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BUBBLES OF THE FOAM




So Life's sad Sunset prizes
What Life's gay Dawn despises,
And always Winter wise is
When Summer is no more:
While Love than lightning fleeter
Turns all he touches sweeter,
To leave it incompleter
Behind him, than before.

AMARA

Years, looking forward, all too slow,
Yet looking back, too fast,
What is your joy, what is your woe,
But scented ash that used to glow,
A sandalwood of long ago,
A camphor of the past?

SULOCHANA

[Illustration]




BUBBLES OF THE FOAM

([Sanskrit])

TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT

BY

F. W. BAIN

_What! Mortal taste Immortal? Earth, kiss Heaven?
Confusion elemental!, ah! beware!_

SOMADEWA

WITH A FRONTISPIECE

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

_First Published in 1912_




DEDICATED

TO

LADY GLENCONNER




CONTENTS


PAGE
I. A SPOILED CHILD 1

II. THE THIRST OF AN ANTELOPE 27

I. A DAPPLED DAWN 29

II. A GLAMOUR OF NOON 63

III. THE DESERT AND THE NIGHT 89




INTRODUCTION


Four things are never far from you, in old Hindoo literature: underfoot,
all round you, or away on the horizon, there they always are: the
Forest, the Desert, the River, and the Hills.

It is never very easy, to understand the Past that really is a past: and
the age of Forests, like that of chivalry, is gone. But in the case of
ancient India, the chief obstacle to understanding arises from our bad
habit of always looking at the map with the North side up. Why this
inveterate apotheosis of the North? Would you understand the old
Hindoos, you must turn the map of India very nearly upside down, so as
to get Peshawar at the bottom, and the Andaman Islands exactly at the
top. And then, history lies all before you, right side up, and you get
your intellectual bearings, and take in the early situation, at a
glance. Entering, like those old nomads, through the Khaibar, you find
yourself suddenly in the Land of Streams: and as you drift along, you
go, simply because you must, straight on, down the River "ganging on"
(_Ganga_) towards the rising sun, "ahead," (which is the Sanskrit term
for East,) all under the colossal wall of Hills, the home of Snow, where
the gods live, on your left (_uttara_, the North, the heights;) while on
the South, (the _right_ hand, _dakshina_, the Deccan) you are debarred,
not by Highlands, but by two not less peremptory rebutters: first, by
the Desert, _Marusthali_, the home of death: and then again, a little
farther on, by the Forest of the South: the vast, mysterious,
impenetrable Wood, of which the Ramayana preserves for us the pioneering
record and original idea, with its spell of the Unknown and the
Adventure (like the Westward Ho! of a later age) with its Ogres and its
Sprites, its sandal trees and lonely lotus-tarns, its armies of ugly
little ape-like men, and its legendary Lanka (Ceylon) lost in a kind of
halo of shell-born pearls, and gems, and their Ten-headed Devil King,
Rawana, away, away, at the very end of all: so distant, as to be little
more than mythical, little better than a dream. No! Those who wish to
see things with the eyes of old Hindoos must not begin, as we did, and
do still, with Ceylon, and the adjacent coasts of Coromandel and
Malabar. That is the wrong, the _other_ end: it is like starting
English history from "the peak in Darien."

But our particular concern, in these pages, is with the Desert. The
conventional notion of a desert, as a colourless and empty flat of sand,
is curiously unlike the thing itself, which is a constantly changing,
kaleidoscopic sea of colour, made up of rainbow stripes, black, golden,
red, dazzling white, and blue, with every kind of lights and shadows,
strange hazes, transparencies, and gleams. True, the ground you actually
tread upon is bare: but it is clothed with raiment woven by that magic
artist, Distance, out of cloud and heat and air and sky. And so, when
these old Hindoo people came to make a closer acquaintance with the
Desert, so dangerous to enter, so difficult, as Mahmood subsequently
found, to cross, they discovered, that over and above the plain prosaic
danger, this Waste of Sand laid, like a very demon, goblin snares for
the unwary traveller's destruction, in the form of its Mirage. Ignorant
of "optical phenomena," they gazed at this strange illusion, these
phantom trees and water, these mocking semblances of cities that
vanished as you reached them, with astonishment, and even awe. It struck
their imagination, and they gave to it a name scarcely less poetical
than the thing: calling it "_deer-water_," or the "_thirst of the
antelope_."[1] Nor was this all. For the apparition was a kind of
symbol, made as it were expressly for their own phenomenology: it
contained a moral meaning that harmonised precisely with all their
philosophical ideas. What could be a better illustration of that MAYA,
that metaphysical Delusion, in which all souls are wrapped, which leads
them to impute Reality to the Phantasms, the unsubstantial objects of
the senses, and lures them on to moral ruin as they wander in the waste?
And accordingly, we find the poets constantly recurring to this _thirst
of the gazelle_, as an emblem of the treacherous and bewildering
fascination of the fleeting shadows of this lower life (_ihaloka_;) the
beauty that is hollow, the Bubble of the World. And thus, Disappointment
is of the essence of Existence: disappointment, which can only come
about, when hopes and expectations have been founded on a want of
understanding (_awiweka_;) a blindness, born of Desire, that sets and
keeps its unhappy victims hunting, in vain, for what is not to be found.

