If Toru Dutt were alive, she would still be younger than any
recognized European writer, and yet her fame, which is already
considerable, has been entirely posthumous. Within the brief space of
four years which now divides us from the date of her decease, her
genius has been revealed to the world under many phases, and has been
recognized throughout France and England. Her name, at least, is no
longer unfamiliar in the ear of any well-read man or woman. But at the
hour of her death she had published but one book, and that book had
found but two reviewers in Europe. One of these, M. André Theuriet, the
well-known poet and novelist, gave the “Sheaf gleaned in French Fields”
adequate praise in the “Revue des Deux Mondes;” but the other, the
writer of the present notice, has a melancholy satisfaction in having
been a little earlier still in sounding the only note of welcome which
reached the dying poetess from England. It was while Professor W. Minto
was editor of the “Examiner,” that one day in August, 1876, in the very
heart of the dead season for books, I happened to be in the office of
that newspaper, and was upbraiding the whole body of publishers for
issuing no books worth reviewing. At that moment the postman brought in
a thin and sallow packet with a wonderful Indian postmark on it, and
containing a most unattractive orange pamphlet of verse, printed at
Bhowanipore, and entitled “A Sheaf gleaned in French Fields, by Toru
Dutt.” This shabby little book of some two hundred pages, without
preface or introduction, seemed specially destined by its particular
providence to find its way hastily into the waste-paper basket. I
remember that Mr. Minto thrust it into my unwilling hands, and said
“There! see whether you can't make something of that.” A hopeless
volume it seemed, with its queer type, published at Bhowanipore,
printed at the Saptahiksambad Press! But when at last I took it out of
my pocket, what was my surprise and almost rapture to open at such
verse as this:—
Still barred thy doors! The far east glows,
The morning wind blows fresh and free
Should not the hour that wakes the rose
Awaken also thee?
All look for thee, Love, Light, and Song,
Light in the sky deep red above,
Song, in the lark of pinions strong,
And in my heart, true Love.
Apart we miss our nature's goal,
Why strive to cheat our destinies?
Was not my love made for thy soul?
Thy beauty for mine eyes?
No longer sleep,
Oh, listen now!
I wait and weep,
But where art thou?
When poetry is as good as this it does not much matter whether
Rouveyre prints it upon Whatman paper, or whether it steals to light in
blurred type from some press in Bhowanipore.
Toru Dutt was the youngest of the three children of a high-caste
Hindu couple in Bengal. Her father, who survives them all, the Baboo
Govin Chunder Dutt, is himself distinguished among his countrymen for
the width of his views and the vigour of his intelligence. His only
son, Abju, died in 1865, at the age of fourteen, and left his two
younger sisters to console their parents. Aru, the elder daughter, born
in 1854, was eighteen months senior to Toru, the subject of this
memoir, who was born in Calcutta on the 4th of March, 1856. With the
exception of one year's visit to Bombay, the childhood of these girls
was spent in Calcutta, at their father's garden-house. In a poem now
printed for the first time, Toru refers to the scene of her earliest
memories, the circling wilderness of foliage, the shining tank with the
round leaves of the lilies, the murmuring dusk under the vast branches
of the central casuarina-tree. Here, in a mystical retirement more
irksome to an European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, the
brain of this wonderful child was moulded. She was pure Hindu, full of
the typical qualities of her race and blood, and, as the present volume
shows us for the first time, preserving to the last her appreciation of
the poetic side of her ancient religion, though faith itself in Vishnu
and Siva had been cast aside with childish things and been replaced by
a purer faith. Her mother fed her imagination with the old songs and
legends of their people, stories which it was the last labour of her
life to weave into English verse; but it would seem that the marvellous
faculties of Toru's mind still slumbered, when, in her thirteenth year,
her father decided to take his daughters to Europe to learn English and
French. To the end of her days Toru was a better French than English
scholar. She loved France best, she knew its literature best, she wrote
its language with more perfect elegance. The Dutts arrived in Europe at
the close of 1869, and the girls went to school, for the first and last
time, at a French pension. They did not remain there very many months;
their father took them to Italy and England with him, and finally they
attended for a short time, but with great zeal and application, the
lectures for women at Cambridge. In November, 1873, they went back
again to Bengal, and the four remaining years of Toru's life were spent
in the old garden-house at Calcutta, in a feverish dream of
intellectual effort and imaginative production. When we consider what
she achieved in these forty-five months of seclusion, it is impossible
to wonder that the frail and hectic body succumbed under so excessive a
strain.
