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Advances in Cancer Research 99 1st Edition George F.
Vande Woude And George Klein (Eds.) Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): George F. Vande Woude and George Klein (Eds.)
ISBN(s): 9780123742247
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 5.32 MB
Year: 2008
Language: english
The Nationalization of
Hindu Traditions
The Nationalization of
Hindu Traditions
Bharatendu Harischandra and
Nineteenth-Century Banaras

V ASUDHA DALMIA

With a new Foreword by

FRANCESCA ORSINI

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 Published by
P [ I< M A N E NT ll L .\ C K
'Himalayana' , Mall Road, Ranikhet Cantt,
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[email protected]

Distributed by
ORIENT BLACKSWA N PRIVAT E LTD
Bangalore Bhopal Bhubaneshwar Chandigarh
Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Jaipur
Kolkata Lucknow Mumbai New Delhi Patna
www.orientblackswan.com

Copyright © 1997 vASUDHA DALMTA

Copyright © 20 I 0
(reprint with new Foreword) VASUDHA DALMIA
for the text of the book

Copyright© 2010 FRANCESCA ORSINI

for the Foreword

Third impression 2017

ISBN 81 -7824 304-0

First published by Oxford University Press in 1997

This edition, with a new Foreword
by FRANCESCA ORSINI, 2010

Printed and bound by Sapra Brothers, Delhi 110092

 For my scholar
and poet mother
Saraswati Dalmia
 Acknowledgements

It is my pleasant duty to thank the following:

Prof. Monika Boehm-Tettelbach and Prof. Heinrich von S tietencron
for encouragement and scholarly support at the most crucial moments,
Maharaja Vibhuti Narayan Singh for his generosity in allowing me to
use the Ramnagar palace library, Shri Chandradhar Prasad Narayan
Singh, 'Bhanu Babu', for his patience in question-answer sessions,
Prof. Anand Krishna, most of all, without whom Banaras would mean
half as much, Rani Bhabhi for her gracious hospitality, Dr Kalyan
Krishna for information on the Vallabha Sampradaya and much else,
Sushmaji for companionship, Dr Girish Chandra for receiving me in
Bharatendu Bhavan and allowing me access to his papers, Dr Dhirendra-
nath Singh foropening up his treasures and letting me profit from his vast
knowledge and love of the poets of the Bharatendu era,
Shri Shradvallabha Betiji Maharaj of Gopal Mandir, Varanasi, for
graciously receiving me in the temple,
Dr T. K. Biswas, Director, Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi for making
possible massive photo-copying, as well as Dr Lakshmi Datt Vyas for
his unwavering resistance to scholars, Prakash Rao for photography,
Dr R. S. Kushvaha for enthusiastic help,
Dr George Baumann, University Library, Tiibingen, for sustained
support over the years,
Dr Richard J. Bingle, India Office Records, British Library, and
Prof. Ravinder Kumar, Director, and S . K. Bhatnagar, Deputy Librar-
ian, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, for prompt help and support
Prof. Sudhir Chandra for his generosity in sharing his extensive
knowledge of nineteenth-century controversies and contexts, Prof. Veena
Das and Prof. Anuradha Kapur for the width of their understanding and
for their warm support,
Drs Rupert Snell, Rukun Advani and R. P. Jain for substantial contri-
bution to the final shaping of the manuscript,
Dr R. S. McGregor for generously provided correctives on the vexed
issue of language,
v111 Acknowledgements
Prof. Juergen Lu ~ tt for the kind loan of microfilms,
Dr Martin Chris.of-Fi.ichsle for help at all hours , Dr Srilata Raman
Mueller for close of readings of texts one can only foist on friends , Dr Eva
Warth and Dr Gita Dharampal-Frick for support at incisive moments,
Rainer Kimmig, as always , for emotional and technical help with com-
puter, Eva Orthmann for resolving Perso-Arabic intricacies,
Dr Bhakti Datta, Prof. Derek Gupta, Christa Mellis , Professors
Margarete and Alois Payer, Gert, Damini and Taru Luederitz for the
shared way ,
my mother and the family in Delhi for the shared traditions ,
finally, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for awarding me a
stipend from October 1991 to October 1993, which made it possible for
me to devote myself entirely to research.
Implicated deeply in this enterprise and therefore beyond thanks:
Dr Angelika Maliniar, Dr Martin Fuchs, as also my research assistant,
Nicole Merkel who did much more than was due, the errors which remain
being entirely mine.
V ASUDHA DALMIA
 Note on Transliteration

Hindi words which have become part of the English language , for ins-
tance Brahman or Pandit, have been written without diacritical marks.
When citing directly from the Hindi , the transliteration followed by
.. S. McGregor in his Outline ofHindi Grammar [1972] 1977, has most-
ly been used. The rather vexed question of the difference in Hindi and
Sanskrit transliteration has been sought to be resolved, in that the Sans-
krit has been employed only in contexts where Sanskrit works are under
discussion. Thus Bhiiratvar~ in the Hindi context and Bhiiratavar~a in
the Sanskrit. For the Urdu transcription I have mainly relied on the
scheme adopted by R. S . McGregor in Urdu Study Materials , 1992.
When citing from secondary sources, the author's usage has been re-
tained.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 Constituting Tradition in Colonial India: Hindi,
Hindu, Hindustan 21
How CAN INDIA PROGRESS : HARISCHANDRA·s VIEWPOINT 21
THE COLONIAL GOVERNMENT AND THE FORMATION OF
PUBLIC 0PINI0N 28
HINDUS AND MUSLIMS, HINDUSTAN AND BHARATVAR~ 32
ASSESSING HARISCHANDRA's Vrnw: DICHOTOMIES ,
AMBIVALENCES AND THE THIRD IDIOM 4'.?.
3 The Holy City as the Source of 'Traditional' Authority
and the House of Harischandra 50
BANARAS AS THE HOLY aTY OF THE HINDUS : THE MYTH
IN INTERPRETATION 50
THE RAJAS OF BANARAS AND THE CREATION OF HINDU TRADITION 64
THE BRAHMAN PRESENCE AND THE TRADITION OF LEARNING 94
THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE: THE MISSIONARY IMPACT AND
CULTURAL INTERACTION 107
THE HOUSE OF HARISCHANDRA OF BANARAS 117
CONCLUSION 143
4 Hindi as the National Language of the Hindus 146
THE GENESIS OF HINDI 146
THE DEVELOPMENT OF HINDUf/BHAKHA AS A LITERARY
LANGUAGE 152
EAST INDIA COMPANY: THE LANGUAGE SPLIT AND THE
COLLEGE OF FORT WILLI A~! 161
ADDRESSING THE HINDUS IN HINDU!: MISSIONARY TRACTS
AND SCHOOL BOOKS 169
THE COURT LANGUAGE CONTROVERSY: I NCREAS ING
POLITICIZATION AND IDEOLOGIZATION 175
CODIFYING THE LANGUAGE; GRAMMARS AND DICTIONARIES 181
OccuPYING THE P UBLIC SPHERE: HARISCHANDRA AND THE
NATIONALIST ASPIRATIONS OF HINDI 191
CONCLUSION 217
Xll Contents
5 The National Identity of the Hindus an.: ''1e
Emergence of Hindi Literature: The Periodicals as a
Discursive Sphere 222
LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION 222
HINDI JOURNALS AND THE FORMATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE 227
THE ROLE OF HARISCHANDRA: LITERARY AND JoURNALISTIC
PERSONA 232
KAVIVACHANSUDHA 236
HARISCHANDRACHANDRIKA 241
BALABODH!Nf 245
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SPACE: DEMARCATING THE MIDDLE
GROUND 251
HINDI AS A LITERARY LANGUAGE AND HINDI LITERATURE AS
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE NATION 267
MAPPING THE LITERARY TERRAIN: THE GENERIC ENCOUNTER 279
POETRY 282
PROSE NARRATIVE 291
DRAMA 300
PROSE ESSAY 314
TRAVELOGUES 322
BOOK REVIEWS 328
CONCLUSION 335
6 'The Only Real Religion of the Hindus' 338
THE TRADITIONALIST RESPONSE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE:
HARISCHANDRA'S THREE PHASES 338
THE COLONIAL FRAMEWORK: MISSIONARY REPRESENTATIONS 342
THE FIRST PHASE: ROOTS AND THEIR OFFSHOOTS 351
THE KA.sf DHARMA SABHA 355
CRITIQUE OF SACERDOTAL TRADITION 362
SECOND PHASE: ASSIMILATIONS AND DEMARCATIONS 366
THE DEBATE WITH THE REFORMISTS: THE DEFENCE OF
IMAGE- WORSHIP 381
ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE: CONSTRUING THE TRUE RELIGIOUS
TRADITIONS OF THE HINDUS 390
THE THIRD PHASE: DHARMA AS CONSTITUTING THE NATION 411
CONCLUSION 425
7 Conclusion 430
Bibliography 440
Index 467
 Foreword
Francesca Orsini