[Footnote 1: I am told, by a pundit in these matters, that the term is
found at least as early as Patanjali (the _Mahabhashya_;) that is
probably, the latter half of the second century B.C.: and hence, it must
have originated long before.]

Especially, essentially, in love: love, which has its origin in Dream,
its acme in Ecstasy, and its catastrophe in Disillusion: love, which is
life's core and kernel and epitome, the focus and quintessence of
existence. A life that is without it has somehow missed its mark: it is
meaningless and plotless, "a string of casual episodes, like a bad
tragedy." For what, after all, is Love? Who has given an account of it?
Plato's fable, which makes Love the child of Satiety and Want, or
Poverty and Plenty, is a pretty piece of fancy: it is clever: but like
mathematics, an explanation of the brain rather than the heart.
Something is missing. For Plato, almost always delicate and subtle, is
never tender: the reason is, that he was atrophied on the feminine side:
he does not consequently understand sex, being himself only half a man:
that is, only man and nothing more. But all the really great imaginative
men are bi-sexual: they have a large ingredient of woman in their
composition, which gives to their divination an extra touch of something
that others cannot reach. And so, with equal poetry, yet with a pathos
infinitely deeper, our Milton makes Love the child of Loneliness:[2] a
parentage evinced by the terrible melancholy of Love when he cannot find
his proper object, and the blank desolation and despair of the frightful
void and blackness left behind, when he has lost it. But now, it is
just this intolerable loneliness which makes him idealise the
commonplace, and see all things in the light of his own yearning,
creating for himself visions of unimaginable happiness, which presently
vanish, to resolve his Eden into nothing, and leave him, with no
companion but the horror of his own intensified isolation, in the sand.
A situation, which hardly any lover that really is a lover can endure,
without going mad. They are very shallow theologians, who by way of
pandering to sentimental prejudices make the essence of the Deity to
consist in Love. Poor Deity! his life would be a Hell, past all human
imagination: an everlasting Loneliness, with no prospect of release. For
it is precisely to escape from this hell that so many forlorn lovers
take refuge in the tomb: a resource not available to those who cannot
die. Death is not always terrible: sometimes he is kind.

[Footnote 2: In his _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_.]

* * * * *

Such then is the theme of _Bubbles of the Foam_: a little love-story,
whose title, like that of all her elder sisters, has in the original a
double application, by reason of the ambiguity of the last word, to
Love, and to the Moon. We might also render it, _A Heavenly Bubble_, or,
_Love is a Bubble_, or _Nothing but a Bubble_, or _A Bubble of the
World_,[3] thinking either of Love or the Moon. For the Moon, like the
goddess of Love, rose originally from the sea: and they retain traces of
their origin, both in their essence and their appearance. For what is
more like a great Foam-Bubble than the Moon? and what is more like the
delusion of love than a bubble of the foam, so beautiful in its play of
colour, while it endures: so evanescent, so hollow, leaving behind it
when it bursts and disappears nothing but a memory, and a bitter taste
of brine? And as love is but a bubble, so are all its victims merely
bubbles of a bubble: for this also is mirage.

[Footnote 3: I was sorely tempted to give it the title of _Mere Foam_:
which, if the reader would kindly understand _mere_ in its German, its
Russian, its Latin, and its ordinary English sense, would be an exact
translation. But it has an unfortunate suggestion (_meerschaum_) which
made it impossible.]

