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published tasteful verse on Indian and other topics throughout a long literary life of over fifty years. Kelly, like many other Anglo-Indian writers, was inspired by the mutiny. But, preeminent among the poets of the last generation were Sir Edwin Arnold and Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall. Arnold was employed in India in educational work from 1856 to 1861, and then returned to England. As a poet, journalist and man of letters, he belongs mainly to the history of English literature proper, and he wrote all his best work long after his departure from India; but his whole subsequent life, and almost the whole of his subsequent work, bore predominant impress of his Indian experience. As an unwearied and tasteful translator of Indian poetry into English verse, Arnold is unrivalled and possesses an assured place in English literature; while, as regards his most original work, The Light of Asia, India may justly claim to have inspired some of its noblest passages, though, perhaps, she is responsible for its exotic and sometimes cloying sweetness. Sir Alfred Lyall, whose Asiatic Studies and Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India proved him to be one of the foremost Anglo-Indian thinkers and writers, combined thought and form most happily in the reflections on Indian politics and religion which he put into the form of Verses written in India. Never since Leyden's Ode to an Indian Gold Coin had the exile's longing been expressed so well as in The Land of Regrets, while Siva: or Mors Janua Vitae is one of the finest products of Anglo-Indian literature.

Among the many writers of humorous verse-a species of literature always popular in India-Walter Yeldham, who wrote under the name Aliph Cheem, deserves mention. His Lays

of Ind made him the Anglo-Indian Hood, and revealed to his delighted generation the humour latent in Anglo-Indian life. By its side, Thomas Francis Bignold's Leviora: being the Rhymes of a Successful Competitor deserves mention.

Among miscellaneous prose writings of the period two famous satires claim notice. The Chronicles of Budgepore, by Iltudus Prichard, attempted to show the quaint results which an indiscriminate and often injudicious engrafting of habits and ideas of western civilisation upon oriental stock is calculated to produce.' Prichard had equal command of the bitterest irony and the most whimsical humour, and was the most powerful satirist whom AngloIndia has known. Twenty-one Days in India, being the Tour of Sir Ali Baba, which appeared in Vanity Fair in 1878-9, was satire of a lighter kind. It was the work of George Robert

Aberigh-Mackay, and the frank, humorous and deliberately cynical way in which it laughed at the personnel of the government of India, from the viceroy down to the humblest menial and the infinite tenderness of its pathos, secured to it a celebrity which it still commands.

Philip Stewart Robinson and Edward Hamilton Aitken may be treated together. They both took the familiar Indian sights, the birds, the trees, 'the syce's children... the mynas, crows, green parrots, squirrels, and the beetles that get into the mustard and the soup,' and wrote about them in pleasant prose. Robinson's In my Indian Garden and Aitken's Behind the Bungalow have few rivals in this class of writing, the predominant feature of which is a gay and lighthearted attitude towards the ordinary things, even the ordinary annoyances, of Indian rural life.

Despite the spread of the knowledge of English among the educated classes of India, Indians wrote comparatively little that can be regarded as permanent additions to English literature. The adoption of English as the language of the universities had the altogether unexpected, though in every way desirable, result of revivifying the vernaculars. Stimulated by English literature and English knowledge, Bankim Chandra Chatterji, the first graduate of Calcutta university, created Bengali fiction. Under the influence of the works of Scott, he wrote successful historical novels, and followed these with novels of Indian social life. Bankim, undoubtedly, was the first creative genius who sprang from the Indian renascence brought about in the nineteenth century by the introduction of English education. But he deliberately turned his face away from all attempts to gain a reputation as an English writer. His younger rival, Romesh Chunder Dutt, sought fame in Bengali as a novelist, and, in English, as a historian, economist, novelist and poet. His Lays of Ancient India and his novels show him to have had a complete mastery of the technique of our language, and considerable imaginative power; but his history and his economics were sometimes too polemical for impartiality, and Romesh will live in literary history mainly as one who helped to create modern Bengali.

Ram Mohan Roy, as a pioneer of English education in India, Keshab Chandra Sen, as a religious propagandist, Kashinath Trimback Telang the Maratha, as a judge, scholar and translator, Bahramji Malabari the Parsi, as a social reformer, and hundreds of other Indians used our language for their own purposes almost as

