That mischief-making deity, the god of Love, who delights in getting others into trouble, got himself, once upon a time, if we may trust the poets, into trouble of no ordinary kind. For seeing, as he thought, his opportunity, he attempted to inflame Maheshwara himself with passion for the virgin Daughter of the Snow, who was standing shyly just in front of him, like an incarnation of irresistible seduction, raised to the highest power by the contrast between her coarse bark garments and the perfect beauty of the figure they enclosed. And then it was that the biter was bit, and Love himself was suddenly reduced to ashes for his impudence by a pulverising glance from the angry Maheshwara's terrible third eye, that opened for an instant, for unhappy Love's discomfiture, like the door of a blast-furnace upon a moth. And the pale young Moon looked out upon it all, from the hair of the angry god; the pale new Moon, that very Digit, who gives the title to our story, being therein described as so superlatively lovely, as to be capable of causing the very god of Love to rise from his own ashes.
For it is to be remembered that Love's ashes are no common ashes: they have in them something of the phoenix; they are always ready to revive. The beautiful lament of Rati (Love's wife), over the ashes of her husband (overheard by Kálidás), was really, had she only known, superfluous. He was sure to come to life again. Or, to speak plain English, a great passion is immortal: its very ashes are never absolutely dead. Breathe close upon them, and, as one of our own poets has said, it may be flame will leap. And this is the solid reason why the old Hindoo sages denoted both Love and Recollection by one and the same word. Memory, remembrance, regret, reminiscence;—all these are clearly closely akin, near relatives of Love. What is indifferent to us we soon forget; but we remember what we love, and the longer, in proportion as we love it more. And thus it comes about, that the most formidable obstacle to the would-be sage, the candidate for honours, as we might call him, in renunciation of the world, is his own recollection, his memory of the past. The object of the sage, according to the old Hindoo doctrine, is to become absolute master of himself (jitátmá), to render himself completely superior, or rather indifferent, to the "attachment" of all mundane clogs. The ordinary mortal is a prisoner, tied, bound in bondage, or attached (sakta), to and by the objects of delusion and sense. Whoever aims at emancipation must first, by a long and strenuous course of penance and austerity, sever these attachments, till even though he still remains among them, they run off him like water from a duck; and he goes on living, according to the classic formula, like a wheel that continues to revolve when the original impetus has ceased, or like a branch that goes on swaying after the departure of the bird. He is awake, as opposed to those who still remain blinded by illusion; he is free, as contrasted with the bound; his soul is unattached. But now, there is one thing, from which it may very well be doubted, whether even any sage, no matter what his elevation, was ever wholly free—regret. The strongest soul possesses the most powerful recollection, and unless madness intervene, to cut the thread by obliterating memory, there are things that refuse to be forgotten. And where recollection is, there is sure to be were it but a vestige of regret; for memory is love. And what, then, is it, that is of all things most peculiarly the object of regret; that laughs at all efforts to reduce it to oblivion and nonentity; that refuses to be driven into the oubliettes of any soul? Needless to say, a woman. And therefore it is, that she is regarded, in Oriental mysticism, as beyond all other things the enemy of emancipation; the clog par excellence; the fetter of the soul; the everlastingly regretted, the unforgettable and unforgotten; the irreducible residuum; the inextinguishable spark among the ashes of the past. Was it not Swift, among whose papers, after his death, was found a packet, labelled in his own handwriting: Only a woman's hair? And did not Coriolanus find in this the thing to thwart him, the obstacle that stood between his resolution and the overthrow of Rome? But we need not go to history or fiction to prove a thing endorsed by the experience of almost every man and woman since the beginning of the world. Everybody knows, what one has said, that youth is a blunder: manhood a struggle: old age a regret. Death is preceded by a sigh; did ever anybody die, who had absolutely nothing to regret? And regret, in the language of the old Hindoos, is nothing but the ashes of dead love, not utterly extinct; and therefore, since all love is more or less divine, the ashes of a god.