It is rare for an academic book to combine a strong line of argument

with a profusion of sources, all carefully presented and analysed, over
a very broad canvas, covering a number of different themes: a book in
which every small detail makes sense both in itself and as part of a
much larger picture. Vasudha Dalmia's The Nationalization of Hindu
Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-century Banaras
is such a book. It is unusual in being at the same time utterly convincing,
thorough and light-footed, sensitive to nuances, ambivalences, and con-
tradictions, and so assured in its reading that there is never any feeling
of it forcing an interpretation upon its material. Re-reading it now, nearly
fifteen years after it first appeared, is like reading a classic, a work that
has not so much shapd our understanding of this period as having cre-
ated the field, the discipline through which to study it. Cultural history
had not been done in this way for India before.
For a long time the "colonial er;counter", and what was termed the
''Indian Rena i';sance''. were defined by studies of Bengal, or more
precisely Calcut.:i. We picmrecl wionial intellectuals as babus, suited
and booted in pub;i c nnd donning dhotis and sacred threads at home,
intellectuals who were equally at home in the English classics (often
also Latin and Greek) and Sanskrit texts, even as they forged modem
literature and the press in Bengali. Other regions and language areas
were viewed as variations on Bengnl, a little more radical here, a little
belated there.
To some extent Bengal still determines the meridian of modernity in
India-can for instance Nazir Akbarabadi be considered a modem p0et,
given that he lived and wrote in Agra at the tum of the nineteenth century?
I doubt there would be much difficulty considering his irreverent, street-
smart poetry "modem" had he lived in Calcutta over the same period .
One of the merits oi Vasudha Dalmia's book, as of David Lelyve!d'o;;
Aligarh 's First Generation and Barbara Metcalf' s studies of Indian Islam,
has been to consider modernity from the perspective of areas and groups
xiv Foreword

where living o:raditions of knowledge, authority, and culture were still

strong. In fact, the rich crop of regional studies on the growth of the
press as well as public sphere institutions all over India has now made
it amply clear how different and specific the trajectories of colonial
modernity were in each separate case. There is no longer one meas-
ure that, more or less, fits all. The picture we get of Harischandra from
Dalmia's book is of a colonial intellectual with long, curly hair and the
richly woven angarkha of the pre-colonial elite, with his courtesan-
companion Mallika on his lap, the pair gazing seriously at each other,
encapsulating the complex historical background of Banaras that this
book traces so thoroughly.
Being a study of the writings and ideas of a singular colonial intel-
lectual, this book acknowledges Sudhir Chandra's The Oppressive
Present (1992) as a predecessor. And indeed Chandra's book was re-
markable for the range of writers and texts it discussed as well as for
the issues it focused on: these were to dominate discussions of colonial
culture in the years that followed-historical consciousness, communal-
ism, nationalism. But whereas the vernacular intellectuals of colonial
times are in Chandra's depiction beset by anxiety and ambivalence
("Crushed by English Poetry" is the title of one of the chapters), Dalmia' s
Harischandra is a much more self-assured character whose attitude to
orientalist discourse is confidently selective. Dalmia' s careful tracing
of the development of the historical discourse on Indian monotheism is
illuminating in this respect, highlighting not only the significant overlap
between European orientalists and Indian intellectuals, but also their
contrasting agendas and the selectiveness with which Rajendralal Mitra
or R.G. Bhandarkar or Harischandra, for instance, made use of orientalist
auctoritas. Her meticulous outlining of "three idioms" in her Introduction,
and of the third idiom in particular-the "modem Indian", as a sanskrit-
izing idiom which formed itself "in the very process of negotiating the
relationship to past idioms and classical texts in the light of present
needs and claims, in order to project itself as a coherent and even homo-
geneous entity" (p. 15)-is borne out in subsequent chapters through
her analysis of literary and religious debates and activities.
As a cultural-historical study in English of a hallowed figure of the
Hindi literary tradition, this book participates in the productive cross-
disciplinary trend that has seen primarily historians and scholars of
English literature mining regional-language archives to produce rich
cultural histories of colonial India. This process acquired particular
urgency because of the shadow cast by Hindutva. Scholars searched
for the origins of its xenophobic views and counterfactual arguments,
 Foreword xv

and for the "communal common sense" (as one scholar called it) that
was apparently firmly rooted in the popular imagination d..)spite decades
of Nehruvian secularism. Views that condemned Indian Muslims into
being eternal foreigners, Sudhir Chandra had shown, could be found in
profusion within the writings of Harischandra and his contemporaries.
In a different way, given the fractious and hierarchical relationship of
Hindi with English, her critical perspective on these themes also exposed
Vasudha Dalmia to criticism. Does not writing "angrezi men hindi"-
about Hindi in English-it was asked, mean choosing to be an outsider
in the world of Hindi, cut off from its concerns and struggles? The answer
seems clear: anyone who reads this book will see that Dalmia writes
with great engagement as well as historical balance about Harischandra.
Her whole book is a plea for patiently listening to the source material
in Indian languages, to look carefully at their longer genealogies and
unexpected conclusions. Harischandra' s position in the Hindi firmament
has always been secure, regardless of whether the emphasis has been
placed on his modernity and radicalism or on his loyalty and traditional-
ism. So, if I may push the planetary metaphor further, the merit of this
book is to make Harischandra' s moon part of several crisscrossing orbits,
not in order to diminish its importance but to see how the movement of
this particular system interacted with other systems. And because she
does not take on the role of critic as censor or judge-as so often hap-
pens in critical works originating in Hindi-Dalmia does not expect
consistency or political correctness in Harischandra, be it his ideas on
Hinduism, Hinduness, or Hindi. Rather, she brings to life a much more
sparkling and nuanced historical character and social animal, someone
who made the fullest use of the possibilities provided by print and the
new culture of associations. Striking are his many unfinished essays,
travelogues, and narratives which reveal a keenness to experiment and
write down ideas and experiences even when a genre is not fully formed,
an argument incompletely worked out. In this respect, Vasudha Dalrnia' s
chronological approach to Harischandra's ideas on Vaishnavism and
his theatrical writings highlight this "work in progress" very well.
Another feature that sets her book apart from other studies of the
"colonial encounter is its delineation of a social stage comprising many
actors. Dalmia does not frame the intellectual encounter simplistically as
a binary relationship between colonial masters or orientalists or
missionaries on the one hand, and Indian intellectuals or informants
ornative rulers on the other-whetherone calls that relationship a "nego-
tiation" or a "transaction" or a "dialogue" or something else along the
same lines. By drawing a social map ofBanaras in which the maharaja,
xvi Foreword

the pandits, and the merchants each had their own source of authority and
sphere of influence, she is able to show how eac!1 of these negoti::!ted
their positions in the new colonial set-up, how their mutual relations were
affected, how they moved in the new spaces of social interaction and
intervention provided by the press, schools, and associations, and how
their idioms were shaped by these encounters "in interaction and ulti-
mately in resistance to the British" (p. 64). Though the focus is primarily
on Harischandra, what we are given is an overall picture of a changing
society in which everyone is an actor both influenced by and influencing
everyone else. One of her arguments-that even the pandits in Banaras
were affected by the colonial encounter, directly in the Benares Sans-
krit College and more generally by the growing authority of Western
orientalisls-has been followed up in detail by Michael S . Dodson in
Orienwlism, Empire And National Culture (2007). li1 Dalmia's work,
however, ,.;ud:. processes are traced both within wrilings as well as
inst,tutionaJ arrangements, and placed within a much wider social and
cultural web.
While rich as cultural and social history-Chapter 3 could be a bQok
on its own-Dalmia's book is also very powerful as intellectual history.
This seems most in evidence in the last chapter, where every strand of
religious thought--for instance monotheism, be it Indian or European-
is analysed, its origins and developments traced, its claims tested, and
its similarities and differences with respect to other strands carefully
drawn out. All t'1e time, Dalmia is keen to point out, Harischandra ' s in-
tellectual articulation ofVaishnava monotheism and religious innovation
did not impede his full participation in the rituals of his sampradaya. No
book in Hindi nr; Harischandra has considered his religious ideas and
activities in such detail.
Throughout. Dalmia makes it clear that her focus is the making of a
national Hindu idiom, and that a significant part of this process was the
bypassing of Islamic and Islamicate traditions that had been the dominant
elite features of the region for several centuries. She notes that "if the
consolidation was emancipatory, it was in its tum repressive, and if it
included, it also excluded, not only the Muslims, but also those on the
periphery of the Hindu social order" (437). She skilfully analyses Haris-
chandra' s skit in which "Pan ch" objects to a young and beautiful Mehtarani
getting an education-" And what do you have to do with learning? The
jans which have to do with learning are qmte different from yours." The
girl replies: 'Tho~e days are past now, sir, now all grain is weighed by
the same ounce" (259)-underlining her interlocutor's middle-class
doubts over education for women and the lower cla~ses.
 Foreword xvii

