PREFACE.

Here follows the second volume of my Auld Lang Syne. In some cases my recollections go back very far, and, after a lapse of nearly seventy years, they may not always be so fresh as they ought to be. It is very strange, on looking back to the various stations through which we have passed in our journey through this life, to find how much our own fate has depended on our surroundings and on circumstances over which we ourselves could not possibly have had any control. Our friends, nay even our enemies, seem to form part of our life, and thus it has come to pass that instead of writing my own life, I have almost unconsciously come to write about my friends rather than about myself. As to enemies, if indeed I ever had any, I prefer to be silent, for it is difficult to be quite fair in speaking of them, and we seldom know, till it is too late, what real benefactors they have been to us. Scholars, who on questions of scholarship differ from us as we differ from them, should never be counted as personal enemies, if only they are vitruthful and straightforward, and if otherwise, is it

not best here also to follow the old rule, De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? But with regard to my friends and acquaintances, the older I grow, the more I feel how much I have owed and still owe to them, nay, how often the whole stream of my life has been turned East or West by a word or two spoken by a friend at the right moment, just as a whole train may be turned by the mere touch of a handle by the pointsman.

The first volume of my Auld Lang Syne contained recollections of musicians, poets, crowned heads, and beggars, such as had not entirely vanished from the camera obscura of my memory. The present volume is chiefly devoted to my Indian Friends, and to certain events that first led my attention to India. Though I have had but visions of the rivers, the mountains, the valleys, the forests, and the men and women of India, having never been allowed to visit that earthly paradise, I have known for many years the beauties of its literature, the bold flights of its native philosophy, the fervid devotion of its ancient religion, and these together seem to me to give a much truer picture of what India really was, and is still meant to be, in the history of the world, than the Bazaars of Bombay, or the Durbars of Râjahs and Mahârâjahs at Delhi. Of course, I shall be told that my picture of India is purely ideal, but an ideal portrait may sometimes be truer than even a photograph, and, though I trust that my facts on the whole are right, I shall

viialways feel most grateful, if any facts are pointed out to me which either contradict or modify my own judgments.

India has never had full justice done to it, and when I say this I think not only of ancient, but of modern India also. And though it can easily be seen that my chief interest lies with ancient India, it should be remembered that in no other country is the past still so visibly present as in that southernmost home of the ancient family of Aryan speech. There may be more historical monuments, reminding us of the past, in Greece and Italy. But life, with its religion, philosophy, and literature, has completely changed there, and we look in vain for a Socrates or Plato on the steps of the Parthenon, or for a Cato or Caesar among the lonely columns of the Forum. In India, on the contrary, the religion of the Veda is by no means entirely extinct. Not long ago even one of the old magnificent Vedic sacrifices, the Agnishtoma, was performed at Benares with all its pristine array. The old epic poems are still recited by the Pâthakas of the country, and some of the old philosophies are flourishing in native Colleges, such as Nuddea, so that men of the present day, such as Gauri-samkara,

the Prime Minister of Bhavnagar, and the Yogin Râmakrishna, bring back to us in full reality the Rishis and Yogins of a thousand or two thousand years ago.

What seems to me to prevent a full appreciation of the intellectual achievements of ancient and viiimedieval India is that they are mostly looked upon, as we look on the prodigies in our exhibitions, as simply curious. Now, we should never say that Plato and Aristotle were curious. We take them far more seriously. We look upon them as our equals, nay as our teachers. It cannot surely be the brown skin that keeps us from feeling the same sympathy and paying the same homage to the poets and philosophers of ancient India, and that prevents even at the present day any real friendship between the best sons of India and England? That brown skin may at first cause a feeling of strangeness, but I know how easily that feeling can be and has been overcome, and, judging from my own limited experience, I can truly say that there is behind that warm and almost Italian colour of the Âryas of India the same warm heart, the same trust, and the same love as under the white skin of Europeans. Real friendship between the rulers and the ruled in India

ought to be no impossibility; it has existed again and again; only it should no longer be the exception, but the rule.

