A Mine of Faults

by F. W. Bain

What! this mother-sister-daughter-goddess-wife-secreting Shell
This, the weaker vessel, holding Love and Life and Heaven and Hell!

Introduction

Though the old literature of the Hindoos is deficient in the department of politics—it has no history, no orators, no Demosthenes, no Polybius, no Aristotle; for the dialectic of politics appears to have been invented by the divinely discontented Greek—though, I say, it has no politics, it is permeated with policy. The ancients, says Aristotle, wrote politically, but we rhetorically: and his remark is admirably illustrated by e.g. the old Panchatantra, whose author certainly had in him as much policy as Thucydides, although he chose to deliver his wisdom in apologues, rather than in the prosaic and somewhat pedantic photography of actual affairs. The Hindoo term, níti, means, not so much policy, as diplomacy, and so their níti-shastra, or doctrine of policy, refers rather to the clever conduct of affairs in negotiation, than to anything else. And therefore, love-affairs, which we should hardly include under politics, fall in with the Hindoo conception, and in this sense women are, as the Hindoos think, and their annals abundantly testify, at least the equals, in policy, of men. When the author of Eothen commended certain women of the Ægæan isles for their admirable [Greek: politiue], he was using the term exactly in the sense of níti. And this correlation of diplomacy and love is the substance of the present story, the story of a love-affair, in which, if we may believe a great authority, the poet-king, Bhartrihari, the special quality required and exhibited is craft. The Hindoos in fact resemble women, and women the Hindoos, in this particular, that they are both of them apt to identify policy with craft, and like rivers, generally prefer to reach desired ends by crooked ways: and this is why both of them, though often very dexterous negotiators (like Wellington's "Old Brag," whom he thought superior to Talleyrand), have too much finesse to make really solid statesmen. For intrigue may be good, in war, and it may be good, in love, but it is not good, save in a subordinate and secondary sense, in state-affairs. Nothing durable was ever built upon it. Strength is simple, but cunning is the weapon of the weak: and there is probably more consummate "policy," i.e. diplomacy and tact, exhibited by women in the conduct of their love-affairs in every century, than has ever been displayed by men on the great stage of politics in the whole of human history.

And though the title of our story, A Mine of Faults, might lead the reader to expect, not without alarm, something geological and mineral, and hard, and stony, it really plays lightly with a somewhat softer substance, which only disconsolate lovers in the depth of their dejection ever venture to compare with rocks or flints—a woman. For here, as usual, the Sanskrit epithet conveys two meanings in one word: being, in one sense, a poetic synonym of the Moon: the maker of eve, the lender of beauty to the dusk: while, according to the other, it means a mine, or inexhaustible store, of blemishes, defects, or faults. And thus, as applied to a particular digit of the moon, that is, a lovely woman, it keeps the mind ambiguously hovering between her lustrous lunar beauty, and her faiblesse:[[1]] the malicious implication being, that she owes her attraction as much to her weakness as her beauty: a paradox, to which the modern world, anxious about the suffrage, seems disposed to turn at present a deaf ear. Dogmatism, on such a subject, would be dangerous and unbecoming: yet it would not be easy to deny that her faults and imperfections, even if they do not determine the attraction of the vas infirmius,[[2]] at least do not diminish, but increase it. Infida, sed pulchra, said the ancient of his mistress: who knows, whether she would have been quite so lovely in his eyes, had she been true? A doubt, or dispute, about possession lends value to the property, in every loser's eyes: and doubtless jealousy, while it diminishes and tarnishes affection, increases charm. And indeed, no philosopher has ever told us exactly what it is that excites the passion of the lover to his "most emphatic she." Take any man you will, and you will find that ninety-nine women in a hundred will leave him unelectrified, unmoved: the next, a very mine of faults, inferior, to every other eye than his, to her ninety-nine ineffectual sisters, will nevertheless act upon him so, that her very presence will send the blood rushing into his face—