There is little sense in Harischandra' s Banaras of the momentous

history of the lower classes in this period, documented by William Pinch
(Peasants and Monks in British India, 1996), and by Nandini Gooptu
(The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-century India, 2001)
for a slightly later period. Parallel to Harischandra' s articulation of
Vaishnnavism, the lower castes continued to embrace a different kind
of Vaishnavism, such as that of the Ramanandis which was open to all
castes, not to speak of Dalit assertion through bhakti towards Ravidas
and Kabir, also significant presences in Banaras. Similarly, the focus
on Banaras necessarily reduces emphasis on the continuing currency
of Urdu throughout the nineteenth century, and the linguistic, literary,
and religious consolidation that was taking place in Urdu, parallel with
Hindi. Muslim weavers are mentioned via Nita Kumar' s study (The
Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880-1986, 1988)
and we have a tantalizing glimpse of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan as an act-
ive member of the Benares Institute: indeed one wonders how he and
Harischandra behaved when they met there and what they said to each
other. 1 What role did Persian-educated Kayasthas and Muslims play in
Banaras in this period, what did they think? A few decades later one of
them, Munshi Dhanpat Rai "Premchand", would write his first major
novel about contemporary Banaras in Urdu, Bazar-e Husn, about which
Dalmia has written eloquently elsewhere. 2
The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions has not just stood the test c~
time but continues to stimulate questions and open up avenues of
research and reflection. By paying equal attention to nuances in the
murces, to the genealogies of ideas, and to the social and political context
in which diverse actors simultaneously and diversely moved, this is a
book that has become something of a benchmark for how cultural history
E-hould be written.

1 Sagaree Sengupta has explored Harischandra's ambivalent relationship to

Urdu-heaping scorn on it in his public statements and satirical poems, but also
writing devotional poetry about Krishna in Urdu, continuing an earlier tradition:
S . Sengupta, ' Krsna the Cruel Beloved: Hariscandra and Urdu', Annual of Urdu
Studies, vol. 9 (1994): 82-102.
2
Originally written in Urdu in 1916, the novel first found a publisher in Hindi
and appeared under the title Seva-sadan in 1919; in Urdu it was published in 1924;
see Vasudha Dalmia, 'The House of Service, or the Chronicle of an Un/holy City' ,
Introduction to Premchand, Sevasadan, tr. Snehal Shingavi, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2005 .
 1
Introduction

Urban votaries of Hinduism in the twentieth century generally see no

reason to question its monolithic character. All doubts on this score tend
to be regarded as academic quibbling by the resurgent movements
which have largely instrumentalized religion for political ends.1 Yet,
for all the efforts to eradicate signs of former pluralities, the fissures
remain apparent even today. Any serious analysis of the process of
cementation, which is still under way, leads back to the nineteenth cen-
tury, for the movements to reformulate and reassert Hinda dharma were
to converge-and in some instances to clash-with unprecedented mo-
mentum in the last decades of the century. Hinduism as it formed itself
in the late nineteenth century worked with the postulation of a race of
'ancient' Hindus: thus, for instance, the title of R. C. Dutt' s book, Early
Hindu Civilization, 2000 to 320 BC. Based on Sanskrit Literature (1888),
as typical of the retrospective projection of a religion conceptualized as
mono linear. To question the mono linearity is not to assert that the affin-
ities invoked had not existed at all. There had been common traditions
and common reference points in the past, but they had not necessarily
solidified into the consolidated mass which 'Hinduism' in the nine-
teenth century came to signify, and which had new socio-political
dimensions.
Dharma sabhiis in the cause of saniitana dharma had begun to spring
up across the subcontinent since the thirties, whether as a defensive
measure against proposed legislation, as in the case of the Dharma
Sabha founded in Calcutta in 1831 when the practice of sat! was banned,
or against rising missionary invective, as in Maharashtra. The dharma
sabhas wen~ no novel institution, they had always mediated between the
precepts of the Dharmasiistra and actual contingency. In the nineteenth
century, however, they no longer. functioned with the authority of the
1
It is in this connection that Romila Thapar has coined the apt phrase·' Syndicated
Moksa' (1985 : 14-22).
2 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
political legislator to back them, but, rather, against this very authority.
Further, they were no longer composed of learned Brahmans alone, but
also of the western educated urban intelligentsia.2 They were organized
according to British models, had presidents, executive boards and
secretaries, and often functioned in strict accordance with British
parliamentary procedure. 3 The notion of sanatana dharma itself had re-
mained anything but stationary through the ages .4 Its renewed propaga-
tion tended to congregate around these sabhas. However, it would be a
mistake to imagine that these institutions came into being only to con-
serve inherited practice. As always, one of their vital functions was also
to sanction change, however minimal it might have appeared at first
sight.
While sifting a wide range of Hindi literature in the nineteenth
century~ I have found that even while defending tradition, while empha-
sizing the saniitanata, constancy, of the vedpurii!J vihitiirya dharma, the
dharma of the Ary as as authorized by the canonical Vedas and Pural).as,
the spokesmen, in the very name of orthodoxy, of tradition itself, were,
in fact, accommodating and articulating wide-reaching changes. The
sanatanata which they so firmly posited was shifting ground, whereby
certain features, which were proclaimed as characteristic, were being
foregrounded in a heretofore uncharacteristic manner. Though a num-
ber of studies of sanatana dharma leadership in the nineteenth century
have been undertaken in the last two decades, 5 these movements, often

· 2 Detailed knowledge of the original Sanskrit sources had been the exclusive
preserve of learned siistris. The translation of Sanskrit legal treatises into regional
languages began to appear from the mid nineteenth century, prompted both by the
example set by the British in the late eighteenth and the early decades of the nine-
teenth century, as well as the need of the vernacular elite for easy access to the origi-
nals.
3 For some details on the organization of the Calcutta Dharma Sabha, see Kopf

( 1969: 266ff.).
4 See Kane (1977: 1628 ff.) for the changing connotations of the term sanatana

dharma from the sixth century AD onwards.

5 The pioneering suryey by Farquhar ([I 914) 1977: 291-308), consisting of a list

of societies and organizations within what he termed 'the chief Hindu sects', which
sprang up in self-defence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was long to
remain the sole venture in this direction, In the last twenty years, however, there have
been various attempts to document the process. The following is less an exhaustive
survey of the literature on the subject than an effort to chart the main analytic trends.
Tucker(l976) offers a lucid survey ofa broad spectrum of the 'traditional' response
in nineteenth-century Maharashtra, of tracts and b•Joks such as, for instance,
 Introduction 3

summarily denoted as 'revivalist', have yet to be charted in any com-

prehensive fashion. There was no centrally co-ordinated traditionalist
movement.of subcontinental breadth. To these efforts to defend tradi-
tion, which had certain features in common, were added the more radical
reform movements, which have often been lumped together under the
category 'neo-Hinduism'. This so-called neo-Hindu rejoinder, fore-
most in formations such as the Brahmo and Arya Samaj, has been taken
to represent the modernization of Hinduism. The more widespread, less

MorobhattDandekar' s Sri hindudharmasthiipanii ( 1831), Gangadhar Shastri Phadke' s