If the account of my Indian Friends which I give in this volume, should serve here and there to overcome that feeling of strangeness and lead to real trust between the two most distant members of the noble family of Aryan speech, I should indeed feel amply rewarded.

I could not well pass over, as belonging by right to the circle of my friends and acquaintances, the ancient Rishis of the Veda, call them Dîrghatamas, ixVasishtha, or any other name, and in order to show what these ancient poets were really like, I have ventured to add metrical translations of a few of their hymns, celebrating the matutinal procession of their bright Devas or gods. For these I have to crave the indulgence of my critics. These poets were the first to call me to India, and I have never regretted having followed their call, as far as other calls allowed me to do so. They have revealed to me a whole world of thought of which no trace existed anywhere else, and they have helped me to throw the first faint rays of light and reason on perhaps the darkest period in the history of religion, philosophy, and mythology. That period, which I should like to call the Etymological, will, I doubt not, become illuminated hereafter by a flood of light from the same source. The work of the present generation of Vedic students could naturally be that

of pioneers only, but they may fairly say In magnis et voluisse sat est, or in Sanskrit, Yatne krite yadi na sidhyati, koztra doshah!

Oxford, May 1, 1899.

MY INDIAN FRIENDS. I.

My first Acquaintance with India.

How I fell in love with India is a very old, and a very long story. We have all read of young knights who in a dream had a vision of a beautiful princess, and who did not rest until they had found her, delivered her, and, after many hard fights with giants and monsters, carried her home in triumph. I had such a vision of India when I was not yet ten years old. It may seem passing strange that a little boy in a small town of Germany should as far back as 1833 have dreamt of India. Few people would know that small town in which he lived. However, if they will look on the map of 2Germany, somewhere between the 12th and 13th degrees of longitude and the 51st and 52nd degrees of latitude, they will find Dessau, the capital of the Duchy of Anhalt. It lies on the road from Leipzig to Magdeburg, and in these days of railways people often pass it on their way to Berlin. I have never been a very superstitious man, and have never believed in ghosts or spirits, in table-turnings or spirit-rappings, in visions or apparitions; in fact, in anything that can strike the material senses, and

yet pretend to be immaterial, and has nothing to strike with. This is the whole problem of ghosts in a nutshell. If ghosts are immaterial, they cannot strike our eyes, or tickle our ears. They could not even have a sulphurous smell. If, on the contrary, they are material, they are not ghosts. But this by the way. But though an unbeliever in ghosts, I have not been able to withhold my belief from coincidences, strange coincidences, which we have to accept in the course of our life without any attempt to account for them. I well remember when I was at school, one of my copybooks had a large picture of Benares on the outside. It was a very rough picture, but I can still see the men, women, and children as they stepped down the ghats to bathe in the waters of the Ganges. That picture caught my fancy and set me dreaming. What did I know of India at that time? Nothing but that the people were black, that they burnt their widows, and that, in order to get into Paradise, they had first to be mangled under the wheels of the car of Juggernâth. On

3my picture, however, they were represented looking tall, and, as I thought, beautiful, certainly not like niggers; and the mosques and temples visible on the shores of the river impressed me as even more beautiful and majestic than the churches and palaces at Dessau. Boys will dream dreams, and as I was sitting idle at school dreaming and seeing visions of Benares, instead of doing my copy, I was suddenly taken by the ear by our writing-master, and told to copy several pages containing such names as Benares, Ganges, India, and all the rest, because I had been so idle and had made a very bad copy. This was my first and somewhat painful acquaintance with India, and it led to nothing else at the time. It simply left the memory of a kind of vision, and, if I had not later in life become devoted to the reality of that vision, I should probably never have thought of my copybook again.

Note.—In Sanskrit words an italic k should be pronounced like English “ch” in church, italic g like “j” in join. Thus, mlekkha, or, as some used to spell it, mlechchha, should be pronounced like mlêcha. Proper names, however, and Oriental words that have already a recognised spelling in English, have mostly been left unchanged.

