And oh! the loveliness at times we see
In momentary gliding, the soft grace,
The youth, the bloom, the beauty which agree,
In many a nameless being we retrace,
Whose course and home we know not nor shall know
Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below.”
Beppo. LORD BYRON.
Chapter IV
THE LADIES OF THE ARISTOCRACY
What exactly it is which constitutes an aristocracy, at any given time or place, is not always easy to define. In Europe, in general, aristocracies are based upon the survivals of feudal fiefs or sometimes upon Court distinctions—but how greatly altered, broadened, twisted, and transmuted! In India special considerations have arisen to complicate the question. For all through Indian society there run, on different curves, double classifications, each traced by divergent forces. On the one hand, as in all human societies—unhappily imperfect—lies the great universal distinction which one calls rank, distinction of power, that is, and official authority, with distinction of wealth as accompaniment or even as sole qualification. On the other side lie the less natural—shall they be called unnatural?—distinctions of a hierarchic classification, peculiar to this continent and the Hindu faith. In this hierarchy, the classification is not by power as tested and exercised in the world, open and plain to all men, but by a claim to power over supernatural forces, acquired by religious merit, not necessarily in the individual life but perhaps in lives assumed to have occurred in past transmigrations. But, as the saint spends in study and prayer the hours during which conquerors are active with sword or sceptre, so religious merit does not necessarily bring wealth or authority—with which indeed it should be incompatible. Moreover, religious austerities and abnegations spring from or produce a character, to which the vices and virtues of a feudal aristocracy are alike opposed. So though the Brahman is in the hierarchy of caste by universal recognition infinitely the highest, so much indeed above all others as to be by mystic ordinance “twice-born,” though he is ceremonially pure as purity itself, though his life is sacred and his blessing a reward, his curse a menace and a doom, yet in no actual sense can his caste be said to form an aristocracy. A few there are among the caste who have risen to royal state and rule lands as princes; but even in them the qualities of human leadership are overwhelmed by the traditions of a scholar race and a consecrated people.