Hindudhannatattva ( 1852), a learned defence of the existing beliefs and practices
of Hinduism, against both missionary attack as well as the threat posed by the newly
anglicized youth of Bombay, and VishnubawaBrahmacari' s Vedoktadhannaprakiisa
(1859). He considers, further, the work ofVithoba Anna Daftdar in the organization
of the Hindu Dharma Vyavasthapaka Mandali in Bombay in 1868, as well as the
operations of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (est. 1867), which was soon to gain a coun-
try-wide reputation. Though the topic is sympathetically treated and the contradic-
tions explicitly addressed, Tucker finds no analytical framework for adequatel:-
treating the work of persons and institutions working for the cause of sanatan dharma
from a variety of perspectives and positions and the phraseology remains restricted
to labels such as 'orthodox' or ' revivalist fashion'. Broadly the same approach is fol-
lowed by Conlon and Hudson in Jones (1992). Conlon deals at length with the work
ofVishnubawa Brahmachari (1825-71), the ascetic defender of a Vedic golden age
who operated primarily in Bombay, a forerunner ofDayanand Sarasvati in some res-
pects, but different in that he found rationalist means for the acceptance of ritual and
van:iiisramadharma. Conlon uses the analogy of the renaissance to introduce his
topic; he cites the usage of the model by historians such as David Kopf (1969) ~ ~
also R. C. Majumdar in his British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Part II
(Bombay, 1965). Hudson analyses the work of Arumuga NavalarofJ affna ( 1822-79),
defender of Shaiva Siddhanta against Christian missionary attacks. Navalar' s
formulation of Shaivism, which affirmed ritual practice and made Shaiva texts
widely available for the first time, was to spread and be acclaimed on both sides of
the Strait. Hudson also sees Navalar's activities as part .of.a general Hindu renais-
sance. The monograph by Ami ya Sen ( 1993) re-establishes the use of labels such
as reformist and revivalist (12) amongst others, s ince he finds , as againstTapan Ray-
chaudhuri ( 1988), that they do, after all, adequately denote the difference in attitudes
between the nineteenth-century propagators of Hinduism. Though conceding that
the revivalists also allowed for a measure of reform, he finds that what distinguished
them from the reformists, was the inconsistency of their attitude in this respect. He
sees the Hindu ' revival' of the last decades of the nineteenth century in Bengal
(1872-1905) as primarily a conservative reaction. Useful, in that he works through
a quantity of material by contemporaries less luminous than Ba '1ki!11c h ~ ndra and
Bhudeb Mukhopadhyaya, which lies buried in files of the journals of the period, his
4 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
radical movements which together went into the making of modern
sanatana dharma have often been seen as the slow adjustment of tradi-
tional Hinduism to the challenge of the modern age. Though the more
radical reform movements served as catalysts, the most vital issues
concerning notions of cultural, religious and political identity were
thrashed out in the traditionalist quarters as well, and perhaps with more
lasting effect, and it was here that the face of modem Hinduism-within
which temple and va~a continue to play a prominent role-was finally
to be coined. The whole process of change, accommodation and re-arti-
culation, whereby usually only the so-called neo-Hindu movements are
taken into consideration, is generally described as the Hindu renais-
sance or simply renaissance. A closer inspection of the categories used
to circumscribe and distinguish the movements may help to clarify the
perspective adopted in this study.
Kenneth Jones, who has to his credit detailed studies of the social and
ideological impact of the Arya Samaj in Panjab in the period, comes to
the conclusion that in fact two broad types of response can be estab-
lished (1989: 39). The one he sees as 'transitional', i.e. when the move-
ments concerned had their roots in the pre-colonial world, were based
on traditional forms of socio-religious dissent and had little or no con-
tact with the colonial milieu, though later, when they perforce came in
touch with it, they had to make limited adjustments to it. The other kind
of movement, which he terms 'acculturative', led by South Asians who
had enjoyed English education, he sees as originating in direct transac-
tion with the colonial milieu. It is a telling fact that when Jones comes
to consider the situation in the North-Western Provinces, though he
records the Deoband movement as specimen of the 'transitional'
variety from Islam, there is no documentation of any Hindu formations
of the sort. The changes in traditional formations, widespread as they
are, are simply not registered, since they do not choose to define them-
selves as different, and in fact emphasize the constancy of the tradition

work finally remains restricted by the analytic framework in which he chooses to

operate. The paper by Jones (1993) is a pioneering effort to trace the work of two
sanatanists of the Panjab, firstly , Pandit Shraddha Ram PhiUauri (1837-81), de-
fender of Vai~i:iava Hinduism, writer of the now forgotten Dharma Raksha (1867)
and co-founder of the Amritsar Dharma Sabha, and secondly, Pandit Din Dayalu
Sharma (b.1863) who founded the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal (1887) which was
to bring together all leaders of the orthodox Hindu community. Though aware of the
thin line dividing these thinkers from the reformists, Jones also speaks of Hindu
revival in this connection.
 Introduction 5
they stand for. As against this, the Arya Samaj allows itself to be readily
classified as acculturative, though its founder stemmed from as tradi-
tional a milieu as any. Thus, the social origin of the founders of the res-
pective movements does not necessarily betray their programme.
Further, though Jones' is a useful distinction, it is equipped only to deal
with movements which in the intensification of their position stand out
sharply from the rest. When applied to the actual situation in colonial
India it leaves much of the broad-based developments and changes
undocumented. The task then is to collect evidence and locate the fea-
tures which gained new emphasis in the confrontation with Christianity
and the learning from the West and which in their tum made for cohesion
in the broad base as it constituted itself in the late nineteenth century.
An overall analysis can only take place at any satisfactory level of abs-
traction once the evidence for the subcontinent can be pieced together
from a number of regional studies.
The Hindu response can obviously be divided into two broad groups
for the purposes of analysis. Is it meaningful to retain the terms
'revivalist' and 'reformist' to distinguish between the two? 'Revival' or
'revivalism' has in the past often been seen in opposition to moderniza-
tion. At first sight, this seems justified, since the sanatana dharma
movements propagate concepts and practice rooted in sanskritic tradi-
tions. As we shall have occasion to note time and again in the course of
this study, the nineteenth century social and religious leadership,
specially when defending sanatana dharma, developed its own deliber-
ately antiquarian vocabulary to designate its priorities and preferences,
and equally deliberately, it set itself off from the modem. The tradi-
tional/modem polarity, used to establish the distinction between the
indigenous and the alien, was a part of the self-representation of those
who sought to depict their tradition as standing firm against the pressure
of change. 6 Yet to accept these poles as genuinely apart and immune to
the influence of the other would be contrary to all the evidence presented
in the documents of the period, which bear witness to incessant change
and exchange. There was intense interaction with missionaries,
orientalists and western ideas, and many of the positions occupied by
the votaries of sanatana dharma were commonly shared with the leaders
of the reform movements, who more explicitly propagated change.
Though it needs to be noted here that if indeed there was change, there

6 Cf. Anuradha Kapur.on the mutually dependent and restrictive function of these

polarities (1990: 3).

6 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
were continuities as well, and for certain strands of traditions continued
to maintain their own and were set forth in one guise or another. The
creative act of invention consisted in the rearrangement of older and
newer concepts and practice and the historical links in time and space
that were forged anew. 7 A century later, then, it is important neither to
be taken in by the antiquarianism of this language nor to fall into the trap
of tracing all that was taking shape as sheer imitation of western models,
nationalist or otherwise. 'Revival' then is not only misleading since it
disallows the possibility of change, it has the added disadvantage of
having been used pejoratively all too often, as if it referred to no more
than outmoded religious practice which had lain inert up to then, but
which had ultimately refused to be suppressed by the more enlightened
reform movements, such as the Brahma or even Arya Samaj. Labels
such as 'revivalist' have served to create closures and more often than
not precluded any serious attempt to discern the selective criteria which
were evolved in order to transpose traditional practice into a modernist
mould, a process which ostensibly functioned well enough to enable the
varied streams of tradition, which subsumed themselves under sanatana,
to flow into what was to constitute Hinduism as a single religious and-
by extension-political and national tradition.
The difference between the so called neo-Hinduism and traditional
Hinduism have been treated most explicitly by Paul Hacker (1978). He
sees nationalism in its peculiar Indian garb as being the chief impulse
and distinguishing feature of neo-Hinduism, religion being made sub-
servient to the nationalist objective. The common trait which binds
these otherwise heterogeneous movements is the predominantly west-
ern orientation of their intellectual formations. Further characteristics
of nee-Hinduism are the assertion that Hinduism is a spiritual unity and
that it has a message to proclaim to the world. While Hacker concedes
that the traditionalists also share some of these concerns, it is only in

