The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858

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And now the Baboo passes into the godown, and receives from a score
of servile _cicars_, glibbest of clerks, their several reports of
the day's business. Presently, from his low desk, in the lowliest
corner, uprises, and comes forward quietly, Mutty Loll Roy, the head
circar, venerable, placid, pensive, every way interesting; but he is
only the Baboo's head circar, an humble accountant, on fifteen
rupees a month. Do you perceive that fact in the style of his
salutation? Hardly; for the Baboo piously raises his joined hands
high above his head, and, louting lower than before, murmurs the
Orthodox salutation, _Namaskarum_! Yet the Baboo contributed two
thousand rupees in fireworks to the last Doorga Fooja, and sent a
hundred goats to the altar; while only with many and trying shifts
of saving could Mutty Loll afford gold leaf for one image, besides
two tomtoms and a horn to march before it in procession. But behold
the lordly beneficence in Mutty Loll's attitude and gesture,
as with outstretched hands, palms upward, he greets the Baboo
condescendingly with a gift of goodwill!

"_Idhur ano, Sirdar, idhur ano_!--Come hither, Karlee, my gentle
bearer, thou of the good heart and gray moustache! Come hither, and
enlighten this Sahib's ignorance; tell him why the Durwan is
disdainful, as toward the Baboo, and the Circar solemn."

"_Man, Sahib_! That Durwan _Ksutriye_, Soldier caste, Rider caste,--
feest-i-rat-i-man (first-rate man); that Durwan have got Rajpoot
blood, ver-iproud, all same Sahib. Baboo, Merchant caste,--
ver-i-good caste, plenty rich, but not so proud Durwan caste; Baboo
not have Rajpoot blood, not have i-sharp i-sword, not have musiket.
Durwan arm all same tiger; Durwan beard all same lion; Durwan plenty
i-strong, plenty proud.

"That Circar,--ah! that Mutty Loll, too, high caste; that Circar
Brahmin,--Kooleen Brahmin,--all same _Swamy_ (god); that Circar
foot all same Baboo head; that Circar shoe all same Baboo turban.
'Spose Baboo not make that Circar _bhote-btote salaam_, that Circar
say curse, that Circar ispeak _jou-jehannam_ (go to hell). Master
und-istand i-me? I ispeak Master so Master know?"

"Very clear, Karlee,--and wholesome expounding. But here comes the
Baboo to speak for himself.--Good-day, Baboo! Whither so fast with
the spanking Arabs and the Simpkin?--to the garden-house?"

"To the garden-house, Sahib; and the Simpkin is for two young
English friends of mine, who will do the garden-house the honor to
make it their own for a day or two."

"Take care, Baboo! take care! I have my doubts as to the Simpkin.
They do say the orthodoxy of 'Young Bengal' men is none the better
for beefsteaks and Heidseck; such diet does not become the son of a
strict and straightgoing heathen. Well may the Brahmins groan for
the glaring scandals of the new lights; you'll be marrying widows
next, and dining at clubs with fast ensigns."

"Sahib, Caste is God, and Mamoul is his prophet. The church of the
Churruck post and the orgies of Hooly are in no danger from beef or
Simpkin so long as steak or bottle costs a man his inheritance; and
we of Young Bengal know too well how hard are the ways of the Pariah
to try them for fun. Caste is God, and Mamoul is his prophet. The
'glad tidings of great joy' your missionaries bring fall upon ears
stopped with family pride and the family jewels: you know that
appropriate old saw in our proverbial philosophy, 'What is the news
of the day to a frog in a well?'--_Salaam, Sahib_! I have but a few
minutes to spare, and the supercargo is waiting with the indigo
samples."

Presently, as the Cossitollah panorama flows on beneath our window,
with all its bizarreness from the bazaars,--its boxwallahs, and its
pawn-makers, its peddlers of toys, its money-changers and shopmen,
its basket-makers and mat-weavers and chattah-menders, its
perambulating cobblers and tailors, its jugglers, gymnasts, and
match-girls,--its fellows who feed on glass bottles for the
astonishment and delectation of the Sahibs, or who, if you have such
a thing as a sheep about you, will undertake to slaughter and skin
it with their teeth and devour it on the spot,--its conjure-wallahs,
who, for a few pice, will run sharp foils through each other's bodies
without for a moment disturbing either health or cheerfulness, or
will make mangoes grow under table-cloths, "all fair and proper,"
while Master waits,--as the Brahmin still dodges the shadow of the
Soodra, and the Soodra spits upon the footprint of the Pariah, the
Baboo returns to his chariot; the fat and solemn coachman gathers up
the reins, the burkarus assume their symmetrical attitudes on the box,
the syces bawl, and the socas jump.

