CHAPTER XII

SUPPLEMENTARY REVIEW

BY MR. E. J. THOMPSON

IF in fulfilment of a promise I now write a few words of summary and conclusion, it is not in the hope of adding anything essential to the story that has been told in Mr. Das’s sympathetic pages. The materials for judgement are before the reader, and he is in a position to appreciate this extraordinary girl.

The fact of her achievement may be quite simply stated. So far as actual performance goes, Toru Dutt’s English fame rests on two books, neither of any great size, and one published posthumously. Each of these, judged by any fair standard, represents, in differing ways, a really astonishing measure of actual, undeniable success. But, further, both are affecting by the number of indications they contain of possibilities of development, often in directions where the poet’s real achievement was slight. There are outcroppings of veins that were never, during her brief day of work, touched to any considerable extent. It is the knowledge of this that compels diffidence and hesitation in criticism of her verse. It is easy to feel that, in the work done, she never escaped from the influence of her favourite English poets, such writers as Mrs. Browning, whose work did not furnish satisfactory prosodic models. The metres used by Toru Dutt are nearly always of the simplest, and her use of them is marred by much crudity. Yet against this must be set the many signs of haste and lack of opportunity to finish. The punctuation of the Ballads, for example, is chaotic. She heard, as Lowell surmises that Keats did, a voice urging ‘What thou doest, do quickly’; and, especially after her sister’s death, she plunged into work with energy and restlessness. Yet, even amid the many marks of immaturity and haste, there are signs that she would have escaped before long from many of her prosodic limitations. ‘Our Casuarina Tree,’ surely the most remarkable poem ever written in English by a foreigner, shows her already possessed of mastery over the more elaborate and architectural forms of verse. In any case, there is enough to show that experience and practice would have brought release from the cramping and elementary forms that she used; which is perhaps what Mr. Gosse means when he says that ‘mellow sweetness’ was all that Toru Dutt lacked to perfect her as an English poet, and ‘of no other Oriental who has ever lived can the same be said’.

But, with regard to shortcomings far more serious, there is evidence again that a few more years would have brought emancipation. Her work, as it stands, is not deeply-rooted. It is usual to say that the Ballads are that portion of her work which has most chance of some sort of permanence for its own sake. This, I am convinced, is an error. I am not blind to their scattered beauties, the noble picture of Savitri in her strife with Death, the touches of Indian scenery which spread a kind of woodland shade over Buttoo; nor can the most casual reader fail to feel the presence of power, careless and diffused, yet binding the whole into unity. But the facts remain, of carelessness, and, what is more serious, lack of sympathy in the author. She stands outside her themes and does not enter deeply into them. Nor can I consider those themes as of anything like first-class value. Some have a rustic charm which strikes the mind pleasantly enough, but not deeply; others had been handled ages before Toru took them up, by writers whose minds were primitive, as hers emphatically was not, and in sympathy, as hers again was not. Of far higher poetic value, and deserving of much more attention than they have received, are the half-dozen intensely personal poems which follow the Ballads. I have spoken of ‘Our Casuarina Tree’. One of the stanzas drops into conventionality, and uses adjectives and thought that are secondhand and otiose. But the poem’s strength is independent of this; and its blending of pathos and dignity of spirit, its stretching out of ghostly arms to those other haunted trees of Wordsworth’s in ‘Borrowdale’, the conclusion—so recalling the last work of another poet, far inferior in genius but dying equally young, Kirke White, in the touching close of his Christiad—all this forms a whole of remarkable strength and beauty, and should achieve her hope of placing the tree of her childhood’s memories among those immortalized by

Mighty poets in their misery dead.