7 Since Hobsbawm and Ranger' s The Invention of Tradition ((1983] 1990) first

appeared, all emphasis on tradition tends to be regarded with s uspicion, as if it were

virtually no more than an invention, a device used as a mere cover for the modern.
However, as pointed out by Hobsbawm in a recent lecture (1993), though the past
always needs to be moulded to suit the needs of a given ideolcgy, it is seldom entirely
invented. There are certain 'hard facts ' which go into its constitution as well. Further,
there are genuine continuities, which cannot be relegated to the realm of the imagi-
nary or the merely playful. It is the configuration of the new and the old, of conti-
nuities and innovations, then, which needs to be studied in periods of accelerated
change.
 Introduction 7
subsidiary fashion, for, as he sees it, they owe primary allegiance to and
stress the continuity of the Hindu tradition, which, by and large, remains
impervious to changes in the modem world. As Monika Horstmann has
pointed out, these assumptions cannot really stand the test of a closer
inspection of the traditionalist positions.8 They not only constantly
reinterpret and modify inherited practice, they are fiercely nationalist
as well and develop increasing missionary fervour with time.
What of the label 'reformist'? Social reform was the one great con-
cern of the century and reformist tendencies were common to all the
movements. The difference lay only in selection and the degree of em-
phasis. However, formations such as the Brahmo and Arya Samaj were
more radical in their approach, and propagated more sweeping reforms
than the dharma sabhas wou~d have been prepared to concede.
What, then, are the differences and which nomenclatures can be
meaningfully retained? I would suggest 'traditionalist' as against ' re-
vi,·a list' to describe the one, for their one binding feature was the stress
on-the sanatanata or constancy of tradition, rather than any breach with
some original, more pristine past, which the more radical reform move-
m~nts claimed to fill. The past invoked by the traditionalist was
accessible in texts, ritual, social practice and institutions, some of them
going farther back in time while others were no older than the late
eighteenth century. For the second group, for lack of a better term, while
discarding 'neo-Hindu', which reeks of inauthenticity, I would continue
to use 'reformist' .
The differences and similarities between the two groups can be
broadly summed up as follows: 1) The traditionalists recognize the
scriptural authority of both sruti and smrti whereby itihiisa and puriilJ.a
are considered a legitimate part of the evolution of scriptural tradition.
As against this practice, the reformists isolate one part of the scriptural
tradition as exclusively authoritative; this distinction being usually re-
served for the Vedas. They tend to see the rest as corrupt or degenerate.
2) For the first group, the Dha1masiistras remain authoritative as
sources for formulating religious and civil law and the essential validity
8 Horstmann ( 1995), while dealing with Hinduism as propagated in the tracts and
publication of the Gita Press (beginning with the publication of the immensely popu-
lar journal Kalyai:i in 1926), is dealing with a slightly later phase of the traditionalist
positions, when the fissures in Hindu dharma, propagated as a monolith, had closed
somewhat more than they had in the late nineteenth century, but her arguments re-
ga rding the essential similarity of the so-called neo-Hindu and traditionalist in this
regard hold true for the older period as well.
8 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
of van:iasramadharma is not considered open to question. Though there
is obvious modification and repeated concession to social change, the
authority of the Dharmasastras is sought to legitimate this: thus the vari-
ous Dharma sabhas, many of them short-lived, which were called into
life by the exigency of British legislative measures. The second group
con.s iders its own respective leaders as authoritative in this respect and
does not recur to the authority of the Dharmasastras. 9 3) The tradition-
alists continue to lay stress on the centrality of the temple and ritual
practice, though here again various reformist measures are called for
and sometimes even implemented. The reformists break away from all
older places of worship and ritual and establish their own. 4) The modes
found to validate the respective traditions are often commonly shared,
for in addition to scripture the traditionalists also mobilize rationalist
arguments in support of their cause, as also historical scholarship, fore-
most that of western orientalists. 5) It is hereby that popular religious
practice-which continues to be considered a part of Hinduism, since
it is not to be allowed an autonomous existence-is increasingly brand-
ed as 'superstition' and downgraded. Traditionalists as well as reform-
ists are alike in their condemnation of this 'superstitious' practice.
The term renaissance has been accepted widely for this process of
modernization. It came into use in the nineteenth century itself and was
certainly a part of the perception of those who contributed most vitally
to the process, like Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Aurobindo Ghose and
Bepin Chandra Pal. 10 Nationalist historiography has tended to make
9 Dayiinand Sarasvafi rejected the smrtis, though he recognized the Manusmrti,
albeit in a considerably mangled form, for he rejected as blatant 'interpolations' all
those precepts which did not concur with his teaching.
10
Cf. Kopf (1969: 3). Kopf sees no further explanation as necessary and accepts
this term as an adequate designation for the process. He sees the Bengal Renais-
sance as essentially taking place in the interaction between the Bengali intelligentsia
based in Calcutta and the British orientalists , as a 'merging of interests between the
two comm1mities ' (7). The Bengali intellectual, between 1800 and 1830, according
to Kopf, was-
a confused but optimistic individual striving to reconcile partially digested alien
traits and unsatisfactory indigenous traditions ... It was his good fortune that the
distance between Britain and India was great and that the Orientalists with whom he
came into contact had already become 'Indianized' . The Bengali' s view of the West
during the sympathetic Orientalist period helped to establish good rapport between
European and Indian and offered good hope for the future . (8)
Kopf s study focuses on the workings of the College of Fort William. His view
has been challenged and corrected by Sisir Kumar Das, who has pointed out that the
 Introduction 9
uncritical use of the term. If, on the one hand, the British colonial period
has been condemned as one of relentless exploitation, on the other it has
been eulogized as the era of 'the great cultural renaissance in India in
the 19th century which transformed her from the Medieval to the
Mod~rn Age'. This cultural renaissance consisted of 'great social and
religious reforms, literary revival, and political aspirations .. .' .11
There are, however, several problems connected with the continued use
of the term. As Barun De has pointed out, the political and social pre-
mises of the term as used in Europe were based on a periodization, on
a sequencing of epochs, which was to culminate in the emergence of
civil society and finally, of bourgeois domination. This cannot be held
to be uniformly true for all of Europe, and thus even here cannot have
a model-building function. The sequence is obviously not analogous to
the Indian colonial situation, where no civil society was possible (1977:
186). The subaltern middle class-the social and economic basis of
which were new groups created by British rule-worked within a frame-
work of alien rule. The 'enlightenment', which set in under conditions
of territorial statehood and the dependent aegis of British intervention,
consisted of the cultural response of this subaltern middle class to the
modernizing bourgeois of Europe (191). 12 The basic assumption of the
concept of Indian Renaissance is that British rule had positive aspects,
bunched together in one phase, in which the revival of Indian culture
took place. Yet the linkage was not necessarily beneficial to Indian
development (195). In all 'renaissance ' is too rosy a view of a much

