyssey of Indian literature, and she seems to have been fired with the idea of presenting some of the grand stories of her Indian heritage in order to gain the appreciation and sympathy of English readers. In this way the Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan were conceived and partly worked out. A series of nine were apparently contemplated, but only seven were found, the gaps being supplied by the reprinting of ‘The Royal Ascetic and the Hind’ and ‘The Legend of Dhruva’.

The volume was published in London in 1882, with an introductory memoir by Mr. Edmund Gosse. The quotation from Sir Philip Sidney’s Apologie for English Poetry, inscribed on the fly-leaf of the little book, is peculiarly appropriate, embodying, as it does, a sentiment which is the outcome of the sensitiveness of the true poetic temperament to the spell of the noble past.

‘I never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved, more than with a trumpet: and yet it is sung but by some blinde crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style.’

‘“When I hear my mother chant, in the evening, the old lays of our country, I almost always weep,” wrote Toru. So do these “tears of a poet”, which a poet alone can shed, tears of Sidney hearing the blind man sing “Chevy Chase”, tears of Musset listening to the old romance sung by the street singers, link together poetic souls of all ages and races, and not least touching among them all are those of the Indian child-poetess.’²

The chief value of this book consists in the fact that Toru had at last found her true poetic sphere. ‘The genius of man dives deep into the dreams of childhood: children’s stories form the real basis of any heart-inspired poetry,’ wrote a French critic;³ and ballads are in essence the child-literature of the past.

In relating ancient ballads or legends, a poet should be objective in his treatment: standing aloof as much as possible, not obtruding his own personality, and chiefly intent on representing as faithfully as possible something of the spirit of the past. A certain amount of modernization may be necessary, in order to be intelligible; but, if he should fail to give the reader sympathetic insight into the spirit of ancient literature, the poet has written in vain.

The ballad form in English, with its slight archaisms and its haunting refrain, is of great use in this direction, and, possibly, if Toru had lived, she would have found it a much more suitable representative of the splendid and stately tone of the Sanskrit original than the easy and monotonous blank verse of these her first attempts. That she was feeling her way to it seems plain from the fact that she used the octosyllabic measure for her later poems.

Neither in ‘The Legend of Dhruva’ nor in ‘The Royal Ascetic and the Hind’ was there much scope for originality, and their chief interest must ever lie in the fact that they mark the beginning of a new phase in the development of Toru’s genius, namely, her desire to give expression to her intense love of her own land and its traditions.

It is with unfeigned wonder and admiration that we turn from these experiments to the noble poem of ‘Savitri’, recreated and clothed in fresh beauty by Toru from an episode related in the Mahabharata.

Savitri is a tender and beautiful picture of the ideal Indian wife. She lives only in and for her husband—an ideal, apparently, not differing greatly from Puritan Milton’s idea of the relations between man and wife in the beginning of things:

He for God only—she for God in him.

In the purifying fires of her devotion to Satyavan, Savitri seems to grow utterly selfless, and in this reminds us strongly of her great Greek sister-heroine, Alcestis, who also offers gladly to die in her husband’s stead. She gives up without a pang her happiness in his love and in her home to go out alone into that sunless land of the shades, the melancholy Elysium of the Greeks, which held in it nothing of attraction for a people with so keen a zest for life as they. It takes the mighty hero Hercules himself to rescue the noble wife from the grasp of Death at the entrance to the underworld. The Indian conception is subtler and finer than this. Satyavan is released from the power of Death by the unconquerable, wholly human love and steadfastness of his wife, and by that alone. Human love triumphs over humanity’s greatest foe. Nay, more—Savitri looks unafraid into the very face of the King of Terrors, and finds it good!

‘I wonder if in an Indian poet’s work, a passer-by would turn round to see Savitri once more,’ speculates M. Darmesteter. However this may be, in these pages she is, perhaps, the most attractive personality. Were there a pageant of the heroes and heroines of the Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, we think the eyes of the spectators would be riveted to the end on that pure, lovely figure, and would then turn away with that look of awe which steals into men’s eyes after looking on a figure of true beauty and heroism.

There is something almost classical in the calm dignity of Savitri’s speeches, as when she addresses Death:

I know that in this transient world All is delusion,—nothing true; I know its shows are mists unfurled To please and vanish. To renew Its bubble joys, be magic-bound In Maya’s network frail and fair, Is not my aim! The gladsome sound Of husband, brother, friend, is air To such as know that all must die, And that at last the time must come, When eye shall speak no more to eye, And Love cry,—Lo, this is my sum.

There is a Virgilian touch where Death talks of bearing Satyavan’s soul across ‘the doleful lake’, and a faint echo of Spenser and the land of Faerie in the line:

Was it a dream from elfland blown?