The ethical value of India's beautiful mythology is not sufficiently appreciated in Europe, whose people seem to think that virtue was discovered by themselves, and have learned from Xenophanes and Plato, S. Paul, S. Augustine, and other shallow politicians to deny all morality to polytheism,[1] condemning the whole of antiquity for the vices of the old metropolis of Rome, which itself was no worse than many modern cities. And India is a survival from antiquity. But it is not, as some suppose, a sink of immorality; nor a barbarous tabula rasa, as others seem to think, with everything to learn in ethics, on which anything may be written that you please. The arrogance of ignorance is the cause of these misunderstandings. The Hindoos have a fable that the chakora, a legendary partridge, subsists on the beams of the moon: and the bird is no bad emblem of themselves. In the ruin of all their ancient glories, the one thing that remains to them is the thesaurus of religion and mythology preserved, like palæozoic flies in amber, in the crystal of their ancient tongue, whose presiding genius is the moon. For with them it is not as with us. Here, in the young nations of the West, literature and religion are not one thing, but two, with essences and origins altogether different and distinct, though now and then, a Milton or a Dante may, by welding them together, produce something more analogous to Indian poetry. For in India religion and literature are inseparable: they look back not to Greece on the one hand and Judæa on the other, but to a sacred compound of the two, all the nearer because it is their very own, whereas to us both Greece and Judæa are foreign, not only the places but the tongues, and likely in the immediate future to become still stranger than they are. This is why nobody can possibly understand anything of India who is ignorant of Sanskrit, which is the key to India, and from which all the modern local idioms, be they Aryan or not, borrow almost everything literary, religious, or philosophical that they contain.[2] And this is just where all the missionaries stumble. Few or none of them realise what it is they have against them: an obstacle which even Ganesha could hardly overcome. You must obliterate the languages of India, ancient and modern, before you can alter its religion. It will not be easy, for when you have succeeded in consigning to oblivion both Sanskrit and Pálí, which seems every day less probable, you will still have to reckon with the vernaculars, with Tulsi Das and Tukarám, Kabir, and a score of other Bibles of the Hindoo peoples, not to mention the legion of their legends, stories, proverbs, festivals, and songs. Fed, like his own chakora, upon these, the Hindoo of good caste finds it impossible to reconcile his traditional conception of saintliness, always ascetic, and based on renunciation, with the spectacle of comfortable missionaries, admirably housed, riding good horses and possessing coquettish wives whose ample wardrobes savour not of sanctity but of Paris. Buddha, the missionary par excellence, was no low-caste man, making a living out of his profession, but an aristocrat who turned his back upon the world; and a dozen English dukes or earls coming out to India to practise voluntary asceticism would do more to convince the Hindoos of Christian religion and sincerity than any number of missionary conferences, in which the real obstacle to missionary effort, the fact, well known to the Hindoo, that he is invited to accede to a religion abandoned by the intelligence of Europe, is scrupulously hidden out of sight. From every line of his old literature the Hindoo learns the essence of religion better than any missionary can teach him. It is devotion: of a woman, to her husband; of a man, to his duty, his dharma; his ancestors, his family, his mother-tongue. Nothing ever will persuade a sane Hindoo of reputable family to belong to a religion which bids him, by injunction, sanction, or example, to abandon his ancestors, desert his family, eat beef, drink spirits, and apply to the divorce court. So it is that we see in India at the present day the very same phenomenon that was exhibited in the agony of the ancient world, when Christianity was an asylum for the outcaste and the criminal and the pariah, a refuge for the destitute, like Romulean Rome in Livy's legend.