two groups worked under constraints of conflicting interests and the relationship
was based on all else but equality . The inner rhythm of life in the College of Fort
William was regulated by the relationship of sahibs to their munshis ( 1978: xii-xiii).
11
Majumdar ([1963) 1.970: xxiv) .
12
De would go so far as to use the term non-organic and non-traditional for this
urban intelligentsia, whereas I would see them as mixed. According to him, and here
I would concur with him, the subjects of British India, even the urban intelligentsia,
should not be called elites since they were made to feel racially inferior, discrimi-
nated against for advancement in careers in official service, and faced metropolitan
commercial protection when they sought to build up their activ ity in production or
mercantile activity. They cannot be seen as other than a dependent sub-elite (211).
Unfortunately De works with rather an uncritical use of the label 'revivalisµi ', which
is undisguisedly pejorative, though even he admits that the difference between pro-
gressive and revivalist is rather arbitrary . Further, he operates with terms such as
communalist, the use of which in .the nineteenth century remains anachronistic. I
shall return to the issue in the next chapter, when discussing the multifarious uses
of the term 'Hindu'.
I0 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditinns
more intricate interaction, which remained fraught with unresolved
issues and tensions.
In this study, I have preferred to work with the concept of consolida-
tion-rather than renaissance-of Hindu tradition. In tracing this con-
solidation, itself no monolinear process, but in its tum fraught with
tensions and contradictions, I focus on the work of Harischandra of
Banaras (1850-85) which constitutes one significant, but 'cellular>I 3
response in the construction of Hindu tradition in northern India.
Significant, in that it represents and highlights vital trends ; cellular, in
that it remains organically linked to the intricate tissue of social, politi-
cal, religious and cultural movements in colonial India, to which it was
itself a response . Harischandra typified the new spokesman for tradi-
tion; it was no longer to be left to the Brahmans alone to speak in the
name of orthodoxy. He was a 'lay religious leader', 1 ~ who used the
power of his knowledge of the new as well as of the old to coin the new
traditionalist idiom, and who could effectively wield the modem print
media to initiate and direct change. His influence was supra-regional,
both because he spoke with the authority of the holy city of Kasi-
representing the new merchant aristocracy reinforced by the Maharaja
and the traditional repute ofleaming-to back him, but also because he
propagated and made Hindi the literary language, which even then
::!aimed national status. Today, Harischandra is known primarily as the
father of modem Hindi literature, and here again it is his dramatic work
wi1ic h occupies the most space in literary histories. Yet, it was as a
publicist, aware of the political potential of public opinion, that he coin-
ed and shaped views on a wide variety of issues, which were inextric-
ably bound to the question of political and national identity.
Harischandra' s literary work has acquired canonical status over the
past century. In the process it has become customary toeithermarginalize
his affiliation to tradition, as befitting the initiator of modem literature,
or there has been a tendency to view him as a revivalist, minimizing his
cultural-political innovations. Literary studies have, in any case, tended
to relegate the historical to 'background information '. Historically
oriented st11dies, on the other hand, even those considering the forma-
tion of social consciousness, have had little use for the historicity of
poetics and for literary categories. The two approaches, the literary and
the social-historical, have tended to remain mutually exclusive.
The .recent research on nationalism and colonialism provides a
13 Cf. Sathyamurthy (1983: 36).
14 The expression is Metcalf's, in Jones (1992: 23'.'J.
 lntroditction 11
certain conceptual framework within which it is possible to integrate
both the above-mentioned perspectives. 15 The studies on nationalism,
though seldom devoting space to the formal aspects of literature, have
considered language and literature in their eminently political roles,
vigorous discussion having been initiated by Benedict Anderson's
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation-
alism (1983). Anderson's definition of nation as 'an imagined political
community, imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign ' ( 15) has
been widely recognized. At the same time, it has been his achievement
to free the term 'imaginary' of its fictitious and 'false' connotations.
This has the merit of taking away the ground from under the feet of dis-
cussions which seek to separate the false from the genuine varieties of
nationalism. Anderson sees the nation as growing from the roots pro-
vided by religious communities and dynastic realms primarily by the
means of print capitalism which supported nationalist ideologies in
their endeavour to associate particular languages with particular terri-
torial units. The print languages which thus emerged further laid the
basis for national consciousness in that they created unified fields of
exchange and communication, gave a new fixity to language, creating
thereby languages of power different from that of the older administrat-
ive vernaculars (46-8). Here I will not enter into a discussion of the three
models of nationalism as conceived by Anderson. Suffice it to note that,
according to him, the former colonies have been unable to deviate from
the models created in the West in order to create new models of nation-
alism moulded according to their own needs.16
This is an issue which is taken up by Partha Chatterjee in his mono-
graph on Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Dis-
course? (1986), which most acutely summarizes and dissects the
discussion on nationalism in its colonial context. 17 He distances himself
15
Apart from the works mentioned in the following pages, in the context of the
present study, Kemi!ainen (1964), Seton-Watson (1977), Gellner (1983), but most
of all Hobsbawm (1990) were found useful for understanding the nationalist pheno-
menon. However, since they do not deal specifically with nationalism in the colonial
world, they have not been discussed here in any detail.
16
As Deshpande (1993: 6) has noied, Anderson ' s analysis of the socio-economic
conditions surrounding the coming of print as a commodity is restricted in the non-
western contexts to an arialysis of high literary texts, rather than a consideration of
socio-economic conditions or the evidence offered by popular literature and jour-
nals .
17
Chatterjee discusses the work of Bankimchandra as a creative writer and the
two eminent politicians Gandhi and Nehru. His consideration of the three is linked
I2 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
equally from the liberal apologists of nationalism, who tend to see what
they consider as irnperfect varieties of nationalism, most of all in the ex-
colonies, as stages on the way to at least some measure of the progress
and democracy achieved in the West, as well as from such conservative
critics who see nationalism as false or even perverted ideology, parti-
cularly unsuited to the needs of politically unripe societies. According
to Chatterjee, nationalism as a concept was historically bound to the
social and political preconditions of enlightenment as it unfolded in the
countries of its origins. It could not on this basis acquire universal appli-
cability to all phenomena, specially those developed under colonial
rule, which were first labelled 'nationalist' and then found wanting in
comparison to the western models. Since there could be no knowledge
independent of culture, there could be no unbounded universality of con-
cept. Categories of thought originating in an alien culture were bound
to acquire new meaning in a new cultural context (27). In the colonial
context, the assertion of national identity was a form of struggle against
colonial exploitation (18). In spite of the fact that Chatterjee is also
doubtful as to whether the nationalist project, bound as it is to the same
essentialist ·conceptions based on the distinctions between East and
West, can ever take off in the colonial context, he nevertheless remains
convinced that it ·is worthwhile to explore the changing relations of
power within societies under colonial domination. 18
Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century
Bengal (1988), Tapan Raychaudhuri's study of three prominent nine-
teenth-century figures-offers further critical insights.19 The three
figures studied belong to the same milieu; yet w~ thin the apparently
narrow range of upper-caste Bengali culture, their experience and
assessments remained diverse. According to Raychaudhuri, apart from
ignoring the diversity of the response, theoretical analyses of third

