But when I am in no humour for contemplation and alarms of eld I take up my Whitaker for 1886, and open it at page 285. There begins the most incredible romance ever written by man, and what increases its incredibility is that it happens to be all true.
At page 285 opens an account of the British Empire. The first article is on India, and as one reads, taking in history and statistics with alternate breaths, the heart grows afraid to beat in the breast lest its motion and sound might dispel the enchantment and bring this “miracle of rare device” down about one’s head. The opening statement forbids further progress for a time. When one hears that “the British Empire in India extends over a territory as large as the continent of Europe without Russia,” it is necessary to pause and let the capacity of the mind enlarge in order to take in this stupendous fact with its stupendous significances.
Here are 254 millions of people living under the flag of Britain! Here is a vast country of the East whose history goes back for a thousand years from this era, which knew Alexander the Great and was the scene of Tamerlane’s exploits, subject to the little island on the western verge of modern Europe. Here, paraded in the directest and most prosaic fashion, are facts and figures that swell out the fancy almost intolerably. Here is one feudatory state, one dependent province, almost as populous as the whole empire over which Don Pedro II. reigns in South America. Here is a public revenue of eighty millions sterling a year, and Calcutta, including suburbs, with a population close upon a million. Here are no fewer than fifty-three towns and cities of more than fifty thousand people each. Here is a gross number of seven hundred and fourteen thousand towns and villages! Is not this one item incredible? Just three quarters of a million, not of people or even houses, but of “towns and villages!” The population of Madras alone is five-sixths of that of the United Kingdom, that of the North-West Provinces and Oudh considerably more, and that of Bengal nearly twice as much as England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales together. The Native States have many more inhabitants than any country in Europe, except Russia. Bombay equals Spain. The Punjaub exceeds Turkey in Asia. Assam exceeds Turkey in Europe. The Central Provinces about equal Belgium and Holland together; British Burmah, Switzerland. Berar exceeds Denmark, and all taken together contain more than the combined populations of the United States of America, Austria, Germany, France, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Belgium! All ours absolutely, or in the feudatory leash; with more Mohammedans than are to be found in the Sultan’s dominions, and a larger revenue than is enjoyed by any country on earth except England, France, United States of America, Austria, and Russia!
These are facts and figures enough to set one dreaming for a month. This is not an age for epic poetry. It is exceedingly unlikely any poet in the present age will seek the framework for his great work in the past. The past was all very well in its own day until it was found out. Certitudes in bygone centuries have been shaken. The present time is wildly volcanic. Now the hidden, throbbing, mad, fierce, upheaving fires bulge out the crust of earth under fabrics whilom regarded as indestructible, and split their walls, and warp their pillars, and choke their domes. It was a good thing for Milton and Dante they lived and wrote long ago, for the iconoclasts of to-day are trying to build a great wall across heaven and tear up the sacred pavement of hell. They tell us the Greek armies were a mob of disorderly and timid cits, and that speculations as to the reported dealings of Dr. Faustus with any folk but respectable druggists are too childish for the nursery or Kaffirs. The golden age is no longer the time that will never come again. The past is a fire that has burnt out, a flame that has vanished. To kneel before what has been is to worship impotent shadows. Up to this man has been wandering in the desert, and until now there have not been even trustworthy rumours of the land of promise. But to us has come a voice prophesying good things. The Canaan of the ages is in the future of time. Taking this age at its own estimate I have long thought the subject for the finest epic lying within possibility in our era is the building of the railway to India. Into a history of that undertaking would flow all the affluents of the ancient world. The stories of Baalbec and Nineveh that are finished, and of Aleppo and Damascus that survive, would fall into this prodigious tale of peaceful conquest. The line would have for marge Assyria on one hand, Egypt on the other; it would reach from the land of the Buddhist through the land of the Mohammedan to the land of the Christian. It would be a work undertaken in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine itself would be the god. It would be the history of man from his birth till this hour. It would be most fitly written in English, for English is the most capacious and virile language yet invented by man.