This old Sanskrit language, then, in which dwells the spirit of a classic paganism not less beautiful, and holier than Hellas, pre-Christian, idolatrous,[3] preserves among other things opposed to Western modernism an element of charm, which in Europe too much knowledge is destroying: the element of distance, of the unknown, of that which is outside the map, beyond, afar. For us, the time is gone, when, as Plutarch says, geographers filled up the emptinesses beyond the limits known with bogs or deserts or wild beasts. But Hindoo stories move in an enchanted land, a thing to dream over like "the world as known to Homer," or the scraps of mythological geography in Pindar's Odes, when, for example, Rhodes was not an island, but lay lurking, before the gods divided earth, in the briny hollows of the sea.[4] And as we pore on it, we feel ready to murmur with Voltaire, that error has its worth as well as truth. Did the discovery of America make up for the lost mystery that brooded like the spirit over the waters of the dim Atlantic, when even Hibernia was half a myth, ultra quam ad occasum nulla invenitur habitabilis terra, nisi miranda loca quæ vidit S. Brandanus in Oceano?[5] The old literature of India, its epics and itihases, are the very home of mythical geography, of lotus lands, white islands, seas of milk, and distant hills behind which, far beyond the sea, the suns go down to die, which never even Sindbad saw. It is all one gigantic dream, fairy tale reduced to a kind of system, where wild imagination is reality, and the commonplace is not. Teach the Hindoo the earth goes round the sun; it may be so: but in his heart there echoes some scrap of ancient poetry, where every sun descends to rest behind the western hill. Would you blame him for choosing rather to err with Kálidás and Walmiki, than go right with some elementary manual of geography? For him, the dream is the reality; and the spell is in the language in which these things are written: who does not know the language cannot understand the spell. Your Mill[6] and your Macaulay argue on these matters like blind men reasoning on colour. Only that grows never old, which never lived. You cannot kill a dream, because it is already dead.
Down in the west of England, on the very edge of the sea, I know a hill, which had it been in India, pagan India, would have been sacred long ago to the Daughter of the Snow; so exactly does its giant sweep of smooth green turf resemble the outline of a colossal woman's breast. And there on a yellow evening, I lay and mused. And I said to my own soul: This is not quite the golden glow of my Indian Eve, for it is just a little chilly; and yet, yonder is a hill worthy to be haunted by Párwati herself. Only the flowers would all be strange to her; for certainly she would not recognise these primroses and buttercups, this gorse. And yet, some things might deceive her; for surely she would take Lundy Island for the very western mountain, behind which at this very moment the sun is going down.
And as I pondered on her and her husband, all at once I exclaimed: O Wearer of the Moony Tire, who art thyself the Past, the Present, and the Future, didst thou for all thy knowledge of Time's secrets ever dream, that one day thy worshippers would all fall under the direction of this misty little island in a far-off northern sea? Was it irony in the Creator, who makes and ruins even worlds in sport, to subject thy dreaming millions to the Western men of business, less like them than any other people on the surface of the earth? Had India's gods deserted her, as once Judæa's did, or wert thou buried in a thousand years of Yóg, when the Moguls and Maráthas, the Clives and the Dupleix were fighting for the heavy crown glittering with barbaric pearl and gold? And yet, what use in asking, since doubtless thou art far away among thy own Himálaya's still undiscovered snows.
And as I spoke, I looked, and lo! there before me was the almost imperceptible Digit of the Moon, hanging low in the evening sky just over Lundy Island and the sea. And instantly I exclaimed: Aha! Maheshwara, I was wrong, and I utterly forgot thy quality of universal presence, for sure I am that where thy Digit is, thou art thyself not far away. So then tell me, was it thy wish to punish thy devotees, or was it by thy negligence they fell? And what shall be the end?
And as I gazed upon the Moon, I heard the laughter of the deity in the thunder of the waves. And presently he said: Foolish Western, there are many other things thou hast forgotten, as well as my ubiquity. Dost thou not remember what one of thy own philosophers has said: [Greek: Theòs anaítios, aitía d heloménou]? Or hast thou actually forgotten the wisdom of all my own old Hindoo sages, that thou wouldst saddle the responsibility for the ripening of the fruit of works, on me? As my people's works have been, so is their condition: they are but gathering the fruit of the tree of their own wrong-doing in a previous existence. And the crimes of a former birth dog them like death, and lie on them like a shadow: they only have themselves to blame, and now there is no help for it, but in themselves. And they must work out their own emancipation, not by petulance and violence, but by penance and austerity.
And I listened in silence to the deity, and when he finished, I looked up. And after a while, I said to myself: Now, surely, that crystal moon is the diadem of deity; and the voice of God is the murmur of the sea.
Christmas, 1910.
[1] The old argument: there is immorality in the stones of the gods; ergo, the men must be the same, is a monotheist calumny. Books like Kingsley's Roman and Teuton