to an explication of Antonio Gramsci' s concept of passive revolution, which he

seeks to refine further in its application to the Indian situation. This is to have a
model-building function for the consideration of nationalism in the colonial world.
The thinking of the three Indian nationalists is then seen as stages in the unfolding
of this process. For a critique of the monolinearity of this position as reducing the
polyvocality of civil society, see Tham (1989a).
l8 Though at the same time he sees the possibilities of the middle class to initiate
change as being inherently limited in the colonial situation.
l9 These are Bankimchandra (1838-94), creati ve writer, Bhudev Mukhopadhaya
( 1827-94), civil servant as well as writer on social and political issues, and Viveka-
nanda (1863-1902), the religious luminary.
 Introduction 13
world nationalism do not take full account of the autonomous positive
cultural contents of Afro-Asian nationalism. In the Indian case this is
sought to be undermined in that the sanskritic tradition is seen as also
mediated by western Orientology. The access to the indigenous tradi-
tion, in the Bengali case, was not necessarily routed through the western
understanding of it. In India, there had been an unbroken tradition of
Sanskrit scholarship as an autonomous source of knowledge about the
past.
In this study, it is not the autonomous contents alone which are sought
to be emphasized. Rather it is in the interaction with the western, within
the special framework provided by the colonial situation, that their
nineteenth-century genesis is traced. This process is neither viewed as
renaissance nor as revival, but as a complex tissue of assimilation and
welding, as also of antagonism and resistance.
Methodologically, two perspectives emerge as determining the
course of this study. Firstly, in seeking to trace and disentangle the auto-
nomous positive contents of the nationalist discourse as represented by
Harischandra and his contemporaries, it will be one aim of the study to
trace their connection with western notions and their subsequent modu 1-
ations. At least three distinct interacting strands, which are together
woven into the fabric of the nationalist tradition specific to this period,
allow themselves to b~ distinguished to a certain extent in Harischandra' s
works :
1. Direct access to pre-colonial tradition, literary as well as social-
religious (as demonstrated in the composition and translation of tradi-
tional literary genres, perpetuation of public festivities, of royal and
temple rituals).
2. Ancient 'Hindu' texts and institutions as mediated also by British
and western orientalists (such as, for instance, the whole historio-
graphic complex connected with the notion of 'Aryan').
3. British colonial administrative, legislative and educational mea-
sures (themselves shaped by attitudes prevalent in Europe) and mis-
sionary activity.
It was in the interweaving of these strands that the various Hindu
nationalist tradition formed and consolidated itself. To trace and hold
apart these strands in retrospect is a complicated procedure, for the
terminology used by the emergent tradition was almost always anti-
quated.
The traditional or indigenous Indian attitude and the alien western
attitude were posited as polarities by those who considered themselves
14 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
as representing these . The self-consciously Hindu intelligentsia, by
virtue of having to maintain their own, culturally and politically, were
constrained to emphasize the indigenous . In creating the new public
sphere, they used a deliberately Indian terminology to circumscribe the
concepts needed to articulate the nationalist agenda for the future.
These were developed in response and resistance to the colonial
government, and in this respect everything that it stood for was branded
formally as alien. Yet, in the given political constellation, the polarities
posited could be none other than interactive.
The question, then, is one of negotiating the difference between the
two extremes. Two impmtant insights developed by Ranajit Guha 20 sug-
gest fresh methodological possibilities, the one is concerned with the
political framework, the other with the interaction of idioms within it.
According to Guha, the historical articulation of power in colonial India
can be conceptua)ized in its institutional, modal <;tnd discursive aspects
as the interaction of the two principles of dominance and subordination.
Dominance consists of persuasion as well as coercion, whereby the lat-
ter decidedly outweighs the former. Subordination, similarly, consists
of resistance as well as collaboration. These interacting pairs then offer
1 conceptual framework within which it is possible to place the
ontradictions and ambivalences of the relationship of the colonized to
he colonizer.
Guha distinguishes between dominance and hegemony. Hegemon·y
as he understands it, is based more on persuasion and consent rather
than on coercion. Once the military occupation of India had been accom-
plished and
colonialism outgrew its predatory, mercantilist beginnings to graduate to a
more systematic, imperial career ... the exclusive reliance on the sword, too,
gave way to an orderly control in which force (without losing its primacy in the
duplex system ofD[ominance]) had to learn to live with institutions and ideo-
logies designed to generate consent (234).
Thus there existed aspirations to hegemony though in subordination to
dominance. The British occupation of India, according to Guha never
became hegemonic, since it worked more with coercion than consent
and was to finally generate more resistance than collaboration.
One of the central theses in Gu ha' s essay, significant, though with
some modification for the present study, proposes that within the four
10 In Gu ha (1989), whence the citations in the following passages.
 Introduction 15
constituents of dominance and subordination a principle of differentia-
tion between dual idioms was at work. One of these idioms derived from
the metropolitan political cultures of the colonizer, in this case typically
British, the other from the precolonial tradition of the colonized, that is,
from the typically Indian (233). Since, as Guha has convincingly shown,
colonial rule never achieved hegemony, the indigenous Indian idiom
always retained more than a measure of autonomy. The task, then, con-
sists in working out how the two idioms overlapped, crossed or subvert-
ed each other, in order to flow and coalesce into the third idiom, which
was the modern Indian. This third idiom could neither be a replica of the
western, nor of the ancient Indian concept. The constituent elements
formed a new compound 'a new and original entity .. .' (271 ).
However, convenient as this scheme is, grave complications set in
once we try to apply it. Though Guha, referring unabashedly to the Hindu
tradition alone, maintains that tradition did not remain inert, he seems,
in fact, to affirm just this, in that he takes for grante'd the continuity into
the present of the indigenous Indian tradition, conceived of as a kind of
master code to be derived from the texts of classical Indian polity. As
against Guha, I would maintain that Hindu tradition as it articulated it-
self in the nineteenth century, as any close scrutiny of texts of the period
testifies, formed itself in the very process of negotiating the relationship
to past idioms and classical texts in the light of present needs and
claims, in order to project itself as a coherent and even homogeneous
entity. In doing so, the nineteenth-century Hindu tradition attempted to
bypass the long stretch of Muslim rule , which had possessed its own
sophisticated judicature and administrative terminology, and which had
remained in operation till Persian was replaced as the language of the
courts in 1837. However, by branding it as alien and just as foreign as
the western/Christian, the spokesmen of the Hindu/Indian tradition
sought deliberately to establish the Dharmasastras as a contemporary
reference point. Though the terms used were genuinely drawn from
classical Sanskrit texts, their nineteenth-century usage obviously dif-
fered from the previous, since they were put to contemporary uses. In
retrospect, these tendencies can indeed be labelled as 'sanskritizing'
since they sought to present the concepts invoked as unchanged and
eternally valid, as authentically Indian in fact. Though nineteenth-cen-
tury intellectuals indulged profusely in the practice of offering Sanskrit
terms as equivalents for British concepts of government and social
institutions, their proposition that these terms and concepts had come
16 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions

down straight from ancient Indian polity, untouched by the ravage of

time, cannot be taken at face value by present-day analysts of the nine-
teenth-century situation. 21 This, however. is what Guba seems to be
doing. He overlooks that links with the past, and even more so with the
immediate pre-colonial past, need to be clarified. The task, then, is to
trace the usage of the classical Sanskrit terms/concepts thus invoked in
the intervening 'Muslim ' centuries, to search within and thence back-
wards from the traditions in which the users were actually rooted them-
selves, and here perhaps continuities are indeed to be found. If the terms
remain untraceable, then the respective usage has to be taken as part of
the historical task that the nineteenth century intelligentsia were faced
with, that of endowing the tradition they were constructing with a
respectable ancestorship , to fulfil which task they obviously sought
their points of reference in ancient texts. The colonial legislature played
no inconsiderable part in this enterprise, since here the belief in the
authority of the Dhannasiistras and the Brahmanic tradition as it was
accessible was never in doubt. Herein it was widely supported by
western orientalists, who mediated and interpreted texts and terms in
the contemporary modes available to them. In fact, the whole procedure
would lead rather to the conclusion that the second idiom that Guha him-
self posited as already given in fact only constituted itself in the nine-
teenth century.
While it is difficult to quarrel with Guha's notion that the concept of
'order' which structured the coercion exercised by the Raj could find an