if it had been their mother tongue; but, of those who attempted imaginative literature in English, very few succeeded in writing anything of permanent interest. Michael Madhu Sadan Dutt lives by his Bengali poems rather than by his Captive Ladie, an attempt, so early as 1849, to tell in English verse the story of Prithwi Raj, king of Delhi. Malabari, besides ardently advocating social reforms through the medium of English writings, wrote The Indian Muse in English garb, with, however, indifferent success. Lal Behari Day's Govinda Sámanta: or The History of a Bengal Ráiyat and his Folk Tales of Bengal were pieces of work well worth doing and competently carried out, though exhibiting ability rather than genius. In Torulata Dutt, however, we meet a different order of intellect. The daughter of Govind Chandra Dutt, who himself wrote tasteful English verse, and related to Sasi Chandra of the same family, a voluminous writer of English, she was in close contact with English or continental culture throughout most of her short life. She wrote a novel in French, which was published posthumously in Paris. Her English poetry displayed real creative and imaginative power and almost faultless technical skill. In her English translations (A Sheaf gleaned in French Fields), and in her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, she so nearly achieved a striking success as to make one regret that our language is essentially unsuited to the riot of imagery and ornament which form part of the natural texture of the oriental mind. Her early death in 1877 at the age of twenty-one was a loss both to her own and to our race, but her life and literary achievements were an earnest of the more remarkable results which were likely to ensue, and are ensuing, from the fusing of western and eastern culture. The educational policy of the government of India is destined, given continuity of development, to react upon English literature in a manner realised even now by but a few, and certainly undreamt of by those who entered upon it. But, until its full results are made manifest, Anglo-Indian literature will continue to be mainly what it has been, with few exceptions, in the past-literature written by Englishmen and Englishwomen who have devoted their lives to the service of India.

CHAPTER XI

ENGLISH-CANADIAN LITERATURE

By the scheme of this History the writer is constrained to confine his investigation to the ranks of the illustrious dead. Now, whereas a moderately favourable case may be made out for our current literature, our dead are neither numerous enough, nor sufficiently illustrious to stimulate more than local enthusiasm, and our few early writers of distinction inevitably suffer in a discussion that fails to link them with their living descendants. It is a reasonably safe surmise that the names of not more than three of our deceased writers are known even to professional students of literature in Europe, and two of these names belong to the present generation. Judge Haliburton (Sam Slick) enjoys at least a modest measure of cosmopolitan reputation, and the poetry of Drummond and of Lampman has received recognition not alone upon its own intrinsic merits, but as being characteristically and distinctively Canadian in its quality.

The mention of Drummond's name suggests a difficulty that must be disposed of on the threshold of the discussion. To what authors writing within or without her borders may Canada justly lay claim? Some arbitrary test must evidently be employed. Drummond was born in Ireland and partly educated there, yet we include him inevitably among our Canadian writers; Grant Allen was born in Canada, yet we exclude him from the list; and Goldwin Smith, who lived in Toronto for forty years, can only by an unjustifiable extension of the definition be included in an account of Canadian literature. The criterion in these doubtful cases must surely be an identification with the interests of the country so complete that a Canadian character is stamped upon the work, or, in default of that, a commanding influence exercised by the author upon the development of the country's literature. There is obviously nothing Canadian about Grant Allen in motive or intention. A residence of forty years

would constitute an ordinary individual a Canadian; but Goldwin Smith came among us with his habits of thought unyieldingly fixed, and lived and died in our midst a philosophical radical of sixty years ago. His interests in pure literature were never extensive, and his influence upon our literature may be said to have been negligible, or to have been confined to our newspapers, which, doubtless, received some benefit from the purity and pungency of his journalistic style.

It is not necessary to apologise for, but merely to explain, the paucity of our literary performance. Canada has many advantages; but it has the disadvantage, in the literary sense, of being a young country, born in the old age of the world. All that tradition counts for in the literature of a European country we must forgo. Our literary past is the literary past of England; we have not yet had time to strike root for ourselves. Older countries have a progressive tradition and a harmonious evolution little interrupted by artificial considerations; whereas, with us, literature is compelled to be almost completely artifice. England had her spontaneous ballad and epic beginnings, her naïve miracle plays that responded to an imperative need of the time, her share in the exhilaration of the renascence, when even imitation was an exercise of the original creative faculty; and, upon these broad foundations, she built her great self-conscious modern literature, each new generation of writers urged on by impulses from the past, reinforcing its lessons here, violently reacting from its opinions there and always excited by contact with the vivifying ideas that the present hour engenders.

It may be said that this is too flattering a picture, that England periodically goes to sleep, and that lethargy, rather than excitement, characterises her normal condition. But the statement was not made in flattery, and, if it does not always correspond with the facts, it may serve, at least, to point a contrast with colonial conditions. The raw material of literature we have here in abundance; but this material does not seem to germinate. Our activities are physical, and our mental needs do not require to be supplied by our own exertions. When London began to build her theatres, plays had to be created to employ them. We build theatres freely; but why should we go to the exertion of supplying the text or even the actors, when the United States and England are within such lazy reach? And so with the novel, and so, also, with poetry, but with this saving consideration that poetry, being an affair of impulse, can live, if not flourish, without

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