Up his cheek the colour sprang,
Then he heard,

and for her sake, it may be, he will cast into the fire his family, his friends, his property, his honour, or his life, or whatever else is or is not his to cast. No analysis will discover to you the secret of the charm. And yet, let no man rashly call him mad, for is not every lover mad, and does not this touch of Nature make the whole world kin? Only, each requires somewhat different ingredients, to make up that particular mass of imperfections that appeals to him. Who but a fool would fall in love with faults? Ah! but Nature, or as the old Hindoos would say, the Creator is so cunning; so well he knows how, by some almost imperceptible distinction, some unanalysable curve or touch or grain of composition, nay, by a spot, a fleck, a blemish, an irresistible defect, a "mole cinque-spotted," on the body or the soul, to turn even the sage into a fool. Explain it as we may, it is not perfection that has inspired the great passions of the world. Unless, indeed, anyone should choose to say, that perfection consists precisely in a mass of imperfections—and then he would agree with the author of this tale: the Moony-Crested God.

Being at Bombay, by accident, a little while ago, I went down to the harbour, as my custom is, to find a boat. But as it happened, such a gale was blowing from the east, that not a boat would come. They were all cowering, as it were, huddled together on the lee side of the quay, dancing madly on the tossing waves, like corks. Here, however, as long ago in the case of the Macedonian Philip, silver arguments prevailed: and at last I put forth "in the teeth of the hard glad weather, in the blown wet face of the sea," with feelings which those only can appreciate who love the sea beyond all earthly things, and live away from it against their will. So, then, we fared on in the eye of the wind, tacking to and fro, and shipping half the water that we met. The race is very strong, in Bombay harbour, at the turn of the tide, in rough weather; we were crossing it aslant, and in the turmoil, our "patron" made a blunder with the tiller, which drew down upon his grey hairs such a storm of execration from his crew, who were baling for dear life, that in his confusion he lost his head and very nearly ended all. We got across, however, but the violence of the wind made it after all utterly impossible to make the north coast of Elephanta, where the landing-stage is, and therefore I had to land where I could, upon the south.

I wandered through the woody isle, startling equally the monkeys, and the men who were constructing a new battery on the apex of the hill; who, taking my method of arrival, with the weather, into view, were strongly inclined, as I imagine, to consider me a Russian spy.[[3]] But finally that came about, which I had foreseen: when I reached the cave, for once I had it to myself. The weather had effectually protected it from all intrusion but my own: and those bands of pleasure seekers, who make it a place of horror and defilement, and desecrate its holy solitude, were missing. About it, and in it, was no noise whatever but the noise of the wind.

I went into the cave, and sat down, at the feet of Deity, close beside the shrine. It was growing late, for we had taken long to come, and dusk was beginning to settle over its dark interior recesses, making its projections stand out strongly in the gloom. Just before me was the Marriage of Shiwa and Párwatí, dim and huge, upon the wall: the gigantic figure of the Great God, holding by the hand, to lead her round the sacred fire, the Daughter of the Mountain, whose attitude is a triumph of artistic skill: coy, bashful, and reluctant, with averted head, she seems as though unwilling to place her hand in his, to gain whom she had endured so many self-inflicted tortures. And a little way off, in the darkness, I could just discern the colossal Trimúrti, the three-headed bust of Shiwa, whose central countenance is filled with such majestic, beautiful, immense repose: divine, immortal calm. And all round me stood about, here and there, huge Dwarapálas, Pisháchas, grinning Kirttmukhas demons and lesser deities, satellites and servers and ministers of the Moony-Crested God.

And as I sat, so little, among those great Shadows, with the darkness growing deeper, in the silence, was it fancy, or did they whisper to one another: Who is this strange white-faced unbeliever, who sits alone among us, as if half out of devotion, yet without the flowers, and the water, and the camphor, and the lamps, and the mantras, and all the other customary rites?