Crains dans le mur aveugle un regard qui t’épie.
It was all very well from a poet. One could smile indulgently at a pleasing and childish fancy. But when it came to laboratory experiments and graphs, things, it was felt, were getting more serious. It was time to make a protest.
Personally, I make no protest. Being only a literary man and not one of those physicists, whose professional interest it is to keep matter in its place, with only such attributes as render it amenable to mathematics, I am delighted. I love matter, I find it miraculous, and it pleases me when a serious man, like Bose, comes along and gives it a new certificate of merit.
In the philosophy books matter is generally spoken of slightingly, as something lumpish and crude. To the subtlety of their own minds, on the other hand, the metaphysicians can never pay a sufficiently glowing tribute. But in reality—if I may be pardoned the philosophically gross expression—it is to matter, not mind, that the attributes of subtlety, fineness, complexity belong. Our mental picture of the world and its component parts is a crude symbolical affair, having about as much relation to the original as a New Guinea idol to the human body. It is precisely because it is so crude and simple that the thought-picture is valuable to us.
Reality—again I apologise—is infinitely too complicated for our understanding. We must simplify. But having simplified, we ought not to say that those Papuan images of the world, which are our philosophical and religious systems, our scientific hypotheses, are subtle; they are not. They are crude, compared with the original, and it is, precisely, their crudeness which gives them value, for us. Year by year, our world-picture becomes increasingly complicated. More details are noted in the original and are incorporated, symbolically into the image. If the mind of man develops and grows more subtle, that is due to the fact that each succeeding generation is brought up with a progressively more complete and elaborate thought-picture of the world and all its details. We think, we also feel, more subtly and multifariously than did the ancients. To our posterity, a thousand years from now, our subtleties will seem, no doubt, most barbarously crude. Perfection will be attained when mind has completely understood matter and is therefore as delicate, as complex, as variously rich as it. That is to say, perfection will never be attained.
ON THE HOOGLY
The ship slides down the Hoogly, between the mudbanks and the palms. Every now and then we pass a village, a huge white jute mill. Above the flat plain of the delta the sky is enormous and peopled with majestic clouds. After these months lived under a perpetually flawless blue, the spectacle of clouds is a delight and a refreshment. I understand, now, the inspiration of those Mogul paintings, which represent princesses and great lords looking at the clouds. A dry season in India makes one long for a break in the monotony of too perfect weather. Cloud-gazing, when at last the approaching rains render it possible, must be a most delicious pastime, particularly when combined (as the Moguls in the paintings combine it) with dalliance, the sipping of sherbet, and the slow deliberate smoking of an enormous hubble-bubble.
These clouds are messengers from the world that lies beyond the borders of India; my pleasure at seeing them is symbolical. For, to tell the truth, I am glad to be leaving India. I have met old friends in India, and made new friends; I have seen many delightful and interesting things, much beauty, much that is strange, much that is grotesque and comical. But all the same I am glad to be going away. The reasons are purely selfish. What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over. It is because I do not desire to grieve that I am glad to be going. For India is depressing as no other country I have ever known. One breathes in it, not air, but dust and hopelessness. The present is unsatisfactory, the future dubious and menacing. The forces of the West have been in occupation for upwards of a century and a half.
And yet five generations of peace and settled government have made the country, as a whole, no more prosperous than it was in the days of anarchy; according to some authorities, such as Digby, they have made it much poorer. Millions, at any rate, are still admittedly without enough to eat, all their lives. Custom and ancient superstition are still almost as strong as they ever were, and after a century and a half of Western government, nine Indians out of ten cannot read or write, and the tenth, who can, detests the Europeans who taught him. The educated and politically conscious profess democratic principles; but their instincts are profoundly and almost ineradicably aristocratic. They desire, theoretically, to see the country “progressing” in the Western sense of the term; but the practical ambition of most of them is to secure a quiet job without responsibilities or risks.
Meanwhile the mountains of unnecessary labour, of evitable hardship and superfluous suffering are piled up, patiently, higher and ever higher. Millions upon millions are born and painfully live—to what end? God knows, it is hard enough to find a reason anywhere, West or East. But in India there is no conceivable answer to the question, at any rate in terms of the present existence. Metempsychosis had to be invented and the doctrine of karma elaborated with a frightful logic, before the serried, innumerable miseries of India could be satisfactorily accounted for.
The ship goes sliding down stream. The clouds seem to beckon and lead on, away. To-morrow we shall be at sea.
RANGOON
The precincts of the Shwe Dagon pagoda contain the world’s finest specimens of what I may call the merry-go-round style of architecture and decoration. The huge bell-shaped spire, gilded from top to bottom and shining, towards the sun, with intolerable high lights, stands in the midst; and round it are grouped the hundreds of subsidiary shrines, elaborately fretted, glittering like Aladdin’s cave at the pantomime with a gaudy mosaic of coloured glass, gilded and painted, or dark, with the natural colour of the teakwood pinnacles and gables, against the golden shining of the pagoda.
It seems a sacred Fun Fair, a Luna Park dedicated to the greater glory of Gautama—but more fantastic, more wildly amusing than any Bank Holiday invention. Our memories, after a first visit, were of something so curiously improbable, so deliriously and comically dream-like, that we felt constrained to return the following day to make quite sure that we had really seen it.
ON THE IRRAWADDY
Ancient geographers imagined a river running completely round the earth. Travelling up the Irrawaddy from Mandalay, I wished that their fancy had been the truth. How delightful it would have been to go on and on in that leisured and comfortable paddle steamer, gliding calmly through every temperature and nation, every city of the earth, and every natural phenomenon! The banks slide past, the country opens and shuts like a fan, plays the peacock with its plains and avenues and receding dykes. Turning deliberately, the mountains exhibit, now one face, now another, now a garment of sunset rose, now of black against the stars, now of green, now of dim remote indigo and purple.
From time to time cities and villages variously beckon. On jutting headlands the stumps of ancient towers and temples look down and consider the reflection of their irrevocably perished splendour. And all the time the current symbolically flows, the sailing ships, the rafts, the little canoes approach, drift past, recede and vanish like so many lives and loves. Such is river travelling at its best, as it ought to be—as it certainly would be, if the ancient geographers were right and the earth were indeed girdled by a cosmic stream.
The upper reaches of the Irrawaddy would certainly form a section of this great imaginary river. In their kind they are perfect. Between Mandalay and Bhamo I found myself constantly reminded of those strange and beautiful pages in which Edgar Allan Poe describes “The Domain of Arnheim.” It is long years since I read the story; but I remember vividly the crystal river which gave access to the domain, I remember the white sands, the green and sloping lawns, the flowering trees, the woods—all the natural beauties so artfully arranged. For the domain of Arnheim was a masterpiece in the art of landscape gardening; it was nature, but composed; it was the non-human chaos of the world informed by the spirit of man.
The hills and jungles of Upper Burma are savagely innocent of human arrangement; but chance has often contrived to group them significantly and with art about their central river. Here,