Just now a _palkee-gharree_, cheapest of one-horse vehicles, with
but one half-naked syce running at the pony's head, and never a
footman near, passes the spanking Arabs; the plain turban of a
respectable accountant in the Honorable Company's coal office at
Garden Reach shows between the Venetian slats of the little window,
and lo! our fine Baboo steps out of his slippers, and standing
barefoot in the common dust of Cossitollah,--dust that has been
churned by all the pigs'-feet that ply that promiscuous thoroughfare,--
humbly touches first the vulgar ground and then his elegant turban,
murmuring a pious _Namaskarum_; for the respectable accountant in the
Honorable Company's coal office is, like Mutty Loll, a Kooleen
Brahmin,--only a little more so. Caste is God, and Mamoul is his
prophet!

At the gate-lodge of the Baboo's garden-house on the Durumtollah
Road, a gray and withered hag, all crippled and leprosied, sits
_durhna_.

What may that be?

Be patient; you shall know.

When the Baboo was as yet a youth, his uncle Rajinda, the pride of
the Mullicks, died of cholera, and the administration of the estate
devolved upon our free-thinking Kalidas. Of course there were
mortgages to foreclose, and delinquent debtors to stir up. A certain
small shopkeeper of the China Bazaar was responsible to the concern
for a few thousand rupees, wherewith he had been accommodated by
Uncle Rajinda as a basis for certain operations in seersuckers and
castor-oil, that had yielded no returns. So our Baboo, in a curt
_chit_, (that is, note, or _sheet_ of paper, as near as a Bengalee
can come to the word,) bade the small speculator of China Bazaar
come down forthwith with the rupees.

But, behold you now, "he had paid," he said. "By the Holy Ganges and
the Blessed Cow! by the turban of his father and the veil of his
mother! restitution had been made long ago," the old man said;
"and the soul of Uncle Rajinda, the pride of the Mullicks, had no
reason to be disquieted for the rupees, though the seersuckers had
been but vanity, and the castor-oil vexation of spirit."

"Produce the documents," said the Baboo, with a business-like
impassibility that in Wall Street would have made him a great bear;--
"where are the receipts?"

"My Lord, I know not. Prostrating my unworthy turban beneath the
lovely lilies of your feet, I swear to my _gureeb purwar_, the
destitute-and-humble-protecting lord, by the Holy Water and the
Blessed Cow, by the beard of my father and the veil of my mother,
that I settled the little account long ago!"

That unhappy speculator in seersuckers and castor-oil died in prison,
and a _gooroo_ (that is, a spiritual teacher) feed by the Baboo,
desolated his last hour with the assurance that he should
transmigrate into the bodies of seven generations of _gharree_-horses,
and drag _feringhee_ sailormen, in a state of beer, from the ghauts
to the punch-houses, all his miserable lives.

Now whether or not the unlucky little speculator had in good faith
discharged the debt will, in all the probabilities of human rights
and wrongs, never appear this side of the last trump; for the Holy
Water and the Sacred Cow, his father's beard and his mother's veil,
were not good in law, the documents not forthcoming.

But it is certain that his widow had faith in his integrity; for at
once, with all her sorrows on her head, she sallied forth in quest
of justice; and from Brahmin post to Sahib pillar she went crying,
"See me righted! Against this hard and arrogant Baboo let my wrongs
be redressed, or fear the evil eye of Dookhee the Sorrowful, of
Haranu the Lost!"

But utterly in vain; for the clamor of the Hindoo widow, however
bitterly aggrieved, is but a nuisance, and her accusation insolence.
So in her pitiful outcasting, in all the forlorn loathsomeness of
leprosy, and the shunned squalor of a cripple, she sat down at the
Baboo's gate, to wait for justice till the gods should bestow it,--
till Siva, the Avenger, should behold her, and ask, "Who has done
this?"

And who shall challenge her? Who shall bid her move on? Mamoul has
crowned her Queen of Tears, and her sublime patience and appealing
have made a throne of the wayside stone on which she sits; there is
no power so audacious that it would give the word to depose her; her
matted gray locks and her furrowed cheeks, her sunken eyes and her
hungry lips, are her "sacred ashes" of the high caste of Sorrow.

