Some one says, “No one is a gentleman who has not a dress suit.” There must be something in this, as every one knows the power of the tail of a coat in social life; yet the statement is not more definite than the definition of the word “network” in Johnson’s dictionary, “Anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.”
A clearer definition of a society gentleman is, “One who can break all the commandments genteelly and keep his linen scrupulously clean.”
Another word is often used, excellent when rightly applied, that of “Christian,” “as to a person acting in the manner, or having a spiritual character proper to a follower of Christ.” But is this the world’s use of it?
I do not know just what started me on this gait, but I frequently find myself going off on a tangent. I am no heavenly body, so have no fixed orbit, and often take the privilege of a wanderer.
During my visit to the city I was greatly interested in looking at “society” and upon the moving world. It was as good as a circus to see the maidan of an evening. The very High Highs of natives in their phaetons, followed by horsed spearmen, as if these swells were afraid of bandits capturing their sweet selves, then a load of bareheaded, barefaced babus, with a number of ragamuffins clinging on behind and shouting at the top of their voices, while the driver was trying to run down every one in front of him. In one of the grand phaetons was a swell rajah, with a servant sitting near him, carrying a spittoon to receive the royal spittle. He probably is one who is clamoring for representative government. What would he represent? I never see such a nest of natives but I think the government erred in not passing a law a century ago restricting every native to his ancestral bullock hackery. A native is by nature a squatter, and is as much out of his place in a phaeton as he is among European ladies in a drawing room. A babu said to me, “If you go to the houses of these fellows who appear in public in great style, you would find the most of them living in mud huts surrounded by filth and stinks, while everything they have is mortgaged to keep up their appearance when they go on parade.” He knew no doubt what he was saying.
Then the traps of the Europeans, the extremes could be seen at a glance. A slender, six foot youth, wearing an enormously high collar and the highest kind of a narrow-rimmed hat, seated on a six foot cart, while alongside of him was a pompous porpoise of a man in a trap nearly touching the ground, drawn by a limping, half-starved pony. Then the people, scarcely one good looking, but ugly and so so, all kinds and conditions as various as the crowd that once assembled in Jerusalem, not omitting the painted bedizened females in grand style, flaunting their characters before everybody—evidently in “society”—the whole scene a vanity fair, fit for the pen of a Bunyan or a Thackeray.
The Bengalee is a study by himself. He has the reputation of being the monumental liar of the world, and those who know him best, his own race, say that truth is an absolute impossibility to him. This may be slightly exaggerated, as I met some fine honest fellows among them, very few and far between, as I wish to be truthful. One of his features attracted my attention, and that was his stare, impudent enough to make a brass mule hang its head. In this I think he takes the lead of all the world. Always going bareheaded, he has become so accustomed to looking the sun out of countenance that nothing on earth fazes him. It is said that as each new statue was put upon the maidan the Bengalees stared so at it that the image blushed all over with a blueish tinge. I have not the least doubt of this, as I myself saw the cerulean color on all the images. It is this arrogant stare that is so offensive to European ladies, and characteristic of the educated babus, for it is said that they are taught everything in the schools except manners and morality. A writer in an English paper says of them, “They are a soft, supple, quick-witted youth; utterly destitute of manly qualities, largely without the Englishman’s truthfulness, equity and resource, good subordinates but abominably bad superiors, and everywhere hated and despised by their countrymen.”
Another says of him, “Though he may be dressed in the finest European clothes, speak English fluently in the well finished style of Addison and Macaulay, and have the superficial manners of a gentleman, yet scratch him, as you would a Russian to find a Tatar, and in this native of India you will always find the heathen.”
As to their religion, Macaulay says of it: “All is hideous and grotesque and ignoble.” De Tocqueville: “Hinduism is perhaps the only system of belief that is worse than having no religion at all.”
Another subject was brought to my attention. I did not desire to know about it as in my life and the circumstances of my birth, I had been compelled to know so much of the degradation of mankind in licentiousness that any reference to it fills me with disgust and makes me wonder how a just God or decent people could tolerate such iniquity. I was informed that sexual vice was so prevalent that scarcely any one, from the highest down to the lowest classes, was not blackened by it. It was so foul a story that I soon stopped it with a request that I be told no more. Zola could come to Calcutta and write a score of books, not from his imagination, but of real facts, with names of living men and women involved in seductions, intrigues and foul crime that would astonish the world. Some one should do it, unmask these hypocrites as he would report a den of thieves, reveal the sources of some fearful epidemic or anything inimical to the well being of mankind. What surprised me most was that the prominent actors in all this, are in “Society,” and many or all of them professed Christians, pretended followers of the pure and holy Jesus! They have, perhaps, such unbounded faith in him that they dare revel in vice to their lust’s content, and think that at the end of life his blood will wash all their guilty stains away. What a delusive, deceptive, accursed belief!