She brought with her from Europe a store of knowledge that would
have sufficed to make an English or French girl seem learned, but which
in her case was simply miraculous. Immediately on her return she began
to study Sanskrit with the same intense application which she gave to
all her work, and mastering the language with extraordinary swiftness,
she plunged into its mysterious literature. But she was born to write,
and despairing of an audience in her own language, she began to adopt
ours as a medium for her thought. Her first essay, published when she
was eighteen, was a monograph, in the “Bengal Magazine,” on Leconte de
Lisle, a writer with whom she had a sympathy which is very easy to
comprehend. The austere poet of “La Mort de Valmiki” was, obviously, a
figure to whom the poet of “Sindhu” must needs be attracted on
approaching European literature. This study, which was illustrated by
translations into English verse, was followed by another on Joséphin
Soulary, in whom she saw more than her maturer judgment might have
justified. There is something very interesting and now, alas! still
more pathetic in these sturdy and workmanlike essays in unaided
criticism. Still more solitary her work became, in July, 1874, when her
only sister, Aru, died, at the age of twenty. She seems to have been no
less amiable than her sister, and if gifted with less originality and a
less forcible ambition, to have been finely accomplished. Both sisters
were well-trained musicians, with full contralto voices, and Aru had a
faculty for design which promised well. The romance of “Mlle. D'Arvers”
was originally projected for Aru to illustrate, but no page of this
book did Aru ever see.
In 1876, as we have said, appeared that obscure first volume at
Bhowanipore. The “Sheaf gleaned in French Fields” is certainly the most
imperfect of Toru's writings, but it is not the least interesting. It
is a wonderful mixture of strength and weakness, of genius overriding
great obstacles and of talent succumbing to ignorance and inexperience.
That it should have been performed at all is so extraordinary that we
forget to be surprised at its inequality. The English verse is
sometimes exquisite; at other times the rules of our prosody are
absolutely ignored, and it is obvious that the Hindu poetess was
chanting to herself a music that is discord in an English ear. The
notes are no less curious, and to a stranger no less bewildering.
Nothing could be more naïve than the writer's ignorance at some points,
or more startling than her learning at others. On the whole, the
attainment of the book was simply astounding. It consisted of a
selection of translations from nearly one hundred French poets, chosen
by the poetess herself on a principle of her own which gradually dawned
upon the careful reader. She eschewed the Classicist writers as though
they had never existed. For her André Chenier was the next name in
chronological order after Du Bartas. Occasionally she showed a
profundity of research that would have done no discredit to Mr.
Saintsbury or “le doux Assellineau.” She was ready to pronounce an
opinion on Napol le Pyrénéan or to detect a plagiarism in Baudelaire.
But she thought that Alexander Smith was still alive, and she was
curiously vague about the career of Saint Beuve. This inequality of
equipment was a thing inevitable to her isolation, and hardly worth
recording, except to show how laborious her mind was, and how quick to
make the best of small resources.
We have already seen that the “Sheaf gleaned in French Fields”
attracted the very minimum of attention in England. In France it was
talked about a little more. M. Garcin de Tassy, the famous Orientalist,
who scarcely survived Toru by twelve months, spoke of it to Mlle.