The Brahmin averts his face as he passes, and mutters, "She is as
the flower which is out of reach,--she is dedicated to God." That
insolent official, the Baboo's pampered durwan, sees in her only
Mamoul; he would as soon think of shaving himself as of driving her
away. So, as the Baboo passes in or out through the great gate, the
solemn coachman whips up the spanking Arabs, and the syces bawl
louder than ever, and Kalidas Ramaya Mullick turns away his eyes.
But for all that, the durhna woman heaps dust upon her head, which
he sees, and mutters a weird warning, which he hears; and though the
lawn is wide, and the banian topes are leafy, and a gilded temple,
the family shrine, stands between, and the marble veranda is spacious,
and the state apartments are remote, they do say the shadow of the
durhna woman falls on the iced Simpkin and the steaks, in spite of
Young Bengal.

_Mootrib i koosh nuwa bigo,
Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou!
Badue dil koosha bidoh,
Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou!
Koosh biu sheen bu kilwule
Chung nuwaz-a sa-ute,
Bosu sitan bu kam uz o,
Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou!_

"Songster sweet, begin the lay,
Ever sweet and ever gay!
Bring the joy-inspiring wine,
Ever fresh and ever fine!
With a heart-alluring lass
Gayly let the moments pass,
Kisses stealing while you may,
Ever fresh and ever gay!"

Now surely she who thus sings should be beautiful, after the Hindoo
type;--that is, she should have the complexion of chocolate and cream;
"her face should be as the full moon, her nose smooth as a flute;
she should have eyes like unto lotuses, and a neck like a pigeon's;
her voice should be soft as the cuckoo's, and her step as the gait
of a young elephant of pure blood." Let us see.

Alas, no! She entertains a set of lazy bearers, smoking the
hubble-bubble around a palanquin as they wait for a fare; and her
buksheesh may be a cowry or two. By no means is she of the
_nautch_-maidens of Lucknow, who were wont to lighten the hours of
debauched majesty between the tiger-fights and the games of leap-frog;
by no means is she ringed as to her fingers or belled as to her toes;
and though she carries her music wherever she goes, she also carries
a shiny brown baby, slung in a canvas tray between her shoulders.

No excessively voluminous folds of gold-embroidered drapery encumber
her supple limbs; but her skirts are of the scantiest, (what Miss Flora
MacFlimsey would call _skimped_,) and pitifully mean as to quality.
By no means have the imperial looms of Benares contributed to her
professional costume a veil of wondrous fineness and a Nabob's price;
but a narrow red strip of some poor cotton stuff crosses her bosom
like a scarf, and leaves exposed too much of the ruins of once
daintier beauties. A string of glass beads, black and red alternate,
are all her jewels,--save one silver bodkin, all forlorn, in her hair,
and a ring of thin gold wire piercing the right nostril, and, with
an effect completely deforming, encircling the lips. Her teeth and
nails are deeply stained, and the darkness of her eyes is enhanced
by artificial shadows.

And so, while that baby-Tantalus, catching glimpses, over the
unveiled shoulder, of the Micawberian fount he cannot reach,
stretches his little brown arms, bites, kicks, and squalls,--while a
small female apprentice, by way of chorus, in costume and gesture
absurdly caricaturing her _prima donna_, (a sort of Cossitollah
marchioness, indeed, for some Dick Swiveller of the Sahibs,) shuffles
rheumatically with her feet, or impotently dislocates her slender
arms, or pounds insanely on a cracked tomtom, or jangles her clumsy
cymbals, while the squatting bearers cry, "_Wah wah!_" and clap
their sweaty hands,--our poor old glee-maiden of Cossitollah strums
her two-stringed guitar, letting the baby slide, and creaks
corkscrewishly her _Chota, chota natchelee_:--

_Badi suba choo boog zuree,
Bar suri kove an puree,
Qassue Hufiz ush bigo
Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou!_

"Zephyrs, while you gently move
By the mansion of my love,
Softly Hafiz' strains repeat,
Ever new and ever sweet!"

Heaven save the key!

"_Ka munkta_, Bearer?--What is it, my gentle Karlee?"

"_Chittee, Sahib!--chittee_ for Master."

"Note, hey? from whom? let us see!"