Mirage! mirage! That is the keynote of the old melancholy Indian music;
the bass, whose undertone accompanies, with a kind of monotonous
solemnity, all the treble variations in the minor key. The world is
unreal, a delusion and a snare; sense is deception, happiness a dream;
nothing has true being, is absolute, but virtue, the sole reality; that
which most emphatically IS,[4] attainable only through knowledge, the
great illuminator, the awakener to the perception of the truth. We move,
like marionettes, pulled by the strings of our forgotten antenatal
deeds, in a magic cage, or Net, of false and hypocritical momentary
seemings: and bitter disappointment is the inevitable doom of every
soul, that with passion for its guide in the gloom, thinks to find in
the shadows that surround it any substance, any solid satisfaction; any
permanent in the mutable; any rest in the ceaseless revolution; any
peace which the world cannot give. Who would have peace, must turn his
back upon the world; it lies the Other Way. Three are the Ways: the Way
of the World, the Way of Woman, the Way of Emancipation.

[Footnote 4: _Sat._ The thesis of Socrates, that virtue is knowledge:
probably borrowed, by steps that we cannot trace, through Pythagoras or
"Orpheus" from the East.]

Does anyone in Europe care about this last, this Way of Emancipation?
No: it is Liberty that preoccupies the European, who about a century ago
seemed, like the old Athenian, suddenly to catch sight of Liberty in a
dream.[5] And yet, who knows? For Europe also is disappointed: there
seems, after all, to be something lacking to this Liberty, something
wrong. With her Utopias ending in blind alleys, or issues unforeseen:
with her sages discovered to be less sages than they seemed: with her
Science turning superstitious, her Literature wallowing in the gutter,
and her women descending from the pedestal of sex to play the virago in
the contamination of the crowd: with so many other things, not here to
be considered, to raise a doubt, whether this Liberty is taking her just
where she wished to go, what wonder if even Europe should begin to
meditate on means of emancipation, even if only from vulgarity, and
steal a furtive glance or two towards the East, to see, whether, by
diligently raking in the ashes of ancient oriental creeds, she might not
discover here and there a spark, at which to rekindle the expiring
candle of her own. For there seems to be some curious indestructible
_asbestos_, some element of perennial, imperturbable tranquillity and
calm, away in India, which is conspicuous only by its absence, in the
worry of the West. Where does it come from? What does it consist in? Is
there a secret which India has discovered, which Europe cannot guess? Is
there anything in it, after all, but barbaric superstition, destined to
fade away and disappear, in the sunrise of omniscience?

[Footnote 5: [Greek: honar heleutherias horhontas. Plutarch.]]

I cannot tell: but well I recollect a fugitive impression left on me by
an early morning in Benares, now many years ago. I threaded its
extraordinary streets, narrower than the needle's eye, and crowded with
strange, lithe, nearly naked human beings, with black, straight, long
wet hair, and brown shining skins, jostled at every step by holy bulls
or cows, roaming at their own sweet will with large placid lustrous
eyes, in an atmosphere heavy with the half-delicious, half-repulsive
odour of innumerable flowers, mostly yellow, that lay about everywhere
in heaps, fresh and rotten, till I came out finally upon the river bank.
A light steamy mist, converted by the low sun's horizontal rays into a
kind of reddish-golden veil, hung in the quiet air, lending an almost
magical effect to the long row of great temples, whose steps run down
into the river, along the northern bank: half of them in ruins, and
looking as if they must presently slide away into the water and
disappear. And as I floated slowly down, I watched with curiosity, half
wondering if I was dreaming, the throng of devotees, sitting, lying,
gliding here and there, like an antique procession on an old Greek
frieze or vase; some muttering and praying, others bathing, others again
standing motionless as statues in the stream, buried in a sort of
_samadhi_ meditation: every outline of every attitude, in that clear
Indian air, as sharp as if cut with scissors out of paper. And lying
close beside, cheek by jowl with the bodies still alive, the ashes of
dead bodies just burned or still burning on the Ghat. Life and Death
touching, running into one another, and nobody amazed: all as it should
be, and a matter of course!

England and India, bureaucracy, democracy, sedition, education, politics
and Durbars:--the world with all its tumult and its roaring passes clean
over their heads, unheeded, unobserved: for them the noise and bustle do
not matter, do not trouble: they do not hear, they do not listen, they
do not even care. It is curious, this peace, this indifference, this
calm: it does not seem reality; it is like a thing looked at in a
picture, like a dream. And, somehow, as I gazed at it, mechanically
there came into my mind, as it were of its own accord, a story I had
read in some old navigator's "yarn," of the albatross, sleeping on the
great South Sea, in the fury of a storm, with its head beneath its wing.