So far as the versification goes, Toru’s advance in technique in this poem, as compared with its predecessors, is little short of marvellous.

From ‘Savitri’, we pass to ‘Lakshman’, and we are this time confronted with the portrait of the ideal brother, a splendid picture of chivalry and self-control. The Lakshman of the Ramayana cannot refrain, in response to Sita’s wild and slanderous upbraidings, from the cynical remark: ‘Women are by nature crooked, fickle, sowers of strife.’ The Lakshman of Toru’s ballad, however, gives utterance to no such unchivalrous utterance, but remains through all the tempest of Sita’s scorn what Chaucer would have called ‘a veray parfit gentil knight’. Although her words have pierced him to the quick, he lets fall no single word of reproach, and his last thought as he turns to leave her is of securing her safety, to the best of his ability. Nowhere, we think, outside Indian thought, could we get so perfect a picture of brotherly loyalty, or so vivid an insight into the strength of the bonds that bind the members of an Indian family, the one to the other.

The poem forms an interesting departure from its predecessors, in that it is not narrative, but conversational, with a touch of the epic spirit, a dramatic dialogue. In such a poem there is small scope for the usual embellishments of metaphor, simile, &c., but there is a danger of lapsing into the merely prosaic. The tone is dignified, rising sometimes to the heroic, as in the following stanza, with its hint of impending tragedy:

He said, and straight his weapons took, His bow and arrows pointed keen, Kind—nay, indulgent,—was his look, No trace of anger there was seen, Only a sorrow dark, that seemed To deepen his resolve to dare All dangers. Hoarse the vulture screamed, As out he strode with dauntless air.

The gradual working out of Sita’s passion forms the most interesting feature of the poem. In the opening verses, we have conveyed to us a vivid impression of Sita’s anxiety on Rama’s behalf, and excited appeals to Lakshman. The latter’s fine vindication of his brother’s courage, and his absolute faith in his unconquerableness, serve merely to set Sita at bay. The implied reproach for her lack of faith, containing, as it does, a germ of truth, causes her to turn and rend one who meant only to comfort. We can see her drawing herself up to her full height, with flashing eyes, using the truly feminine weapon of bitter sarcasm, the weapon of one proved to be wrong, but not willing to own it. She flings at him the conjecture:

One brother takes His kingdom,—one would take his wife! A fair proportion!

Then, again, posing as an injured martyr, and believing herself to be one, she declares:

If fire can burn, or water drown, I follow him . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I did not know thy mind before, I know thee now,—and have no fear.

This ballad contains a not unskilful attempt at psychological delineation of character, simple and experimental, but still showing a phase of Toru’s genius with which we might otherwise have been unacquainted.

‘Jogadhya Uma’ is a poem unique in this collection for its dreamy, mystic beauty, and gains rather than loses from the fact that its theme is drawn not from any of the great epics or puranas of Sanskrit, but from folklore. It is a well-known legend of the people, and was told originally to Toru by an old family nurse, Suchee, a staunch Hindu, ‘of whom all the children were very fond.’

Mystic and dreamy, indeed, the poem is, akin to that of Tennyson’s story of the brand Excalibur, ‘clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful’. It is yet not so dreamy but that, after reading it, there wander through the fields of our imagination two very human and altogether lovable characters: the one, an old priest whose fine face is aglow with reverent, expectant faith; the other, a homely, rather stupid-looking pedlar, whose features, too, are irradiated with an almost child-like wonder. Both are standing on the edge of a lotus-covered tank, looking wistfully for a sign.

We think no other story is more admirably suited to Toru’s simplicity of touch. There is throughout the poem a delicate, old-world and Indian flavour. It resembles the illuminations of exquisite workmanship found in certain rare old Eastern manuscripts, wherein every detail stands out clearly, as well as the purity of every colour.

The poem is like a succession of miniatures: the red line of the road to Khirogram (the music of the name suggesting beauty), the meadows where the outlines of the cattle standing ‘magic bound’, knee-deep in grass, loom through the mists which the rising sun is just tinting with rainbow hues. In the foreground is the cheery figure of the pedlar, basket on head, while dotted here and there on the road behind are other figures, intent on their avocations.

Then follows the pretty scene at the lotus-covered tank; the pedlar eagerly displaying his wares, the beautiful maiden framed against the marble archway, with one lovely arm uplifted to watch the sunlight sparkling on the colours in the bracelet on her wrist. From this we pass to a village scene, the sunlit temple in the midst, and at the open door a very human priest, of gay laugh and generous hand. He is standing unusually thoughtful now, with a vermilion-streaked box in his hand, while the pedlar watches wonderingly from the shadow. Lastly, we see the priest standing with bent head amid the noonday hush of nature by the marble ghat, and a world of longing is in his face as he waits for a sign of the goddess’s presence.

