Bubbles of the Foam Read online

  Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  BUBBLES OF THE FOAM

  So Life's sad Sunset prizes What Life's gay Dawn despises, And always Winter wise is When Summer is no more: While Love than lightning fleeter Turns all he touches sweeter, To leave it incompleter Behind him, than before.

  AMARA

  Years, looking forward, all too slow, Yet looking back, too fast, What is your joy, what is your woe, But scented ash that used to glow, A sandalwood of long ago, A camphor of the past?

  SULOCHANA

  BUBBLES OF THE FOAM

  ([Sanskrit])

  TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT

  BY

  F. W. BAIN

  _What! Mortal taste Immortal? Earth, kiss Heaven?Confusion elemental!, ah! beware!_

  SOMADEWA

  WITH A FRONTISPIECE

  METHUEN & CO. LTD.36 ESSEX STREET W.C.LONDON

  _First Published in 1912_

  DEDICATED

  TO

  LADY GLENCONNER

  CONTENTS

  PAGEI. A SPOILED CHILD 1

  II. THE THIRST OF AN ANTELOPE 27

  I. A DAPPLED DAWN 29

  II. A GLAMOUR OF NOON 63

  III. THE DESERT AND THE NIGHT 89

  INTRODUCTION

  Four things are never far from you, in old Hindoo literature: underfoot,all round you, or away on the horizon, there they always are: theForest, the Desert, the River, and the Hills.

  It is never very easy, to understand the Past that really is a past: andthe age of Forests, like that of chivalry, is gone. But in the case ofancient India, the chief obstacle to understanding arises from our badhabit of always looking at the map with the North side up. Why thisinveterate apotheosis of the North? Would you understand the oldHindoos, you must turn the map of India very nearly upside down, so asto get Peshawar at the bottom, and the Andaman Islands exactly at thetop. And then, history lies all before you, right side up, and you getyour intellectual bearings, and take in the early situation, at aglance. Entering, like those old nomads, through the Khaibar, you findyourself suddenly in the Land of Streams: and as you drift along, yougo, simply because you must, straight on, down the River "ganging on"(_Ganga_) towards the rising sun, "ahead," (which is the Sanskrit termfor East,) all under the colossal wall of Hills, the home of Snow, wherethe gods live, on your left (_uttara_, the North, the heights;) while onthe South, (the _right_ hand, _dakshina_, the Deccan) you are debarred,not by Highlands, but by two not less peremptory rebutters: first, bythe Desert, _Marusthali_, the home of death: and then again, a littlefarther on, by the Forest of the South: the vast, mysterious,impenetrable Wood, of which the Ramayana preserves for us the pioneeringrecord and original idea, with its spell of the Unknown and theAdventure (like the Westward Ho! of a later age) with its Ogres and itsSprites, its sandal trees and lonely lotus-tarns, its armies of uglylittle ape-like men, and its legendary Lanka (Ceylon) lost in a kind ofhalo of shell-born pearls, and gems, and their Ten-headed Devil King,Rawana, away, away, at the very end of all: so distant, as to be littlemore than mythical, little better than a dream. No! Those who wish tosee things with the eyes of old Hindoos must not begin, as we did, anddo still, with Ceylon, and the adjacent coasts of Coromandel andMalabar. That is the wrong, the _other_ end: it is like startingEnglish history from "the peak in Darien."

  But our particular concern, in these pages, is with the Desert. Theconventional notion of a desert, as a colourless and empty flat of sand,is curiously unlike the thing itself, which is a constantly changing,kaleidoscopic sea of colour, made up of rainbow stripes, black, golden,red, dazzling white, and blue, with every kind of lights and shadows,strange hazes, transparencies, and gleams. True, the ground you actuallytread upon is bare: but it is clothed with raiment woven by that magicartist, Distance, out of cloud and heat and air and sky. And so, whenthese old Hindoo people came to make a closer acquaintance with theDesert, so dangerous to enter, so difficult, as Mahmood subsequentlyfound, to cross, they discovered, that over and above the plain prosaicdanger, this Waste of Sand laid, like a very demon, goblin snares forthe unwary traveller's destruction, in the form of its Mirage. Ignorantof "optical phenomena," they gazed at this strange illusion, thesephantom trees and water, these mocking semblances of cities thatvanished as you reached them, with astonishment, and even awe. It strucktheir imagination, and they gave to it a name scarcely less poeticalthan the thing: calling it "_deer-water_," or the "_thirst of theantelope_."[1] Nor was this all. For the apparition was a kind ofsymbol, made as it were expressly for their own phenomenology: itcontained a moral meaning that harmonised precisely with all theirphilosophical ideas. What could be a better illustration of that MAYA,that metaphysical Delusion, in which all souls are wrapped, which leadsthem to impute Reality to the Phantasms, the unsubstantial objects ofthe senses, and lures them on to moral ruin as they wander in the waste?And accordingly, we find the poets constantly recurring to this _thirstof the gazelle_, as an emblem of the treacherous and bewilderingfascination of the fleeting shadows of this lower life (_ihaloka_;) thebeauty that is hollow, the Bubble of the World. And thus, Disappointmentis of the essence of Existence: disappointment, which can only comeabout, when hopes and expectations have been founded on a want ofunderstanding (_awiweka_;) a blindness, born of Desire, that sets andkeeps its unhappy victims hunting, in vain, for what is not to be found.