CEYLON, 1912




I

A SPOILED CHILD




I

A SPOILED CHILD

BENEDICTION

_A bow to the mystical evening dance of the Rider on the Mouse,[6] who
whirling round his elephant trunk, smeared with wet vermilion, suddenly
shoots it straight up into the purple sky, and stands for a single
instant still, poised in the yellow twilight, as if to make a coral
handle for the white umbrella of the laughing Moon._

[Footnote 6: Ganesha.]


I

There is, in the western quarter, a land of lonely desolation, that
resembles a very sea, but of sand instead of brine, and rightly named
Marusthali, being a very home of death, sending back to the midday sun
rays hotter than his own, and challenging the midnight sky, with silent
ashy laughter, as though to say: What am I but the rival and reflection
of thyself, with bones instead of stars, and tracks of wasted skeletons
instead of a Milky Way. And there, upon a day, it came about that
Maheshwara was roaming with Parwati in his arms. And as they floated
swiftly on, over the dusty waste, they watched their own huge shadows
sweeping like the forms of clouds across the burning sand, exactly
underneath, for it was noon: and the surface of the desert shook and
quivered in the stillness, as if the wind, asleep, had, like a tired
traveller, sought refuge from the fury of the sun above their heads. And
all at once, the Daughter of the Snow exclaimed: See, there is the
mirage! Let us descend, and sit for a little while upon the sand: for I
love to watch this wonder, which resembles in its far faint blue the
colour of a dream. And accordingly, to do her pleasure, Maheshwara sank
softly to the earth, settling on it like a cloud gently resting on a
hill.

So as they looked, after a while, that slender goddess said again:
Surely it is a shame, and well may the poor antelopes be mistaken and
deceived. For who could believe yonder water to be only an illusion? And
when the eyes of even gods are bewildered by the cheat, how much more
the eyes of thirsty and unreflecting little deer!

Then the Moony-crested deity said slowly: O Daughter of the Snow, thy
own reflection on this beautiful illusion is the truth. And yet, well
were it for the world, were its illusion limited only to its eyes, not
extending, as it actually does, to its understanding also. For this
deceptive picture on the sand is far inferior in power and importance to
the bewildering delusion of this world below, fluttering about whose
shifting dancing light, like moths about a wind-blown torch, men singe
their silly souls, and burning off their wings, drop helpless, maimed
and mutilated, into the black gulf of birth and death, and lose
emancipation; till, after countless ages, their wings begin to sprout
and grow again, under the influence of works. Yet they who after all
emerge, and soar away, unburdened even by an atom of the guilt that
weighs them down, and brings them back into the vortex of rebirth, are
very few. And yonder bones, now lying in the sand, could they but rise
and speak, would be a proof of what I say.

And the goddess looked, and saw, close by, a little heap of bones, that
lay half-buried in the sand. And she said with curiosity: Whose are the
bones, and how are they a proof of thy consideration?

And Maheshwara replied: These are bones, not of a man, but of a camel,
that perished in the desert long ago. For into this body of a camel
fell the soul of which I spoke, in punishment of crimes committed in the
birth before, in the body of a man; who, blinded by passion, slew three
of his fellow mortals; as, if thou wilt, I will tell thee while we sit,
watching the illusion of the senses, that so closely represents the
illusion of the souls of the lovers in the tale.


II

Know, then, that once upon a time, long ago, all the gods had assembled
in the hall of Indra's palace, to listen to a singing competition that
took place among the Gandharwas. And all sat listening attentively, till
at length, all at once, came a pause in the performance. And in the
silence, while all the heavenly singers rested, it so fell out, by the
decree of destiny, that the flowery-arrowed god,[7] striving to
recollect a cadence that had pleased him, hummed it, as well as he
could, over again, aloud; and like the unskilful imitator that he was,
played havoc with his model, stumbling at the quarter tones, and singing
fiat. And out of delicacy and politeness, the gods all turned away their
faces, hiding their smiles, except Brahma,[8] whose face never moved.
But Kamadewa, looking up suddenly, caught the vestige of a smile,
hovering, just before it disappeared, on the corner of the lips of
Saraswati, as if it were unwilling to leave a resting-place so
unutterably sweet as that lovely lady's mouth. And instantly, he turned
red and pale alternately, with rage that followed shame: so little does
he who delights in making others blush like doing it himself. And
suddenly taking fire, he cried aloud: Ha! dost thou turn me into
ridicule, O thou malapert blue-stocking?[9] Then will I curse thee for
thy pains. Fall instantly into a lower birth, and suffer anguish in the
form of a mortal woman, for thy presumption and ill-mannered mirth.

