CONTEMPORARY BOOKS.
I.—HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF THE EAST.
(Under the Direction of Professor E. H. Palmer.)
Colonel Malleson certainly did well to claim permission to rewrite Sir John Kaye’s last volume (History of the Indian Mutiny, by Colonel Malleson, Vol. I., London: W. H. Allen & Co.), and comparison of the two may afford to the historian of the future valuable aid in interpreting the volumes yet to come. A great part of the present must be held to be the work of the virulent pamphleteer and violent partisan rather than of the historian; and if the quotations of, and references to, the Red Pamphlet indicate relations between Colonel Malleson and its author, the publishers cannot be held to have exercised a wise discretion in their choice.
The task of the reviewer of such a book is unusually heavy. Book for book, almost chapter for chapter, it is intended to replace Sir John Kaye’s work, and the reviewer therefore needs to study the two carefully, and to compare them minutely. Colonel Malleson, no doubt, had access to Sir John Kaye’s materials, but within a certain field seems to have been unable to see the other side of any question. To arm, to leave Sepoys armed, is simply to detain European troops to watch them; it is nothing that to disarm them is to drive them, and all their connections, wild with terror as sheep marked for the slaughter; yet he cannot be ignorant of the cases in which a few bad men committed a regiment, and how whole regiments “went” in terror of their masters’ vengeful distrust.[105] In saying, as he does so confidently, that by enrolling the Calcutta Volunteers on their first offer, on 20th May, Lord Canning would have set free half a European regiment, Colonel Malleson must have been thinking of what the Volunteers might have been fit to do had they been enrolled and drilled six months before,—provided they had been willing to take the day-work of garrison duty, and to think more of the State than of the house and furniture at Ballygunj: the real profit of the enrolment was the confidence and cheerfulness organization gave to the Europeans themselves. And—to take a more important instance—the “Gagging Act” was an insolent expression of distrust of Englishmen, an attempt to prevent their opinions reaching England in print. For distrust of their discretion English editors had given cause enough, and for influencing English opinion, as Indian newspapers may be said to be unknown in England in their original sheets, a letter from the editor of the Friend of India to any English paper would have been as sure of English readers, and of as much weight with them, as if it had been set up in the damp printing-house at Serampore.
Colonel Malleson quotes from the “Red Pamphlet,” as Sir John Kaye had done before him, a smart description of “Panic Sunday.” From Colonel Cavanagh’s report it seems pretty clear that the higher classes—the “society”—of Calcutta were not among the refugees in the fort, and as Secretaries to Government and Members of Council may be counted on the fingers, it would be as well if the historian would name the fugitives before death takes all who could answer the charge. We have had access to the diary of a young civilian, then a guest of the Member of Council who lived furthest from Government House, away in Alipore, beyond the house of the Lieutenant-Governor and the great jail of Alipore and the lines of the native regiment which was the great terror of Calcutta: on that Sunday, host and guest went to the Cathedral twice as usual, and after the evening service the guest returned home, while the host drove to Calcutta to call on some cousins; as the cousins had driven to Alipore, and the visitors at both houses waited a while those households at least were afoot till a later hour than usual, and at last went to bed as usual without closing an extra door.
The second chapter closes with an impassioned peroration, wherein the removal of Mr. William Tayler from his post at Patna is likened to the judicial murder of Lally, and the starvation of Dupleix. It is clear enough, from Colonel Malleson’s account, that Mr. Tayler liked to carry out his own plans too well to risk interference by over-frankness to his superiors. In the face of an enemy such concealment may be as mischievous as disobedience, and Sir John Kaye reminds us that at an earlier date confidence in Mr. Tayler’s judgment had been shaken; and his report of his message to his district officers, the report which immediately preceded, and probably led to, his suspension, says nothing of the clause which sets the treasure above anything save human life. Under any circumstances Mr. Tayler’s defence is not helped by sharp censures on Mr. Money, or by blindness to the fact that the best intelligence made a march to Patna seem more perilous than the far longer one through a jungle country to Calcutta. Wise after the event, indeed, we may see that Mr. Tayler’s forecast was sounder than Mr. Halliday’s; but the Lieutenant-Governor, and Lord Canning too, could only act on the circumstances known to them, and Mr. Tayler was replaced by an officer of yet higher rank in the official hierarchy, and probably forestalled renewed promotion by resigning the Service as soon as he could get a pension. But why were not his services rewarded? asks Colonel Malleson, ready with the hard word “intrigue.” But who were the sharers in the intrigue, and who was to profit by it? Men whom Lord Canning sharply rebuked and degraded were yet recommended by him for honour, and no courteous letter from Mr. Talbot can do away with the fact that the Viceroy, writing when all heat of strife was over and all facts known, yet did not obtain for Mr. Tayler any distinction.
On one point, however, we are bound to protest against Sir John Kaye’s harsh judgment: to him the arrest of the Wahabi leaders was a scandalous breach of the usages of war. But they were unquestionably subjects of the British Crown, and the question surely is—would they have resisted arrest by ordinary process or not? If not, they had to thank Mr. Tayler for courteous consideration in arresting them himself, and detaining them in honourable captivity; in resisting they would have been guilty of that rebellion against their sovereign in which there was too good reason to believe them sharers.
On the many points whereon both authors are in substantial accord it would be waste of space to touch, and we pass to the other important episode in which Colonel Malleson traverses Sir John Kaye’s judgment, and here our verdict is with the later author: in treating of Durand’s conduct at Indore, Colonel Malleson seems to have risen above the region of personal feeling, if not of personal knowledge; so that while his full and vivid narrative shows plainly the difficulties, political and strategical, of Durand’s position and also of his retreat, he shows as clearly that it is no simple case of Durand versus Holkar, but one in which each may be commended without loss of credit to the other.
So much space has been of necessity devoted to the chief points on which the two authors are at variance, that none is left for the transactions which Colonel Malleson’s changed arrangement brings into the present volume, though Kaye had intended for them a place in some later one. His work in the new field makes us only the more regret that he did not bring to his task the unbiassed mind of a man who had never known the author of the Red Pamphlet or Mr. William Tayler. But we would, in a concluding word, beg him to revise his Indian spelling; to a man who has once felt the charm of a fancy rule the claims of established usage go for nothing, but at all events he may be decently consistent; why does Colonel Malleson double so many letters which in Urdu are single, and why does he spell the name of the ancient and famous, if now obscure, town of Jaunpore as though it were “the City of Life”?