No, decidedly, the cracker mottoes of the ancients are of no use to us. We need our own tags and catch-words. The preceding paragraph is full of them: complex, birth-control, violence for an idea, psychology, and the rest. Few of these words or of the ideas for which they stand have yet found their way into poetry. For example, God, the intellectually interpreted sensation in the pit of the stomach, has not yet been crystallised into couplets. His home is still the text-book, the Hibbert Journal article. Like most of the rest of our ideas He is unquotable. The ancients were able to build up their notions of the world at large round an elegant poetical skeleton. Less fortunate, we have only a collection of scientific, or sham-scientific, words and phrases to serve as the framework of our philosophy of life. Our minds and our conversation are consequently less elegant than those of our fathers, whose ideas had crystallised round such pleasing phrases as “Sunt lacrimæ rerum,” “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more,” and “A sense of something far more deeply interfused.” Some day, it may be, a poet will be found to reduce our catch-words to memorable artistic form. By that time, however, they will probably be as meaninglessly out-of-date as the cracker mottoes of the classics.
SRINAGAR
Srinagar owns a large population of sacred cows and bulls that wander vaguely through the streets, picking up such vegetable garbage, grass, and fallen leaves as they can find. They are small beasts—the half of good-sized English cattle—and marvellously mild. Red rags mean nothing to these little bulls, they can be trusted in china shops—even in nurseries. Liberty, under-feeding, and unlimited access to the females of their species account, no doubt, for this surprising gentleness.
But though harmless, these Hindu totems are passively a nuisance. They will not attack you as you walk or drive along the streets, but neither will they get out of your way. They stand there, meditatively ruminating, in the middle of the road, and no shouting, no ringing of bells or hooting of horns will send them away. Not until you are right on top of them will they move. The fact is, of course, that they know their own sacredness. They have learned by long experience that they can stand in the road as much as they like and that, however furiously the klaxon sounds, nothing will ever happen to them. Nothing; for Kashmir, though its inhabitants are mostly Mohammedans, is ruled by a pious Hindu dynasty. Up till a few years ago a man who killed a cow was sentenced to death. Under a milder dispensation he now gets only a matter of seven years’ penal servitude. A salutary fear of cows is rooted in the breast of every Kashmiri chauffeur. And the totems know it. With a majestic impertinence they stroll along the middle of the roads. When one is a god, one does not disturb oneself for the convenience of mere man, however importunate.
To the eye of pure reason there is something singularly illogical about the way in which the Hindus shrink from killing cows or eating their flesh when dead, but have no scruples about making the life of the sacred beasts, by their ill-treatment, a hell on earth. So strict is the orthodoxy of Kashmir, that Bovril is confiscated at the frontier, and sportsmen are forbidden to shoot the wild nilgai, which is not bovine at all, but happens to be miscalled the “blue cow”; the very name is sacred. And yet nothing is done to protect these god-like animals from any cruelty that does not actually result in death. They are underfed and, when used as draft animals, mercilessly over-driven. When the goad fails to make them move, their driver will seize them by the tail and, going through the motions of one who tries to start up a Ford car, violently twist. In winter, when fodder runs short, the Kashmiris pack their beasts together in a confined space until they begin to sweat, then turn them out into the snow, in the hope that they will catch pneumonia and die. To the eye of reason, I repeat it, it certainly seems strange. But then the majority of human actions are not meant to be looked at with the eye of reason.
SRINAGAR
It takes the Tartar traders six weeks of walking to get from Kashgar to Srinagar. They start with their yaks and ponies in the early autumn, when the passes are still free from snow and the rivers, swollen in summer by its melting, have subsided to fordableness. They walk into Kashmir, and from Kashmir into India. They spend the winter in India, sell what they have brought, and in the following spring, when the passes are once more open, go back into Turkestan with a load of Indian and European fabrics, velvet and plush and ordinary cotton, which they sell for fabulous profit in their own country.
We paid a visit to the Central Asian sarai at Srinagar where the Tartars halt for a rest on their way down into India. A dozen merchants with their servants were encamped there: strange Mongolian men, high-booted, trousered, jerkined in thick cloth or sheepskin. They showed us their wares: carpets, costly and cheap, from Kashgar and the other oasis cities of the Tarim basin; coarse felt mats, on which were rudely printed in red and blue the most exquisite designs; hand-woven and hand-printed cottons from Turkestan; Chinese silks, jade and crystal; furs. We bought a rug of the poorest quality, a thing of more cotton than wool, but superbly patterned in colours that were none the less beautiful for being manifestly aniline. Also a felt mat in the design of which a Greek decorative motive played a leading part. That identity of the contemporary with the ancient and classical form—was it due to the coincidence of reinvention, to a modern importation from the West? Or was it due, as I liked to think it was, to the survival, through centuries of change and tumult and in spite of invasions and slaughters, of the art which Alexander’s adventurous successors, the despots of Central Asia, implanted in that once flourishing land beyond the mountains?
I do not know why it should be so; but there is something peculiarly romantic about caravans and the slow commerce of pedestrians. The spectacle of a hundred laden yaks or ponies is enough to fire the imagination; of a hundred laden trucks leaves us entirely cold. We take no interest in the merchant who sends his goods by train; but the pedestrian merchant seems to us an almost beautiful and heroic figure. And the aura of romance which surrounded the Tartars was brightened in our eyes when they showed us their medium of exchange. Diving down into the recesses of their greasy clothing, they pulled out for our inspection glittering handfuls of gold. We examined the coins. They were Russian ten-rouble pieces of before the Revolution, all bright and new. The head of the Tsar stood sharply out on them, as though they had but yesterday issued from the Imperial mint.
TAXILA
The country round Taxila, that ancient city where Alexander rested and found an ally, reminded me a little of the Roman Campagna. The outworks of the Himalayas play the part of the Alban and Sabine mountains. Ranges of woodless Frascatis and desiccated Tivolis subside into a grey and rolling plain. On sudden and unexpected eminences rising out of this plain stand the Indian equivalents of Nepi and Civita Castellana. And here and there, on hill-tops, in the open ground below, lie the ruins of the various cities and temples which flourished and decayed, were born anew, only to be sacked and plundered, were re-edified, only to perish absolutely, between the year 1500 before our era and the year 500 after Christ.
First cousins, they seem—these ruins—of the tombs along the Appian Way, of Ostia and Hadrian’s Villa (for ruins, whatever their date and country, have a strong family resemblance among themselves), and own brothers, I may add, to the inhabited villages near by, which differ from the ruins only in being dirtier and more dilapidated.
The best preserved remains are those of the Buddhist monastery and temple of Jaulian. The temple is a stupa or relic mound, and must have looked when intact, with its dome and spire of superimposed umbrellas, something like the modern Burmese pagoda—which is, of course, only a local variation of the original Indian stupa. To-day, nothing remains, but the base of the main stupa with, all round it, a number of miniature stupas or votive shrines. The monastery adjoins the temple, and resembles almost exactly the ruins of a Christian monastery. I noticed only one point of difference: the Buddhist monks had bathrooms.
Round the base of the stupa and in niches in the walls of the monastic cloisters, a quantity of sculpture in stone, stucco, and clay remains intact and in position. The Greek influence is manifest, even in this work of the third century a.d. The Hellenistic leaven was active for centuries. Ages passed, and many barbarian invasions swept across the land before all traces of the Greek influence were quite eradicated and the art of Northern India became again entirely oriental.
The quality