It was when I had left school, and had gone to the University of Leipzig in 1841, that my vision, like a revenant, appeared again, and assumed then a more tangible and permanent form. I was getting a little tired of Greek and Latin, and the warmed-up cabbage, the crambe repetita, of Homer and Horace, when I heard of the foundation of a new Chair—a Chair of Sanskrit—and saw lectures on Indian literature advertised by Professor Brockhaus. Here my curiosity was roused at once; I had already had a slight flirtation with Arabic, but now I fell seriously in love with Sanskrit, and became more and more faithless to my first classical love. Professor 4Brockhaus was an excellent, kind-hearted, and helpful teacher. I began Sanskrit with a will, and, after I had attended his lectures for several semesters at Leipzig, and had read with him such ordinary books as Nala, Sakuntalâ, and even a little of the Rig-Veda, I went to Berlin to study under Bopp; and then proceeded to Paris, attracted by the fame of Eugène Burnouf.

At that time my desire to see India, as I had seen it in the visions of my schooldays, became very strong. As classical scholars yearn to see Rome or Athens, I yearned to see Benares, and to bathe in the sacred waters of the Ganges. But at that time such a thing was simply out of the question. At that time to go to India seemed to be the privilege of Englishmen only, and it took half a year to get there, and a great deal more money than I could command. The dream of my life to see India face to face has never been realised. When I was young enough, I had not the wherewithal to go there, and when, later in life, I was invited again and again by my Indian friends to go there, I was too old and too much tied down by duties from which there was no escape. Besides, unless I could have stayed in India at least two or three years, could have learned to speak the languages, and come to know the few native scholars still left, it was nothing to me. My India was not on the surface, but lay many centuries beneath it; and as to paying a globe-trotter’s visit to Calcutta

and Bombay, I might as well walk through Oxford 5Street and Bond Street But, though I never stood on the ghats of Benares, and never saw the men, women, and children step down from them into the sacred waters of the Ganges, I have had the good fortune of knowing a number of Indians in Europe, and no doubt some of the best and most distinguished of the sons and daughters of India. I have often been told that I have been misled by these acquaintances, and have taken far too favourable a view of the Indian character; that I had seen the best of India only, but not the worst. But where is the harm? I have seen what the Indian character can be, I have learnt what it ought to be, and I hope what it will be, and though we cannot expect a whole nation of Rammohun Roys, of Debendranâth Tagores, of Keshub Chunder Sens, of Malabâris and Râmabâis, we ought not to neglect them in our estimate of the capabilities of a whole nation.

Dvârkanâth Tagore.

Indians did not travel so freely fifty years ago as they do now. The crossing of the black water and all its consequences had not then lost its terrors. When, therefore, in the year 1844, a real Hindu made his appearance in Paris, his visit created a great sensation, and filled me with a strong desire to make his acquaintance. He was a handsome man, and, as he took the best suite of apartments in one of the best hotels in Paris, he naturally roused considerable curiosity. I was 6then attending Professor Burnouf’s lectures at the Collège de France, and, as the Indian visitor had brought letters of introduction to that great French savant, I too was introduced to the Indian stranger, and soon came to know him well. He was the representative of one of the greatest and richest families in India, Dvârkanâth Tagore, the father of the Maharshi Debendranâth Tagore, who is still alive, and the grandfather of Satyendranâth Tagore, the first successful native candidate for the Indian Civil Service, whom I knew as a young student in England, and who now, after serving his country

and his Empress with great distinction for many years, has retired from the service.

Dvârkanâth Tagore was not a Sanskrit scholar, but he was not unacquainted with Sanskrit literature. The first time I saw him was at the Institut de France, when Burnouf presented him with a copy of his splendid edition of the Bhagavat-Purâna. On one side was the Sanskrit text, on the other the French translation, and it was curious to see the Indian placing his delicate brown fingers on the white page with the French translation, and saying with a sigh, “Oh, if I could read that!” One would have expected that his wish would have been to understand the ancient language of his own country; but no, he pined for a better knowledge of French.

