19th century had to bestow would have been the culminating result of its finest work in historic study, along with its greatest practical experience, and the philosophic reflexion on the idea of evolution in both those spheres. But it is just this quality of thought, and the outlook belonging to it, which the 20th century, in spite of the high level of historical scholarship maintained, seems most incapable of absorbing. It desires to shake itself free from those influences that would suggest the impossibility of wholly new developments. It dreads the shadow of the past, which, falling upon new constructions, may reveal in them the eternal human, the tendency to become 'custom deep as life' and instruments of servitude instead of freedom. It cannot recognise that only those who drink deep of History can gain that spiritual elasticity which is necessary to the constructive age, because History renders possible a living realisation of modes of consciousness and forms of thought other than those to which we are habituated.

But this freedom of the historic spirit is not, as a rule, to be acquired merely by the scientific study of History in the cloister, even though that study should include the records of many civilisations. It seems essential to its acquisition that the study of the past should be combined with a vivid sense of the existence to-day of civilisations different in quality, trend, and ideals from that to which we belong. In order to gain the priceless possession of the imagination which removes the barrier between our own familiar daylight world and the twilight of other races and ages, we must sit at the feet of the few men of genius, who, having lived and worked amongst peoples far removed in thought from our mental habits, can also see with their eyes and interpret their spirit. Unless this barrier is surmounted, the ideas which shape themselves in the study will not issue to modify the influence which our position forces us to exert over the destinies of men and women whose true character is obscured, for the majority of Englishmen, either by the mist of distance or by the false glare due to refusal to admit unlikeness. In order to realise the significance of the question whether, on the foundation of unlike pasts, different peoples can raise the structure of a future similar in spiritual or political essentials, we

must learn to appreciate the life of a community growing in the shadow of its own past and tending towards its own future. In other words, its course should be perceived in the direct way in which we perceive the life and death, the being and activities, of a handful of individuals as a basis for our philosophy of man. And this is not possible without sympathetic experience of civilisations other than our own.

It is difficult to think of any work which can supply what is lacking to the atmosphere of our historic study and the temper of our constructive efforts so well as the few volumes, mostly brief collections of essays on Eastern problems, left by Sir Alfred Lyall. But, powerful as is the effect produced on the mind by these studies, especially those which deal with Indian conditions, we must turn, to complete it, to the little volume of 'Verses written in India'-blossoms of poetic insight in a strenuous life of highly responsible work. Something more intimate than knowledge seems to be conveyed even by the prosewritings, but the poems supply the vision, in which knowledge, as it were, becomes sight for the imagination as well as for the intellect. It is Lyall's whole mental attitude which possesses such supreme value, whether for the student or the statesman. Not merely with a view to the better understanding of the questions peculiar to India should his writings be pondered, certainly not in order to draw from them any one set of conclusions touching the ideal method of meeting immediate issues. The spirit of these studies should teach us to expect problems ever new to develop out of the relations between East and West; and in the present hour, when the British nation as a whole is more responsible than has been any democracy in history for the future development of a great people far remote from it in all the factors of national evolution, there could not be a better introduction than they afford to the study it is morally bound to undertake.

Lyall's method in the selection and arrangement of his impressions of Eastern civilisation may be described as that of the man of action who never ceases to be a thinker, the thinker who has lived and worked with many men of many types, and is profoundly interested in mankind. But, more than this, it is the method of the

seer, who sees into the deeper sources of human action, sources behind the differentiated impulses we speak of— this as the struggle to survive, that as the hunger and thirst after righteousness-sources of man's mixed being indescribable unless through the poet's art. In him might be recognised the spirit which is most characteristic of English thought, too conscious of limitations to lend itself much to systems, speaking rather through the elusive medium of poetry, which is alone capable of capturing the finer and more evanescent glimpses of truth. But his poetic sense of the tears in mortal things' gained its strength in the sphere of social philosophy because of its far-reaching nature. It is not only the things of individual lives, but the things of racial fate, the rise and fall of tribes and peoples, like bubbles forming and dissolving on the stream of destiny, of which one thinks when applying to him the words 'mentem mortalia tangunt.' And there is possibly more truth in this emotion than in the feelings aroused by the modern conception of the movement of progress.