  [Footnote 1: I am told, by a pundit in these matters, that the term isfound at least as early as Patanjali (the _Mahabhashya_;) that isprobably, the latter half of the second century B.C.: and hence, it musthave originated long before.]

  Especially, essentially, in love: love, which has its origin in Dream,its acme in Ecstasy, and its catastrophe in Disillusion: love, which islife's core and kernel and epitome, the focus and quintessence ofexistence. A life that is without it has somehow missed its mark: it ismeaningless and plotless, "a string of casual episodes, like a badtragedy." For what, after all, is Love? Who has given an account of it?Plato's fable, which makes Love the child of Satiety and Want, orPoverty and Plenty, is a pretty piece of fancy: it is clever: but likemathematics, an explanation of the brain rather than the heart.Something is missing. For Plato, almost always delicate and subtle, isnever tender: the reason is, that he was atrophied on the feminine side:he does not consequently understand sex, being himself only half a man:that is, only man and nothing more. But all the really great imaginativemen are bi-sexual: they have a large ingredient of woman in theircomposition, which gives to their divination an extra touch of somethingthat others cannot reach. And so, with equal poetry, yet with a pathosinfinitely deeper, our Milton makes Love the child of Loneliness:[2] aparentage evinced by the terrible melancholy of Love when he cannot findhis proper object, and the blank desolation and despair of the frightfulvoid and blackness left behind, when he has lost it. But now, it isjust this intolerable loneliness which makes him idealise thecommonplace, and see all things in the light of his own yearning,creating for himself visions of unimaginable happiness, which presentlyvanish, to resolve his Eden into nothing, and leave him, with nocompanion but the horror of his own intensified isolation, in the sand.A situation, which hardly any lover that really is a lover can endure,without going mad. They are very shallow theologians, who by way ofpandering to sentimental prejudices make the essence of the Deity toconsist in Love. Poor Deity! his life would be a Hell, past all humanimagination: an everlasting Loneliness, with no prospect of release. Forit is pre
cisely to escape from this hell that so many forlorn loverstake refuge in the tomb: a resource not available to those who cannotdie. Death is not always terrible: sometimes he is kind.

  [Footnote 2: In his _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_.]

  * * * * *

  Such then is the theme of _Bubbles of the Foam_: a little love-story,whose title, like that of all her elder sisters, has in the original adouble application, by reason of the ambiguity of the last word, toLove, and to the Moon. We might also render it, _A Heavenly Bubble_, or,_Love is a Bubble_, or _Nothing but a Bubble_, or _A Bubble of theWorld_,[3] thinking either of Love or the Moon. For the Moon, like thegoddess of Love, rose originally from the sea: and they retain traces oftheir origin, both in their essence and their appearance. For what ismore like a great Foam-Bubble than the Moon? and what is more like thedelusion of love than a bubble of the foam, so beautiful in its play ofcolour, while it endures: so evanescent, so hollow, leaving behind itwhen it bursts and disappears nothing but a memory, and a bitter tasteof brine? And as love is but a bubble, so are all its victims merelybubbles of a bubble: for this also is mirage.

  [Footnote 3: I was sorely tempted to give it the title of _Mere Foam_:which, if the reader would kindly understand _mere_ in its German, itsRussian, its Latin, and its ordinary English sense, would be an exacttranslation. But it has an unfortunate suggestion (_meerschaum_) whichmade it impossible.]