Clarisse Bader, author of a somewhat remarkable book on the position of
women in ancient Indian society. Almost simultaneously this volume fell
into the hands of Toru, and she was moved to translate it into English,
for the use of Hindus less instructed than herself. In January, 1877,
she accordingly wrote to Mlle. Bader requesting her authorization, and
received a prompt and kind reply. On the 18th of March Toru wrote again
to this, her solitary correspondent in the world of European
literature, and her letter, which has been preserved, shows that she
had already descended into the valley of the shadow of death:—
Ma constitution n'est pas forte; j'ai contracté une toux
opiniâtre,
il y a plus de deux ans, qui ne me quitte point. Cependant
j'espère
mettre la main à l'[oe]uvre bientôt. Je ne peux dire,
mademoiselle,
combien votre affection,—car vous les aimez, votre livre et
votre
lettre en témoignent assez,—pour mes compatriotes et mon pays
me
touche; et je suis fière de pouvoir le dire que les héroines de
nos
grandes épopées sont dignes de tout honneur et de tout amour. Y
a-ti-il d'héroine plus touchante, plus aimable que Sîta? Je ne
le
crois pas. Quand j'entends ma mère chanter, le soir, les
vieux
chants de notre pays, je pleure presque toujours. La
plainte de
Sîta, quand, bannie pour la séconde fois, elle erre dans la
vaste
forêt, seule, le désespoir et l'effroi dans l'âme, est si
pathétique
qu'il n'y a personne, je crois, qui puisse l'entendre sans
verser
des larmes. Je vous envois sous ce pli deux petites traductions
du
Sanscrit, cette belle langue antique. Malheureusement j'ai été
obligée de faire cesser mes traductions de Sanscrit, il y a six
mois. Ma santé ne me permet pas de les continuer.
These simple and pathetic words, in which the dying poetess pours
out her heart to the one friend she had, and that one gained too late,
seem as touching and as beautiful as any strain of Marceline Valmore's
immortal verse. In English poetry I do not remember anything that
exactly parallels their resigned melancholy. Before the month of March
was over, Toru had taken to her bed. Unable to write, she continued to
read, strewing her sick-room with the latest European books, and
entering with interest into the questions raised by the Société
Asiatique of Paris in its printed Transactions. On the 30th of July she
wrote her last letter to Mlle. Clarisse Bader, and a month later, on
the 30th of August, 1877, at the age of twenty-one years, six months,
and twenty-six days, she breathed her last in her father's house in
Maniktollah Street, Calcutta.
In the first distraction of grief it seemed as though her unequalled
promise had been entirely blighted, and as though she would be
remembered only by her single book. But as her father examined her
papers, one completed work after another revealed itself. First a
selection from the sonnets of the Comte de Grammont, translated into
English, turned up, and was printed in a Calcutta magazine; then some
fragments of an English story, which were printed in another Calcutta
magazine. Much more important, however, than any of these was a
complete romance, written in French, being the identical story for
which her sister Aru had proposed to make the illustrations. In the
meantime Toru was no sooner dead than she began to be famous. In May,
1878, there appeared a second edition of the “Sheaf gleaned in French
Fields,” with a touching sketch of her death, by her father; and in
1879 was published, under the editorial care of Mlle. Clarisse Bader,
the romance of “Le Journal de Mlle. D'Arvers,” forming a handsome
volume of 259 pages. This book, begun, as it appears, before the family
returned from Europe, and finished nobody knows when, is an attempt to
describe scenes from modern French society, but it is less interesting
as an experiment of the fancy, than as a revelation of the mind of a
young Hindu woman of genius. The story is simple, clearly told, and
interesting; the studies of character have nothing French about them,
but they are full of vigour and originality. The description of the
hero is most characteristically Indian.—
Il est beau en effet. Sa taille est haute, mais quelques-uns la
trouveraient mince, sa chevelure noire est bouclée et tombe
jusqu'à
la nuque; ses yeux noirs sont profonds et bien fendus, le front
est
noble; la lèvre supérieure, couverte par une moustache
naissante et
noire, est parfaitement modelée; son menton a quelque chose de
sévère; son teint est d'un blanc presque féminin, ce qui dénote
sa
haute naissance.
In this description we seem to recognize some Surya or Soma of Hindu
mythology, and the final touch, meaningless as applied to an European,
reminds us that in India whiteness of skin has always been a sign of
aristocratic birth, from the days when it originally distinguished the
conquering Aryas from the indigenous race of the Dasyous.