Pink paper,--scented with sandal-wood, pah!--embossed, too, with
cornucopias in the corners,--seal motto, _Qui hi?_ ("Who waits?")--
denoting that the bearer is to bring an answer. Now for the inside:

"DEVOTED AND RESPECTFUL SIR:--"

"Insured of your pitiful conduct, your obsequious suppliant, an
eleemosynary lady of decrepit widowhood, throws herself at your
Excellency's mercy feet with two imbecile childrens of various
denominations. For our Heavenly Father's sake, if not inconvenient,--
which we have been beneficently bereaved of other paternal
description,--we humbly present our implorations to your munificent
Excellency, if any small change, to bestow the same, winch it will
be eternally acceptable to said eleemosynary widow of late Colonel
with distinguished medal in Honorable Service, deceased of cholera,
which it was suddenly attacks, and as pretty near destitute. Therefore,
hoping your munificent and respectable Excellency will not order,
being scornful, your pitiful Excellency's durwan to disperse us; but
five rupees, which nothing to Excellency's regards, and our tenacious
gratitude never forget; but kissing Excellency's hands on
indifferent occasions, and throwing at mercy feet with two imbecile,
offsprings of different denominations, I shall ever pray, &c."

"MRS. DIANA, THEODOSIA, COMFORT, GREEN."

"P.S. If not five rupees, two rupees five annas, in name of
Excellency's exalted mother, if quite convenient."

There now! for an imposing structure in the florid style of
half-caste begging-letters, Mrs. Diana Theodosia Comfort Green
flatters herself that is hard to beat.

"'_Qui hi_?'--Karlee, who is at the gate?"

"_Mem Sahib_! one chee-chee woman wanch look see Master, ispeakee
Master buksheesh give; _paunch butcha_ have got."

"_Paunch butcha!--five_ children! why, Karlee, there are but two here.
But remembering, I suppose, that my Excellency has but two 'mercy
feet,' and with an eye to symmetry in the arrangement of the grand
tableau of which she proposes to make me the central figure, she has
made it two 'imbecile offsprings' for the looks of the thing. Do you
know her, Karlee?"

"_Man, Sahib_! too much quentence have got that chee-chee woman; that
chee-chee woman all same dam iscamp; paunch butcha not have got,--
one butcha not have got. Master not give buksheesh; no good that
woman, Karlee think."

"Very well, old man; send her away; tell the durwan to disperse
Mrs. Diana Theodosia Comfort Green; but let him not insult her
decrepit widowhood, nor alarm her imbecile offsprings of various
denominations. For the 'Eurasian' is a great institution, without
which polkas at Coolee Bazaar were not, nor pic-nics _dansantes_ at
Chandernagore."

But now to tiffin. I smell a smell of curried prawns, and the first
mangoes of the season are fragrant. Buxsoo, the _khansaman_, has
cooled the _isherry-shrob_, as he calls the "green seal," and the
_kilmudgars_ are crying, "_Tiffin, Sahib_!" The Mamoul of meal-time
knows no caste or country.

_Bur zi hyat ky kooree!
Gur nu moodum, mi kooree!
Badu bi koor bu yadi o,
Tazu bu tazu, nou bu nou_!

"Gentle boy, whose silver feet
Nimbly move to cadence sweet,
Fill us quick the generous wine,
Ever fresh and ever fine!"

* * * * *

BOOKS.

It is easy to accuse books, and bad ones are easily found, and the
best are but records, and not the things recorded; and certainly
there is dilettanteism enough, and books that are merely neutral and
do nothing for us. In Plato's "Gorgias," Socrates says, "The
ship-master walks in a modest garb near the sea, after bringing his
passengers from Aegina or from Pontus, not thinking he has done
anything extraordinary, and certainly knowing that his passengers are
the same, and in no respect better than when he took them on board."
So is it with books, for the most part; they work no redemption in us.
The bookseller might certainly know that his customers are in no
respect better for the purchase and consumption of his wares. The
volume is dear at a dollar, and, after reading to weariness the
lettered backs, we leave the shop with a sigh, and learn, as I did,
without surprise, of a surly bank-director, that in bank parlors
they estimate all stocks of this kind as rubbish.

But it is not less true that there are books which are of that
importance in a man's private experience, as to verify for him the
fables of Cornelius Agrippa, of Michael Scott, or of the old Orpheus
of Thrace; books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers
and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so
revolutionary, so authoritative; books which are the work and the
proof of faculties so comprehensive, so nearly equal to the world
which they paint, that, though one shuts them with meaner ones, he
feels his exclusion from them to accuse his way of living.

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of
the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil
countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results
of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and
inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by
etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom
friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers
of another age.