Beautiful as it is, the poem suffers, with the other ballads, from its medium of expression, though, perhaps, in some slighter degree. The octosyllabic rhymed stanza lends itself to prosiness. In the interview with the goddess, the pedlar is made to exclaim like a schoolgirl:

Oh what a nice and lovely fit!

The use of the word ‘Manse’ for the priest’s house is rather naïve, and one feels that the village scene is English rather than Indian. This, however, is the chief flaw in what is undoubtedly a gem of art among the Ballads of Hindustan.

‘In her own vernacular,’ says Mr. Frazer,⁴ ‘the poem would have been sung to music so weird and soothing, the words would have been attuned to feelings so deep and sincere, that, although she had parted from her ancient faith and become a Christian, it would have been a poem destined to live in the religious poetry of Hinduism, and take a place among the songs of the people.’ For our part, we are glad that Toru ‘let it stand among her rhymes’ in English, and thus gave Western readers a sympathetic insight into the simple piety of our ancient Indian folklore.

‘Buttoo’, in spite of the rather strange collection of trees in the wood which forms the background for the hero of the poem, is another wonderful picture of Indian life and thought, and Indian in its very essence. It is an illustration of the marvellous reverence in which an Indian chela (disciple) holds his master. The West would do well to learn something from the East in this, and it would be difficult to find a parallel for the act related in this poem—an act of supremest obedience even to the point of absolute self-renunciation and self-maiming on the part of a pupil towards a master who had but made him a jest and a laughing-stock before others.

Not the least noteworthy feature of the poem in connexion with the development of Toru’s genius is the growth of conciseness, as in the moment of Buttoo’s sacrifice—where it would have been easy to succumb to the temptation to linger, and draw out sentiment:

Glanced the sharp knife one moment high, The severed thumb was on the sod.

‘Sindhu’, a story from the Ramayana, again essentially Indian in spirit, is a picture of filial piety, for Sindhu is an ideal son in his cheerful service of his querulous, exacting old parents. It contains, too, an illustration of the essentially Indian doctrine of ‘Karma’—a man’s deeds, whether voluntarily or involuntarily evil, will pursue him inevitably to a righteous retribution. The king shot Sindhu unwittingly, as Sindhu himself acknowledged, but Sindhu’s death was in reality the expiation of a boyish sin when he shot a dove, and the king expiated the crime of shooting the boy by death, heart-broken after the banishment of his own beloved son.

Judging from the style, which is distinctly inferior to that of the other poems, we should place it as an early attempt with ‘The Legend of Dhruva’ and ‘The Royal Ascetic and the Hind’. The metre chosen (the rhymed quatrain, 8.6.8.6.), is one that can most easily degenerate into doggerel, and the poem as a whole suffers badly from this fault.

‘Prehlad,’ from the Mahabharata, is the description of a boy’s fearless devotion to the gods, in face of bitter opposition and ruthless cruelty at the hands of his tyrant father. It contains, too, a good picture of the Eastern tyrant, fearless in his blasphemy, as his son was in his piety. Eastern, too, is the dénouement wherein the tyrant is miraculously struck dead by the direct intervention of the gods, and his son proclaimed king in his stead.

We think the poem would have finished more fittingly at the picture of Prehlad, the new-crowned king, bowing his head reverently on the throne amidst the plaudits of the people; leaving out the apostrophe to tyrants in general: but this may be just a matter for individual taste.

It is interesting too to note the vaguer touch in dealing with the supernatural, as shown in the description of the ‘sable warrior’:

Colossal,—such strange shapes arise In clouds, when autumn rules the lands!

‘Sita’, the last poem of the series, is a dream-picture conjured up by ‘three happy children in a darkened room’ who are listening to the sad story of Sita as it falls from their mother’s lips in song. They see a dense forest where the sunlight scarcely penetrates. In the midst is a clearing around which gigantic creepers festoon the trees with flowers. White swans are gliding on a quiet lake, whilst the peacock rises ‘whirring from the brake’, and the wild deer bound through the glades. The gold of the forest corn glints in the distance, where the blue smoke rises from the altars near the dwelling of the ‘poet anchorite’.

Artistically, the poem, short as it is, is among the best of the ballads. Simple and vivid in style, it is skilfully touched with a delicate pathos by the closing lines:

When shall those children by their mother’s side Gather, ah me! as erst at eventide?

Seven miscellaneous poems complete the volume of ballads, and all of these are in a sense autobiographical. These poems were discovered amongst Toru’s papers after her death. The first, ‘Near Hastings,’ records, with Toru’s characteristic clearness and simplicity of style, an incident in her life in England. She and her sister, the latter still suffering, were resting on the beach near Hastings, when a lady noticed them in passing. She stopped and entered into friendly conversation with them, and, before going, gave Aru some beautiful roses, and thereby won Toru’s undying gratitude; for years afterwards she sang:

Her memory will not depart, Though grief my years should shade, Still bloom her roses in my heart! And they shall never fade!