‘Near Hastings’ is a lyric which brings a lump to the throat, and should convince the most careless and supercilious of the grace and wisdom, the political expediency even, of receiving with kindness these strangers with whom destiny has so strongly linked us and who so often find our manners, like our northern climate, cold. The poems have touches of a boldness and imaginative vigour which have not appeared before in Toru’s work. Nothing, for instance, could be finer or more vivid than the line on the simuls in blossom, in the Baugmaree sonnet:

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

Her poems on France and French affairs misread the political situation. Her love for France was passionate, a second patriotism; but no one to-day is likely to quarrel with her enthusiasm for the generous nation that has so long and so signally served civilization. Her letters show how the Franco-Prussian War stirred her sympathies; no Frenchwoman could have felt more poignantly for her bleeding country. It is interesting to compare Toru’s verses on the war with those written by a contemporary poetess, Christina Rossetti:

She sitteth still who used to dance.

But the verses grip most of all for the vehement soul that they reveal, a soul which has had few fellows throughout time. Toru Dutt remains one of the most astonishing women that ever lived, a woman whose place is with Sappho and Emily Brontë, fiery and unconquerable of soul as they; and few statements, one feels, can more triumphantly sustain fair examination than this. The remarkable verses in which she chronicles the dream that foreran death go to strengthen this same conviction of power and fire. These verses, intensely personal all, and by that intensity breaking from convention and fetters, show her feeling her way to freer rhythms, and even handling blank verse—of which no Englishwoman has given a satisfactory example—in a way that promised ultimate mastery, or at least a very great degree of strength and adequacy. These poems are sufficient to place Toru Dutt in the small class of women who have written English verse that can stand.

The Sheaf is remarkable after other fashion. Merely to have translated so much and so well from one alien tongue into another must be a feat hardly paralleled; and the book contains much work that is individual and beautiful. In this connexion, it is of interest to note that some of the very best work is Aru’s; in particular, the lines quoted by Mr. Gosse as exemplifying Toru’s early mastery of English verse, and since then in constant quotation for the same purpose, have the initial A. (Aru) against them:

Still barred thy gates! The far East glows, The morning wind wakes 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.

But the Notes are astonishing beyond anything in the text. It seems impossible that an Indian girl, at such an age, should have had such a knowledge of French literature. And in the Notes, while never merely foolish even when boldest, she deals with French masters as one assessing the work of equals, and it seems hard to tell which to admire more—the range of reading, or the independence and masculinity of criticism. These Indian girls—though the gentle Aru, one knows, had far the smaller share in these surprising Notes—knew their own minds, and could express those minds with precision and a strength that compels respectful attention. I remember speaking to Dr. Brajendranath Seal of these Notes and the way they found me; and he told me they had made the same impression on him when he first read them. If for the Notes alone, The Sheaf merits republication.

Toru’s letters, now first presented to the world by Mr. Das, are valuable for the way they enable us to see the home-life out of which her life and work sprang. It is impossible to read them without feeling how beautiful and noble that home-life was, with its encyclopaedic interests, its playfulness amid knowledge, its affection. The father, bereaved of such comrades and children in quick succession, yet keeping a scholar’s gentleness and a saint’s resignation through all sorrow; father and child, though Death came not as a visitant only but as inmate and constant shadow over all events, preserving their love of ‘the things that are more excellent’, of books and pets, their care for dependants, and clinging the closer to each other as everything in their perishing world grew dim but love—these form a picture no feeling reader will be slow to take or quick to forget. Her excellent friends, her kind relatives, Baguette the cat, the horses, the servants, all combine to form a family-circle little like the kind of family the West has learned to look for in the East. The publication of these letters, as of everything relating to Toru Dutt, is nothing less than an Imperial service, and must awaken to closer fellowship and understanding all that is best in the races so closely linked and now so often estranged. And the whole of Toru’s life and work rested upon a character patient and uncomplaining, Christian in faith and fortitude. If for a time her circumstances were such as to leave her, in a sense, between two worlds, neither truly hers—so that the Ballads, to refer back for example, have no deep roots in the Indian sentiment from which they profess to spring—yet her mind was too independent and too truly indigenous for this to have continued long. There is abundant proof that this girl, so amazingly and richly at home in two alien literatures, was growing into her own nation and its thought, and would have shown us Christian thought and feeling, not as something alien but as truly belonging to Him in Whom there is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, English nor Bengali. What Michael Dutt was too shallow to have done, our other Christian poet would have accomplished, and in a measure actually did accomplish.