It is in the letters written under the pseudonym of Vamadeo Shastri that Lyall's unequalled power of entering into the inner spirit of two civilisations is best seen, at a perfection only surpassed perhaps in a few lines and stanzas of those poems which bewitch us into the illusion that we know the inheritance of æons of thought and feeling alien from our own. There is here revealed to us the extraordinarily complex mental and moral situation which has come about from the interaction of British and Indian civilisations. We cease for the time to regard India from the ordinary political standpoints, whether that of Imperialism towards the great Dependency, or that for which the word 'India' means a vast multitude of fellow-creatures to whom we are privileged to introduce the ideals of democratic liberty. Vamadeo Shastri's treatment of the episode of Arjuna at the opening of the Bhagavadgita awakens our minds to the secret of the contrast between the spirit of India and that of the West, for what is here illustrated is the instinctive attitude of a people to the peculiar problem of humanity, the relation between thought and action. In Arjuna we have a hero 'on the brink of a desperate battle,' ' communing with divinity,' and

'persuaded that he does well to fight, not by promise of victory or sanction of the justice of his cause, but by a demonstration that life and death, the slayer and the slain, are philosophically indistinguishable. That the incongruity of such dissertations in the very poise and imminent collision of battle should not have damaged the great popularity of the poem shows, I would point out, what repose the Hindu mind has drawn, at all times and in all places, from the solace of Pantheism.'

The supposed Brahman is represented as turning to the greatest English genius for a parallel. In Shakespeare's poetry he finds 'strange flashes into the depths of mysticism'; and 'Macbeth, hemmed in by his foes and hopelessly at bay, falls suddenly musing upon to-morrow and yesterday and reflects that life is after all full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' For the English cast of thought it is in the ensuing furious activity that the drama culminates, but for the Hindu the 'war-notes and battle-pieces' prelude a 'dialogue upon the true knowledge that is attainable by complete mental abstraction from the world of sense.'

Of the teaching of Indian philosophy we have heard from other European scholars. The unique quality of Lyall's interpretation of the subject and its far-reaching practical importance lie in the way in which he brings home to us that this philosophy is the self-conscious expression, the explanation, as it were, by the higher reason of the race, of an attitude that belongs to the soul of the people, and affects their whole outlook upon life. Thus we are told not only that the arguments of Mr Balfour's Foundations of Belief' are unnecessary to convince the higher Brahman intelligence of the deceptive nature of sense-perception, but also that the

'simple Indian folk will not be much interested by the news that the whole order of creation to which they belong is to be annihilated within a measurable period. They have never set an inordinate value on the short and sorrowful days passed under this burning sun, while for heaven or hell they have little care, desiring only to be rid of sensitive existence in any shape.'

It is when we turn to the moral ideal born of this habit of thought that the practical significance of the

mental attitude is disclosed. The Western conception of progress is associated with the attribution of a value to the interests and pleasures of the world which is strange to the original Hindu outlook; the virtue of asceticism so strongly inculcated by Indian teaching would be derided, if not destroyed, by the modern spirit in its most characteristic expression. In attempting to appreciate the ideals of a people we must see these ideas in their place in the fabric of its culture and sentiments, depending upon climate, environment, history, customs, pursuits, in fact the whole of its spiritual organism. Is it possible to disturb a part of this without changing the whole? or can we introduce the higher result of another people's experience without, by bringing in also the lower, taking from the invaded people that which is its own best? In giving us a vivid realisation of the anxiety tending to pessimism with which a high-souled Brahman might be conceived to watch the effect of the growing wave of Western ideas upon the Hindu mind, and his apprehension of the 'spiritual anarchy' to which it might lead, we are not indeed to infer that Sir Alfred Lyall expresses his own view as to the possibility of Western ideals ultimately taking the place of those sprung from the soil and the life-blood of India. But he enables us to comprehend that ideas transplanted may modify their form, and even their character and significance, when entering a new spiritual and moral complex, and may produce unforeseen effects.

Let us suppose that the line of thought thus started leads to reflexion on the Western conception of freedom, since this is at the root of our social and political energy. How much this owes to the religious idea of the worth of the person, modern democracy does not appear to realise. The development of the cherished ideal of AngloSaxon civilisation into the strong and intense conception of personality which is the guiding-star of a great part of the present schemes of reconstruction seems to us to have followed a necessary course, compelled by the inner dialectic of the idea. The value of the individual has become axiomatic, a first principle of reform. This thought was provided by a religion which came from the East, but to whose evolution the practical spirit of the West has contributed much. More than a thousand Vol. 234.-No. 464,

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