  Mirage! mirage! That is the keynote of the old melancholy Indian music;the bass, whose undertone accompanies, with a kind of monotonoussolemnity, all the treble variations in the minor key. The world isunreal, a delusion and a snare; sense is deception, happiness a dream;nothing has true being, is absolute, but virtue, the sole reality; thatwhich most emphatically IS,[4] attainable only through knowledge, thegreat illuminator, the awakener to the perception of the truth. We move,like marionettes, pulled by the strings of our forgotten antenataldeeds, in a magic cage, or Net, of false and hypocritical momentaryseemings: and bitter disappointment is the inevitable doom of everysoul, that with passion for its guide in the gloom, thinks to find inthe shadows that surround it any substance, any solid satisfaction; anypermanent in the mutable; any rest in the ceaseless revolution; anypeace which the world cannot give. Who would have peace, must turn hisback upon the world; it lies the Other Way. Three are the Ways: the Wayof the World, the Way of Woman, the Way of Emancipation.

  [Footnote 4: _Sat._ The thesis of Socrates, that virtue is knowledge:probably borrowed, by steps that we cannot trace, through Pythagoras or"Orpheus" from the East.]

  Does anyone in Europe care about this last, this Way of Emancipation?No: it is Liberty that preoccupies the European, who about a century agoseemed, like the old Athenian, suddenly to catch sight of Liberty in adream.[5] And yet, who knows? For Europe also is disappointed: thereseems, after all, to be something lacking to this Liberty, somethingwrong. With her Utopias ending in blind alleys, or issues unforeseen:with her sages discovered to be less sages than they seemed: with herScience turning superstitious, her Literature wallowing in the gutter,and her women descending from the pedestal of sex to play the virago inthe contamination of the crowd: with so many other things, not here tobe considered, to raise a doubt, whether this Liberty is taking her justwhere she wished to go, what wonder if even Europe should begin tomeditate on means of emancipation, even if only from vulgarity, andsteal a furtive glance or two towards the East, to see, whether, bydiligently raking in the ashes of ancient oriental creeds, she might notdiscover here and there a spark, at which to rekindle the expiringcandle of her own. For there seems to be some curious indestructible_asbestos_, some element of perennial, imperturbable tranquillity andcalm, away in India, which is conspicuous only by its absence, in theworry of the West. Where does it come from? What does it consist in? Isthere a secret which India has discovered, which Europe cannot guess? Isthere anything in it, after all, but barbaric superstition, destined tofade away and disappear, in the sunrise of omniscience?

  [Footnote 5: [Greek: honar heleutherias horhontas. Plutarch.]]

  I cannot tell: but well I recollect a fugitive impression left on me byan early morning in Benares, now many years ago. I threaded itsextraordinary streets, narrower than the needle's eye, and crowded withstrange, lithe, nearly naked human beings, with black, straight, longwet hair, and brown shining skins, jostled at every step by holy bullsor cows, roaming at their own sweet will with large placid lustrouseyes, in an atmosphere heavy with the half-delicious, half-repulsiveodour of innumerable flowers, mostly yellow, that lay about everywherein heaps, fresh and rotten, till I came out finally upon the river bank.A light steamy mist, converted by the low sun's horizontal rays into akind of reddish-golden veil, hung in the quiet air, lending an almostmagical effect to the long row of great temples, whose steps run downinto the river, along the northern bank: half of them in ruins, andlooking as if they must presently slide away into the water anddisappear. And as I floated slowly down, I watched with curiosity, halfwondering if I was dreaming, the throng of devotees, sitting, lying,gliding here and there, like an antique procession on an old Greekfrieze or vase; some muttering and praying, others bathing, others againstanding motionless as statues in the stream, buried in a sort of_samadhi_ meditation: every outline of every attitude, in that clearIndian air, as sharp as if cut with scissors out of paper. And lyingclose beside, cheek by jowl with the bodies still alive, the ashes ofdead bodies just burned or still burning on the Ghat. Life and Deathtouching, running into one another, and nobody amazed: all as it shouldbe, and a matter of course!

  England and India, bureaucracy, democracy, sedition, education, politicsand Durbars:--the world with all its tumult and its roaring passes cleanover their heads, unheeded, unobserved: for them the noise and bustle donot matter, do not trouble: they do not hear, they do not listen, theydo not even care. It is curious, this peace, this indifference, thiscalm: it does not seem reality; it is like a thing looked at in apicture, like a dream. And, somehow, as I gazed at it, mechanicallythere came into my mind, as it were of its own accord, a story I hadread in some old navigator's "yarn," of the albatross, sleeping on thegreat South Sea, in the fury of a storm, with its head beneath its wing.

  CEYLON, 1912