But a mere mortal, such as I, cannot stay in India always, or even abide for ever by the way. Although I have Whitaker’s Almanack before me all the time, I have strayed a little from it. In thinking of the lands through which that heroic line of railway would pass, I have almost forgotten the modest volume at my elbow. Yet fragile as it looks, one volume similar to it will last as long as the Pyramids, will come in time to be as old as the oldest memory is now; that is, if the ruins of England endure as long as those of Egypt, for a copy of it lies built up under Cleopatra’s Needle.
I turn over the last page of “British India” in my Almanack. We are not yet done with orient lands and seas. The article over-leaf is headed “Other British Possessions in the East.” Here, if one wants incitement towards prose or verse, dreaming or doing, commerce or pillage, is matter to his hand. The places one may read of are—Aden, Socotra, Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Labuan, British North Borneo, and Cyprus. Then in my book comes “The Dominion of Canada,” with its territory “about as large as Europe”! and a revenue equal to Portugal, which discovered and once held India. After Canada come “Other American Possessions,” including British Guiana, which, except for the sugar of Demerara, is little heard of; it occupies a space of earth as large as all Great Britain. So little do people of inferior education know of this dependency, that once, when a speaker in the House of Commons spoke of the “island of Demerara,” there was not a single member present who knew that Demerara was not an island, but part of the mainland of South America. Last in the list comes British Honduras, about as big as Wales.
After America, we have our enormous outlying farm in the southern hemisphere, “British Possessions in Australasia.” There the land owned by England is again about the size of Europe! Then follow “British Possessions in the West Indies,” small in mileage, great in fertility and richness of produce, and with a population twice that of Eastern Roumelia. The “British Possessions in Africa” are considerably larger than France, with about half as many inhabitants as Denmark. The territories owned in the Southern Atlantic are Ascension, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, and St. Helena. This prodigious list ends with the European Possessions, namely, Malta, Gibraltar, Heligoland, the Channel Islands, and Isle of Man.
By this time the hand is tired writing down the mere names of the riches belonging to Great Britain. Towards the close of my list from Whitaker my energy drooped, and a feeling of enervating satiety came upon me. I am surfeited with splendours, and, like a tiger filled with flesh, I must sleep. But in that sleep what dreams may come! How the imagination expands and aspires under the stimulus of a page of tabulated figures! How the fancy is excited, provoked, by the spectacle of an endless sea in which every quarter of the globe affords a bower for Britannia when it pleases her aquatic highness to adventure abroad upon the deep, into the farthest realms of the morning, into the regions of the dropping sun. Here, in my best two books, are the words of the most copious language that man ever spoke, and the facts and figures of the greatest realm over which man ever ruled. Civis Romanus sum! I will sleep. I will dream that I am alone with my two books. I will speak in this imperial, this dominant dialect, as I move by sea and land among the peoples who live under the flag flying above me now. Who would encumber himself with finite poetry or romance when he may take with him the uncombined vocabulary, with its infinite possibilities of affinities, and the history of the countries and the peoples that lie beneath this flag, and bear in his heart the astounding and exalting consciousness—Civis Romanus sum!
LIES OF FABLE AND ALLEGORY.
Some little while ago the battered and shattered remains of an old bookcase with the sedimentary deposit of my own books, reached me after a journey of many hundred miles from its former resting place. The front of the bookcase is twisted wirework, which, when I remember it first, was lined with pink silk. Not a vestige, not a shred of the silk remains and the half dozen shelves now depend for preservation in position on a frame as crazy as Her Majesty’s ship Victory, and certainly older. The bookcase had belonged to my grandfather before Trafalgar, and some of the books I found in it among the sediment were printed before the Great Fire of London. In all there were about a couple or three hundred books, none of which would be highly valued by a bibliophile. Owing to my being in a very modest way a wanderer on the face of the realm, these books had been out of my possession for nearly twenty years, and dusty and dilapidated as they were when they reached me I took them in my arms as long-lost friends. I had finished the last sentence with the word children, but that would not do for two reasons. These books were not mine as this one I am now writing is, and long-lost children change more than they have changed, or more than friends change. Children grow and outpace us and leave us behind and are not so full of companionable memories as friends. There is hardly time to make friends of our adult children before we are beckoned away. The friends we make and keep when we are young have always twenty years’ start of our children in friendship. A man may be friendly with his son of five but a father and son cannot be full friends until the son is twenty years older.