[Footnote 7: _i.e._ the god of love, Kamadewa.]

[Footnote 8: It would have been useless for Brahma to turn away his
face, since he has four; one on every side.]

[Footnote 9: _Kupandita_, the exact equivalent of our word. Saraswati is
the Hindoo Pallas Athene; with this distinction in her favour, that she
is as gentle as the Greek lady is the reverse. The _flava virago_ of
Ovid becomes in India a lotus white and pure as her own celestial
smile.]

And instantly, all the other gods, hearing him, broke out into a very
storm of indignation. And buzzing like infuriated bees around one who
seeks to rob them of their honey, they swarmed about that god of love,
exclaiming all together: What! shall Heaven be bereft, even for a very
little while, of the very crest-jewel of its brow, because of thy loss
of self-control, and a fault on her part which was not a fault at all,
but only the appropriate reproof of thy ill-advised endeavour to play
the musician without possessing the necessary skill? And there arose a
tumult in the hall; and finally, they made me arbitrator to settle the
dispute, knowing that Ananga was afraid of me, as well might he be[10].
And so, after all were silent, I spoke. And I said, very slowly: O
bender of that bow, whose string is a row of bees, thou art surely
altogether inexcusable, first for thy singing, and secondly for thy loss
of temper, and finally for thy curse. For who could be so harsh as to
strike Saraswati, even with a _shirisha_ petal? But now, the mischief is
utterly beyond repair, and once spoken, the curse cannot be
recalled.[11] And whether she will or no, she must now go to earth, and
leave us for a time, till thy curse has spent its force. And yet, for
all that, it is not right that the doer of injustice such as thine
should escape scot-free. Therefore now I will give thee curse for
curse, and thou shalt eat the fruit of thy own tree. Fall then,
immediately into the body of a man, and suffer that mortality which thou
hast laid upon Saraswati. And thy fortune shall be interwoven with her
own, so that thy curse shall be determined by the quality and period of
hers.

[Footnote 10 Because Maheshwara had burned him, on a previous occasion,
with fire from his eye.]

[Footnote 11: In these and similar ideas, the Hindoos resembled the
ancient Romans: the letter was decisive and irremediable, _uti lingua
nuncupassit, ita jus esto_.]

And then, as he listened to my doom, Kamadewa turned paler than the
ashes to which I had reduced him long ago, finding himself punished for
his insolence by me, for the second time. But the gods all exclaimed,
with approbation and delight: Victory to Maheshwara! who has once more
bitten the biter, and condemned him, by a sentence even more merciful
than he deserved. For what could be more intolerable than even Heaven
without Saraswati, unless it be the curse that is about to produce such
a melancholy condition of affairs?

And then, those two deities disappeared suddenly from Heaven, and
descended to be born as man and woman on the earth.[12]

[Footnote 12: This exordium, which has points of resemblance with that
of the insufferable Bana's _Harsha-charita_, is only the Hindoo method
of declaring that the two characters presently to be brought upon the
scene are mortal incarnations of love and charm: as we call a man, an
Adonis, or a woman, a Venus.]


III

Now just at that very moment, it happened, that there were living in the
desert two Rajpoots of the race of the Moon; and the name of the one was
Bimba, and that of the other, Jaya.[13] And Saraswati was born as the
daughter of the wife of Bimba, while Kamadewa was born as the son of the
wife of Jaya. Now Bimba was a king: and Jaya was his cousin on the
mother's side. And very soon afterwards, Jaya set upon his cousin,
laying claim to the throne, and driving him away, took his kingdom, and
kept it for himself. And he caught the wife of Bimba, and put her to
death, as he would have done also with her daughter and her husband. But
Bimba succeeded in escaping with his daughter, and ran away and hid
himself. So Jaya remained in triumph, reigning over the kingdom, whose
capital stood on the very spot on which we are sitting now. For the
kingdoms of the earth come and go upon it, like the shadows of the
clouds: and they grow up suddenly like grass, and perish a little later,
and vanish clean away, leaving behind them absolutely nothing but
mounds, such as those now lying all about thee, and fragments of
recollections, and half-forgotten names, like the dreams of the night
which morning obliterates and drives away, vaguely hanging in its memory
like wreaths of mist curling and twisting on the black still surface of
a pool in some dark valley screened from the early sun by one of thy
father's[14] peaks.

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