| <20 July 1917>
|
|
|
|
|
| So saith Kipling's soldier-man, thinking of his
|
Kipling is one of a
| number of ambassadors between East and West. But
| Kipling's East is the East of the tourist and
| commercialist - for the most part he
| has glimpses of a more real East - an
| Eastern East, and these we catch in
|
| "The Jungle Book."
|
"The Jungle
| Book" is a wonderful story book that every
| boy and girl should have as a birthright. It tells of
| a little baby boy lost in the jungle. He is adopted
| into a family of wolves, and is sent by his wolf-father
| to learn his lessons from a bear and a boa-constrictor.
| His wonderful adventures in the jungle,
| his feud with the tiger, and his return to his own
| kind form a series of the most beautiful stories ever
| written.
| Superficial though, in some respects, Kipling's
| interpretation of the East must be admitted to be, he
| somehow seems to convey a spirit wonderfully in
| accord with that to which we are introduced by such
| mighty ambassadors as Edwin Arnold, Annie Besant,
| Edward Fitzgerald, and Richard Burton. Probably the
| secret is that all succeed in conveying something of
| the atmosphere of a race-culture that had reached an
| advanced stage at a time when Europe was but a
| hunting ground of neolithic savages.
| For we must remember that Rome was still an infant
| city, and the Glory of Greece but just emerging from
| the mists of tradition when Indian culture reached
| something in the nature of a culmination in the
| adoption of the philosophy of Buddha.
| The great gift of Sir Edwin Arnold to the Western
| World is undoubtedly his
| "Light of Asia" . In a philosophic poem
| it is difficult to select quotations. But one, which
| gives the gist of the Buddhist moral code, is taken
| from the closing pages of the work, -
| "
|
| These are the "Five Rules." They have a familiar
| ring. Explain it as you will, Buddha's explanations
| is as follows:
|
|
| This is a familiar thought to the Eastern
| philosopher. He holds all religions to be equally
| true, all being dialects of the Word of God. Had only
| the Western World realised as much, what rivers of
| blood had remained unshed.
| Mrs Besant, in her translation of the
|
Bhagavad Gita ,
| has performed a similar service for he who would
| understand Brahmanism, as Arnold did for the student
| of Buddhism. Her work as an ambassador between the
| sundered thought world of East and West, has,
| however, been more of an organising than of a
| literary character.
| But Edward Fitzgerald's translation of Omar
| Khayyam's
| Rubaiyat has probably stimulated
| interest in Oriental thought more than any other
| influence. It is safe to say that
|
| the Rubaiyat is by far the
| most popular English poem today. For, as Khayyam's
| more exact translators tell us, we must regard
| Fitzgerald's version more as an English poem than as
| a faithful rendering of the original. Khayyam, they
| say was by no means as thorough-paced an old sinner
| as Fitzgerald would have us believe. But, after
| - all, we must pause before we throw
| Fitzgerald overboard, if we are to agree with a
| publisher's explanation for the remarkable success of
| the
| Quatrains .
| In his introductory note to a pocket edition of
| Omar(printed in Australia) Mr T.C. Lothian says:
|
|
| Perhaps he is right, for the Western world has
| certainly not embraced
| "The Light of Asia" with the same
| enthusiasm as it has shown the bibulous bard of
| Nuishapur, and Richard Burton, whose finer-toned, tho
| less voluptuous philosophic poem,
|
| "The Kasidah," which first
| appeared at about the same time as
|
| the Rubaiyat , remains today
| practically unnoticed.
| The opening lines vaguely suggest the first
| stanzas of Omar:~~
|
|
| The philosophy of
| the Kasidah , is on the whole, a
| negative one. It purports to express the views of one
| Hajf Abdu-el-Yeydi, but is really Burton's own
| work.
| On the other hand there is no doubt a magic n the
| Omaresqpe stanza - something akin to the haunting
| ring of
"Red
| Wing," and one or two other melodics.
|
was
| the ancient's demand. But we moderns will believe the
| damnedest of heresy provided only some word-magician
| can fit it within the bounds of an Omaresque
| quatrain. People who, under ordinary circumstances,
| would have Blatchword's
| "Not Guilty," or Blatchford himself,
| if they could, burned by the public hangman will
| recite with gusto:
|
|
| Curiously enough a very similar philosophy to
| Khayyam's has formed part of English literature since
| the translations of the Bible - namely,
| the
Book of
| Ecclesiastes . A few verses roughly flung into
| Quatrains ,
| after Omar, and you'd hardly know it wasn't the old
| Persian himself. This, after all, is only giving
| Koheleth (as the author of the book called himself) a
| fair chance, for what sort of translation of
| Khayyam
| would a committee of Theologians give us?
|
|
| Well, so much for the East, with its philosophies,
| its mysticism, and its magic. The sweat and steam,
| and iron clang of Commercialism is fast driving its
| colour and luxury into the forgotten past. Let us
| rescue what we may of it. But what of its squalor and
| misery? Truly, these are problems that are answered
| neither by the ancient wisdom of the East nor by the
| Commercialism of the West.
| Hints on Books.
| Everyone, I suppose, has read
|
Khayyam ,
| and the
| "Kasidah" can
| only be obtained from the publishers (Thos. B.
| Mosher, Portland, Maine, USA)
| Cheap editions of the
|
| "Bhagavad Gita" and the
| "Light of Asia"
| are obtainable but the
|
| "Jungle Book" should, to fill its
| purpose truly be obtained in an illustrated edition.
| This would run to several shillings.
| Robert Louis Stevenson's Poems are worthy of
| attention to interpret the mind of a primitive race
| (the Polynesians). His
| "Tamatea" is a genuinely heroic lay,
| although dealing with barbarous people and events.
|