We owe to books those general benefits which come from high
intellectual action. Thus, I think, we often owe to them the
perception of immortality. They impart sympathetic activity to the
moral power. Go with mean people, and you think life is mean. Then
read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of
positive quality, with heroes and demigods standing around us who
will not let us sleep. Then, they address the imagination; only
poetry inspires poetry. They become the organic culture of the time.
College education is the reading of certain books which the common
sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already
accumulated. If you know that,--for instance, in geometry, if you
have read Euclid and Laplace,--your opinion has some value; if you
do not know these, you are not entitled to give any opinion on the
subject. Whenever any skeptic or bigot claims to be heard on the
questions of intellect and morals, we ask if he is familiar with the
books of Plato, where all his pert objections have once for all been
disposed of. If not, he has no right to our time. Let him go and
find himself answered there.

Meantime, the colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries,
furnish no professor of books; and, I think, no chair is so much
wanted. In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear
friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and
leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two,
ten, or twenty centuries for us,--some of them,--and are eager to
give us a sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo
that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has
dressed them like battalions of infantry in coat and jacket of one
cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the
right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation
and Combination,--not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half
a million caskets, all alike. But it happens in our experience, that
in this lottery there are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a
prize. It seems, then, as if some charitable soul, after losing a
great deal of time among the false books, and alighting upon a few
true ones which made him happy and wise, would do a right act in
naming those which have been bridges or ships to carry him safely
over dark morasses and barren oceans, into the heart of sacred cities,
into palaces and temples. This would be best done by those great
masters of books who from time to time appear,--the Fabricii, the
Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons,
whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of learning. But private readers,
reading purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving each
the shortest note of what he found.

There are books, and it is practicable to read them, because they
are so few. We look over with a sigh the monumental libraries of
Paris, of the Vatican, and the British Museum. In the Imperial
Library at Paris, it is commonly said, there are six hundred
thousand volumes, and nearly as many manuscripts; and perhaps the
number of extant printed books may be as many as these numbers united,
or exceeding a million. It is easy to count the number of pages
which a diligent man can read in a day, and the number of years
which human life in favorable circumstances allows to reading; and
to demonstrate, that, though he should read from dawn till dark, for
sixty years, he must die in the first alcoves. But nothing can be
more deceptive than this arithmetic, where none but a natural method
is really pertinent. I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and
I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best
of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home. The
inspection of the catalogue brings me continually back to the few
standard writers who are on every private shelf; and to these it can
afford only the most slight and casual additions. The crowds and
centuries of books are only commentary and elucidation, echoes and
weakeners of these few great voices of Time.

The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a
mechanical one of hours and pages. It holds each student to a
pursuit of his native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. Let
him read what is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd
of mediocrities. As whole nations have derived their culture from a
single book,--as the Bible has been the literature as well as the
religion of large portions of Europe,--as Hafiz was the eminent
genius of the Persians, Confucius of the Chinese, Cervantes of the
Spaniards; so, perhaps, the human mind would be a gainer, if all the
secondary writers were lost,--say, in England, all but Shakspeare,
Milton, and Bacon, through the profounder study so drawn to those
wonderful minds. With this pilot of his own genius, let the
student read one, or let him read many, he will read advantageously.
Dr. Johnson said, "Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son
shall read first, another boy has read both: read anything five
hours a day, and you will soon be learned."

Nature is much our friend in this matter. Nature is always
clarifying her water and her wine. No filtration can be so perfect.
She does the same thing by books as by her gases and plants. There
is always a selection in writers, and then a selection from the
selection. In the first place, all books that get fairly into the
vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the
affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel,
though they cannot say. There has already been a scrutiny and choice
from many hundreds of young pens, before the pamphlet or political
chapter which you read in a fugitive journal comes to your eye. All
these are young adventurers, who produce their performance to the
wise ear of Time, who sits and weighs, and ten years hence out of a
million of pages reprints one. Again it is judged, it is winnowed by
all the winds of opinion, and what terrific selection has not passed
on it, before it can be reprinted after twenty years, and reprinted
after a century!--it is as if Minos and Rhadamanthus had indorsed
the writing. 'Tis therefore an economy of time to read old and famed
books. Nothing can be preserved which is not good; and I know
beforehand that Pindar, Martial, Terence, Galen, Kepler, Galileo,
Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior to the average intellect. In
contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish betwixt notoriety
and fame.

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