And after all, the essential thing to be said about Toru Dutt can only be said when we remember her, not solely in herself, amazing (it seems impossible to avoid this adjective in connexion with her) in her combination of intellect and knowledge and character, but in the race she represented. Indian women in legend have long been familiar to the West; and all would concede that such figures as Sita and Savitri cannot be unrelated to the race whose imagination produced them, but must have had their types in real life. And it will be remembered what a line of heroines the Rajput nation has produced till, almost within living memory, in Krishna Kumari the old-world stories of Jephtha’s daughter and of Iphigeneia gained a deeper pathos with that figure of a child-martyr dying in the sunset of a noble race. But the nations of India’s plains, each in its way endowed with gifts for that larger India, have seen too little of the unrealized power of their womanhood.

The story of these gifted and heroic sisters, whose brief lives found fulfilment in the liberty which Christ has brought, was the first dawn, in the Bengali Renaissance, of the day which has brought to light such possibility and such achievement as the names of Kamini Sen and Sarojini Naidu represent. It is natural to think of Sarojini Naidu, when Toru Dutt comes to mind. It is undeniable that Mrs. Naidu has a metrical accomplishment and a skill in words far beyond anything which her predecessor’s hasty effort attained. But in strength and greatness of intellect, the comparison is all to Toru’s advantage. And all these, both the two whose fame rests on their work in English and those who have used their own rich vernacular, sprang from the narrow circle of families emancipated from old social wrong, chiefly by Christian and Brahmo influence. If the scanty plot can bear, in so brief a space of years, so promising a harvest, what an enrichment of their nation would come, if the same possibilities of development came to the whole of Bengali womanhood? To one who loves the Bengali people and believes in their future, it seems hardly credible that so much should have been said, and so much from year to year should continue to be said, yet so little should be done. Whatever reasons may have existed for the introduction of the purda system, those reasons have long ceased to be operative; and with a freer life for the mothers of the people, not only would the misery of seclusion through the intolerable heats of summer pass from them, but the nation would gain a healthier, stronger manhood. Every one who has had experience of schools and colleges must have felt that in no country is teaching accompanied by so many cruel disappointments, and in no country is there so much sickness and physical feebleness as in Bengal. Part of this weakness must be inherited; and in a country where natural conditions are of themselves so hard, the generations, as they come to birth, should be given every possible chance of success in the battle which is to be so unequal in any case. But this is one side only; and woman’s suffering outweighs man’s. Much has been spoken against child-marriage, little has been done. Maidenhood, at the years when it should naturally be most delightful and winning, ceases to be maidenhood. Had Toru been a Hindu, the burdens of premature wifehood, probably of premature motherhood, would have made her story impossible. As regards its girls, the Bengali people loses at least five years of childhood, and the loss is one for which nothing can offer any shadow of compensation. I remember, when I made this comment to Bengal’s greatest living poet, his reply: ‘I quite agree with you, and it is the saddest thing in our lives.’ Again, much has been said against the monstrous dowry-system, which renders self-respect an impossibility for the women whose worth is weighed against the rank and attainments of the men who take them, which makes education an affair of the market-place; but little has been done. When Snehalata, heart-broken at the ruin which her marriage was bringing on her family, burnt herself to death, Bengal was stirred, and meetings beyond count were held, and students beyond count vowed that in their case, at least, the thing should not be. Rarely can there have ever been such a display of profound emotion in any land, never can there have been so little result. All things continued as they were. One would think that never among any people can there have been so distressing an episode; and nothing more depressing for those of us who have loved this people and defended them through all evil report. Here we are left without an answer when our friends are defamed, and can only assent in humiliation and despair. And first of all the many things that must be done and sought, this elementary justice must be rendered, and woman be free to expand and find herself; and Toru Dutt, in her greatness of soul and her greatness of mind, will no more be a solitary and astounding phenomenon, but the first-born star in a heaven of many lights.