As a literary composition “Mlle. D'Arvers” deserves high
commendation. It deals with the ungovernable passion of two brothers
for one placid and beautiful girl, a passion which leads to fratricide
and madness. That it is a very melancholy and tragical story is obvious
from this brief sketch of its contents, but it is remarkable for
coherence and self-restraint no less than for vigour of treatment. Toru
Dutt never sinks to melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale,
and the wonder is that she is not more often fantastic and unreal.
But we believe that the original English poems, which we present to
the public for the first time to-day, will be ultimately found to
constitute Toru's chief legacy to posterity. These ballads form the
last and most matured of her writings, and were left so far fragmentary
at her death that the fourth and fifth in her projected series of nine
were not to be discovered in any form among her papers. It is probable
that she had not even commenced them. Her father, therefore, to give a
certain continuity to the series, has filled up these blanks with two
stories from the “Vishnupurana,” which originally appeared respectively
in the “Calcutta Review” and in the “Bengal Magazine.” These are
interesting, but a little rude in form, and they have not the same
peculiar value as the rhymed octo-syllabic ballads. In these last we
see Toru no longer attempting vainly, though heroically, to compete
with European literature on its own ground, but turning to the legends
of her own race and country for inspiration. No modern Oriental has
given us so strange an insight into the conscience of the Asiatic as is
presented in the stories of “Prehlad” and of “Savitri,” or so quaint a
piece of religious fancy as the ballad of “Jogadhya Uma.” The poetess
seems in these verses to be chanting to herself those songs of her
mother's race to which she always turned with tears of pleasure. They
breathe a Vedic solemnity and simplicity of temper, and are singularly
devoid of that littleness and frivolity which seem, if we may judge by
a slight experience, to be the bane of modern India.
As to the merely technical character of these poems, it may be
suggested that in spite of much in them that is rough and inchoate,
they show that Toru was advancing in her mastery of English verse. Such
a stanza as this, selected out of many no less skilful, could hardly be
recognized as the work of one by whom the language was a late
acquirement:—
What glorious trees! The sombre saul,
On which the eye delights to rest,—
The betel-nut, a pillar tall,
With feathery branches for a crest,—
The light-leaved tamarind spreading wide,—
The pale faint-scented bitter neem,
The seemul, gorgeous as a bride,
With flowers that have the ruby's gleam.
In other passages, of course, the text reads like a translation from
some stirring ballad, and we feel that it gives but a faint and
discordant echo of the music welling in Toru's brain. For it must
frankly be confessed that in the brief May-day of her existence she had
not time to master our language as Blanco White did, or as Chamisso
mastered German. To the end of her days, fluent and graceful as she
was, she was not entirely conversant with English, especially with the
colloquial turns of modern speech. Often a very fine thought is spoiled
for hypercritical ears by the queer turn of expression which she has
innocently given to it. These faults are found to a much smaller degree
in her miscellaneous poems. Her sonnets, here printed for the first
time, seem to me to be of great beauty, and her longer piece entitled
“Our Casuarina Tree,” needs no apology for its rich and mellifluous
numbers.
It is difficult to exaggerate when we try to estimate what we have
lost in the premature death of Toru Dutt. Literature has no honours
which need have been beyond the grasp of a girl who at the age of
twenty-one, and in languages separated from her own by so deep a chasm,
had produced so much of lasting worth. And her courage and fortitude
were worthy of her intelligence. Among “last words” of celebrated
people, that which her father has recorded, “It is only the physical
pain that makes me cry,” is not the least remarkable, or the least
significant of strong character. It was to a native of our island, and
to one ten years senior to Toru, to whom it was said, in words more
appropriate, surely, to her than to Oldham,
Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,
Still showed a quickness, and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of Rime.
That mellow sweetness was all that Toru lacked to perfect her as an
English poet, and of no other Oriental who has ever lived can the same
be said. When the history of the literature of our country comes to be
written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile
exotic blossom of song.
EDMUND W. GOSSE.
1881.