‘France 1870’, in a metre strangely irregular as regards accent, is a little poem which reveals Toru’s love and admiration for France, which she hails as ‘Head of the human column’, whilst for ‘Levite England’ she reserves scorn. There is much of passionate feeling in the poem, and when the ear accustoms itself to the strangeness, there is a certain charm about the great irregularity of the rhythm, in which no two verses are alike.

‘The Tree of Life’ is perhaps the best example we have of the mysticism which lay deep in Toru’s nature. The poem is an account of those daylight visions which come to mortals but rarely. Biographically, it is of interest as the last poem written by her. The opening line is vividly suggestive: ⁵

Broad daylight, with a sense of weariness!

It describes how, as the invalid lay with her father’s hand in hers, in that intimate, voiceless communion which the two knew and loved so well,

Suddenly, there shone A strange light, and the scene as sudden changed.

In the midst of an illimitable plain stretched out before her eyes, the visionary saw

A tree with spreading branches and with leaves Of divers kinds,—dead silver and live gold.

Beside the tree stood an angel, who plucked some of the leaves and bound them round the poetess’s brow, till its wild throbbing ceased. So wonderful was their effect, that she pleaded for some to be bound round her father’s brow also.

One leaf the Angel took, and therewith touched His forehead, and then gently whispered ‘Nay!’

After Toru had gazed awhile, wondering and spell-bound at the love and tenderness in the angel’s beautiful face, she opened her eyes upon the world again, to find the vision gone, and her father still sitting patiently beside her, with her hand held fast in his.⁶

The next poem, ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Erckmann-Chatrian’s novel entitled Madame Thérèse,’ records the impression made upon Toru by an incident recorded in the novel, when the French lines were wavering before the Prussian onslaught, and the falling standard was snatched by a woman, and a charge led by her and a drummer-boy. It is marked by the same fervour as was ‘France 1870’, and by an even greater irregularity of rhythm. It would be difficult, for instance, to determine the metre of the following line:

Va-nu-pieds! when rose high your Marseillaise.

It is rather an excess of partiality, too, that can rhyme ‘pont’ with ‘confront’!

The next two poems, ‘Baugmaree’ and ‘The Lotus’, are interesting, apart from their matter, as being the only poems (that we know of) written by Toru in sonnet form. Their success makes us regret that she did not use the form more frequently.

‘Baugmaree’ is a description of the family’s loved Indian garden, girt round with its ‘sea of foliage’ of varying shades, with its vivid splashes of colour where the Seemuls lean above the pools:

Red,—red, and startling like a trumpet’s sound.

The last half of the sonnet is so fine that we must quote it:

But nothing can be lovelier than the ranges Of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon Looks through their gaps, and the white lotus changes Into a cup of silver. One might swoon Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze On a primeval Eden, in amaze.

‘The Lotus’ is in a daintier, more trifling vein, and professes to give the origin of ‘the queenliest flower that blows’. To end the strife as to whether the lily or rose were queen, Psyche at last went to Flora and asked for a flower that should be ‘delicious as the rose, and stately as the lily in her pride’. The result was the lotus, rose-red and lily-white.

‘Our Casuarina Tree’ ends the little volume. It opens with a description of the giant tree, festooned with the crimson flowers of a great creeper which winds round and round it ‘like a huge python’. By day and by night it is a centre of busy life and sweet bird-song. It is the finest object on which the poetess’s eyes rest as she flings wide her window at dawn, and sometimes in the early light

A grey baboon sits statue-like alone Watching the sunrise.

The shadow of the tree thrown across the tank makes the white water-lilies there look ‘like snow enmassed’. Yet, grand and beautiful as is the tree, it is dear chiefly for the memories that cluster round it—memories of a time when happy children played under its shade. The thought brings out an intense yearning towards the playmates lost:

O sweet companions, loved with love intense, For your sakes shall the tree be ever dear!

To the poetess’s imagination, the tree in sympathy sounds a dirge ‘Like the sea breaking on a shingle-beach’. That ‘eerie speech’, she thinks, may haply reach the unknown land and strike a chord of memory there. Such a wail had always this power over her own mind. Even when heard by the seashore in France or Italy, it had always sent thought winging its way homeward bringing remembrance of the Tree as seen and loved in childhood.

The last verse of the poem, with its note of Romanticism, hints at a desire for immortality of verse, and ends with the beautiful line:

May Love defend thee from oblivion’s curse.

The eleven-lined stanza in which the poem is written is a new and very successful experiment.

For its rich imagery, the music of its verses, and the tenderness and pathos with which it is instinct, we would place this poem second to none in the volume.