He was not an antiquarian, nor a student of his own religion or of the language of his own sacred books. But when he was told by Burnouf what 7my plans were, and how I had actually copied and collated the MSS. of the Veda at Paris, he took a lively interest in me. He invited me, and I often spent the mornings with him, talking about India and Indian customs. Strange to say, he was devotedly fond of music, and had acquired a taste for Italian and French music. What he liked was to have me to accompany him on the pianoforte, and I soon found that he had not only a good voice, but had been taught fairly well. So we got on very well together. After complimenting him on his taste for Italian music, I asked him one morning to give me a specimen of real Indian music. He sang first of all what is called Indian, but is really Persian music, without any style or character. This was not what I wanted, and I asked whether he did not know some pieces of real Indian music. He smiled and turned away. “You would not appreciate it,” he said; but, as I asked him again and again, he sat down to the

pianoforte, and, after striking a few notes, began to play and sing. I confess I was somewhat taken aback. I could discern neither melody, nor rhythm, nor harmony in what he sang; but, when I told him so, he shook his head and said: “You are all alike; if anything seems strange to you and does not please you at once, you turn away. When I first heard Italian music, it was no music to me at all; but I went on and on, till I began to like it, or what you call understand it. It is the same with everything else. You say our religion is no 8religion, our poetry no poetry, our philosophy no philosophy. We try to understand and appreciate whatever Europe has produced, but do not imagine that therefore we despise what India has produced. If you studied our music as we do yours, you would find that there is melody, rhythm, and harmony in it, quite as much as in yours. And if you would study our poetry, our religion, and our philosophy, you would find that we are not what you call heathens or miscreants, but know as much of the Unknowable as you do, and have seen perhaps

even deeper into it than you have!” He was not far wrong.

He became quite eloquent and excited, and to pacify him I told him that I was quite aware that India possessed a science of music, founded, as far as I could see, on mathematics. I had examined some Sanskrit MSS. on music, but I confessed that I could not make head or tail of them. I once consulted Professor H. H. Wilson on the subject, who had spent many years in India and was himself a musician. But he did not encourage me. He told me that, while in India, he had been to a native teacher of music who professed to understand the old books. He had expressed himself willing to teach him, on condition that he would come to him two or three times a week. Then at the end of half a year he would be able to tell him whether he was fit to learn music, whether he was in fact an Adhikârin, a fit candidate, and in five years he promised him that 9he might master both the theory and the practice of music. That was too much for an Indian civilian who had his hands full of work, and though he learnt many things from Pandits, Professor H. H. Wilson, then, I believe, Master

of the Mint and holding several other appointments besides, had to give up all idea of becoming apprenticed for five years to a teacher of music. Dvârkanâth Tagore was much amused, but he quite admitted that five years was the shortest time in which any man could hope thoroughly to master the intricacies of ancient Hindu music, and I too gave up in consequence all hope of ever mastering such texts as the Sangîta-ratnâkara, the Treasury of Symphony, and similar texts, though they have often tempted my curiosity in the library of the East India House.

There is another member of the Tagore family, Râjah Surindro Mohun Tagore, a very liberal patron of Indian music, who has published a great deal about it, but he too has kept aloof from touching on the old science of music that once existed in India, though we know as yet so little of its literature. If we could accept a tradition that has been repeated again and again by Sanskrit scholars, even by men of great learning, such as the late Professor Benfey, we should have to believe that Guido d’Arezzo (about 1000 A. D.) borrowed his gamut from the Arabs, and that they had adopted it from the Persians, who had been the pupils of the Hindus. In itself such 10a borrowing has nothing incredible in it, for we know that our figures, not excluding the nought, travelled on the same road, from the Indians to the Persians, the Arabs, the Spaniards, and the Italians. It is true also that one of the Indian gamuts consisted of seven notes, and that these notes went by the names sa, ri, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni, which were the first syllables of their Sanskrit