21 One recent work which is based on the premise that all nineteenth and twentieth-

century Hindu thought remains essentially and archetypically rooted in the ancient
texts of the 'Hindus' , the Arthasiistra, Manusmrti and the various Dhannasiistras,
is the otherwise most useful and lucid account of modern Hindu political thought
by Klimkeit (1981). Thus when in the adoption of western sociological terminology
Klimkeit detects 'eine eigentuemliche Aushoelung und Neubestimmung dieser
urspruenglich westlichen Begriffe .. . und eine gle.ichzeitige Anreicherung derselben
miteinheimischen, hinduis tischen Wertvors tellupgen' (14), he does not so much see
the creation of an entirely new idiom as the subversion of the new by the age-old,
which he summarizes at the end of his work as rooted in dharma as the ' metaphysisch
begruendete Grundordnung' (304) . The division of the work into a preliminary
section which deals with political thought in ancient India, to be immediately
followed by s ections dealing with the developments in Hindu nationalist thought in
Bengal in the nineteenth century as well as the other .regions of India, culminating
in the pan-Indian thinking of Vivekananda and Gandhi, is indicative of an approach
which has itself bernme victim to the Hindu nationalist rhetoric of the past two
centuries, which claims direct and unmediated descent from the ancient Aryan.
 Introduction 17
equivalent in and interact with the Indian idiom of da/1{;/a, which govern-
ed a large area of indigenous politics, it is more difficult to concede that
'the Laws of Manu may be said to speak for all of them'. (1989: 238).
For, in tracing the career of the term dai:ic;la , it would be necessary to
track the steps in its usage, consecutively and one by one, over the cen-
turies that separate Manu from the colonial period and not leap from
ancient Indian polity to the nineteenth or even to the twentieth century.
The intermediate stages, the concrete historical usage in a given com-
munity or group of texts, would need to be located with some precision. 22
Guha chooses to bring the principle of subordination, which is the co-
relate of dominance, in correspondence with the notion of bhakti. There
are passages in Bankimchandra and Dinbandhu Mitra which use the
term in the sense of the loyalty owed to the (colonial) state. However,
to relate this subservience in a global fashion to the use of bhakti in the
whole medieval devotional literature and summarily categorize it as the
'ideology of subordination' (25), with dasya, servitude, as its ruling
principle, is a questionable procedure. 23 The semantic field of a concept
as rich as bhakti, profusely used and in the most variable of contexts,
in the course of at least two millennia, remains difficult to circumscribe
with any precision. I dwell at such length on these equations because in
22
Within the element of persuasion, according to Guha, the two idioms were
similarly at work. The Victorian notion of improvement, which pervaded all efforts
of the colonial rulers to relate non-antagonistically to the ruled, found correspon-
dence in the indigenous notion of dharma. That the nineteenth-century intelligentsia
built a bridge between the Ashokan and Nehruvian phases of its career seems
reasonable enough, and the use of the term by men as different as Tagore and Gandhi
is proof of its resilience. However, it still remains necessary to bridge the gap
between the Ashokan phase of its career and the nineteenth century. Otherwise one
becomes an inad vertent victim of the orientalist constructs of the Eternal East,
besides falling victim to the ideologically highly questionable practice of exclud-
ing all the developments which took place in the vast temporal stretch described as
the Muslim period, simply because they are to be viewed as 'alien'. Were there no
Persian or Arabic terms for these concepts? Within the sanskritic tradition itself,
apart from the linguistic shifts, were there no conceptual shifts through the cen-
turies? Did the terms remain frozen in time till they were taken up and used with
newer connotations by the nineteenth-century intelligentsia? To resort to Gonda or
even Kosambi as authorities instead of tracing these shifts is a dangerous enterprise
at best.
23
It is possibly also not too sound a practice to make these statements on the basis
of a few translations and commentaries in English, without reference to any primary
texts, either in the Sanskrit or the ve rnaculars. It seems, at the least, to be a s uperficial
reading of complicated theologies.
18 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
the course of the present work we shall have to do with some of these
terms, most specially bhakti , in their re-use with newer as well as older
connotations. There was, as we shall see, when Hindu dharma is dis-
cussed at some length in Chapter Six, a development peculiar to the
nineteenth century, when the concept ofbhakti_, newly interpreted, was
used as an overarching principle to bring about cohesion in the manifold
theological directions within what was to come to constitute modem
Hinduism. In order to understand these developments, it seems impor-
tant to remain grounded in the later tradition, that is, in the more imme-
diate pre-colonial past, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and
then from there to trace the tradition as it was alive and still actively
known in the nineteenth century, rather than take immediate recourse
to the authority of ·remoter periods.
If I have engaged in such a lengthy tussle with Guha's thesis, it is
not so much to dismantle it, as rather to qualify it. It offers impo1tant
insights, since it not only provides a political and social framework for
the interaction of the tw0 idioms, but also allows for contradictions.
Further the concept of the three idioms allows for the tracing of the two
streams, which flow into the third, without the constraint of having to
view this third, which is being created as entirely traditional or entirely
derivative. Here, once again, the principle of differentiation between the
four constituents of dominance and subordination serves as a check on
any tendency which would view the whole as a harmonious blending of
East and West. The dominance made it impossible not to be accosted
by the idiom of the colonial masters , the fact that this dominance never
achieved complete hegemony made for more than q measure of resist-
ance. Thus if the third idiom as it emerged carried all the signs of a strug-
gle , it also carried the burden of unresolved tensions . However, though
useful as a heuristic device , there remains a very real danger that the
two idioms, the colonial and the traditional Indian, themselves come to
be regarded as homogeneous , as fixed entities. Most of all, it is the tradi-
tional Indian idiom which cannot be taken for granted, for, even while
the modem Indian/Hindu was beginning to find articulation in the strug-
gle with the metropolitan/colonial, the ancient Indian/Hindu was itself
also engaged in the process of being construed as the second idiom.
The interaction of indigenous agencies , newly forming and other-
wise, with the metropolitan, and the subsequent crystallization of the
third idiom, determines the methodological perspective of the present
study.
The second methodological perspective, while moving within the
 Introducrion 19
framework of the creation of the third idiom, has to do with the problem-
atic of considering literature primarily as a source of historical know-
ledge. An almost inexhaustible supply of information is available in the
journals which Harischandra had edited for over a decade and a half
and which became legendary in their own times-the Kavivachansudhii
(1868-85), and the Harifrhandra<>handrikii (1873-85). They were to
create a literary public, which was to grow to occupy a politically func-
tional public sphere. 24 However, since this study seeks a complemen-
tary approach, the writings of Harischandra and his contemporaries, in
these journals and elsewhere, are considered not only thematically, as
sources of political, social and cultural information, but also in their
literary context. The two famous journals themselves are treated as a
literary genre and extensive profiles are sought to be drawn. The style
of address is considered in detail as well as the new genres in modern
Hindi literature, which were first experimented with in these journals. 25
Both the explicitly literary as well as popular works are sought to be
understood by the laws of their own poetic composition.
Further. for all the foregrounding of Harischandra himself as an
. editor and a public figure, there is an attempt to document a measure of
the polyvocality of public opinion, in that the various voices in the jour-
nals, where much of the writing went unsigned, are also given promi-
nence. Thus, as against Anderson who studied the use of print media in
the colonial world only in an explicitly literary context, editorials, letters
to the editor, social and political essays and religious tracts are taken
into consideration as together constituting the literary activity of the
public sphere.
The sources for this kind of history , however. could not be only
literary even in this wider sense. In addition to popular literature, tracts,
public appeals and pamphlets, texts such as grammars , dictionaries ,
primary school books, and also official reports and documents, contri-
buted, for instance, to the standardization and codification of the new
print language. There was , as always , the vast amount of informational
material put together by British administrators. While retaining a mea-
sure of caution as regards their obvious bias, it is surely time to abandon
defensiveness when approaching colonial archives, for here again there
24
Cf. Jiirgen Habermas (1962), and Terry Eagleton ([l 984] 1987).
15
Wolfgang Martens ( 1968) provides a detailed account of the press in Enlighten-
ment Germany. Richmond Bond in a series of publications has performed the s ame
task for the English. I am not aware of this having been attempted in the Indian context
as yet, in any extended study. This is possibly the first attempt to do so.
20 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
are a number of-often warring-voices. It should be possible to view
them as historical sources, sifting and evaluating the evidence they
offer and to consider their contribution to the discussion and opinion for-
mation of the times. 26
The present study, in seeking to embed and contextualise the
traditionalist response of Harischandra and his contemporaries', struc-
tures all but the following chapter in such a way, so as to historically lead
up to, rather than necessarily begin with their discourse, thus question-
ing its very first premise, that it was self-evidently constant and
consistent in its evolution. This historical perspective often necessi-
tates a detailed account of the preceding formations, conceptual and
institutional, and their interaction with a variety of instances. The
crystallization of late-nineteenth-century tradition as propagated by
Harischandra and other votaries of sanatana dharma can then, in its turn,
be traced in all its perorations. This methodological decision needs to
be borne in mind when, page after page, no mention of the late nineteenth
century seems in sight. To some extent, then, since they recur in detail
to the earlier developments specific to the themes handled therein, each
of the following chapters may seem self-contained, though they also
build upon each other and their link to each other is ostensible. The
sequence of the chapters is determined by the primary features of t~e
collective identity of the Hindus as they emerge from the analysis of a
key text, a speech made by Harischandra in 1884, at the end of his short
life.

26 Cf. Aijaz Ahmad (1991b: 150) and Alok Bhalla,' A Plea Against Revenge Histo-

ries : Some Reflections on Oriental ism and the Age of Empire', in, Alok Bhalla and
Sudhir Chandra (1993: 1-13).
 2
Constituting Tradition in
Colonial India: Hindi, Hindu,
Hindustan

How can India Progress: Harischandra 's Viewpoint

In November 1884 the newly formed Arya Desopakarii:ii Sabha along
with the Ballia Institute jointly arranged a meeting on the occasion of
the annual Dadri mela in Ballia, a district town lying north-east ofBana-
ras. Harischandra, as the leading literary figure in the North-Western
Provinces, was invited to address the gathering. The assembly consist-
ed of the town's rafs , notables , and was presided over by no less a per-
sonage than the British Collector, D. T. Roberts, who had decided to
grace the occasion, once he heard that Harischandra was coming. The
address was entitled Bhiiratvar-? kf unnati kaise ho sakti hai, or, how can
India make progress; unnati was used to mean 'progress' as well as
'reform'. Harischandra himself chose to translate it as ' reform', thereby
stressing this one aspect over the other. 1 Here then was one central con-
cern of the late nineteenth century, the cleansing, reform , of tradition in
1
The Hindi text was published under the English title: 'How can India be
Reformed' in the Navoditii Hari §chandrachandrikii (11. 3 December I 884), Haris-
chandra' s journal, which, after an interval of seven years, he had recently taken into
his own management again and revived. The text of the address has been repri"nted
several times , but is most conveniently available in Granthiivall III (889-903).
Harischandra's works were firs t collected and publis hed by Ramdln Sirµh: Haris -
chandrakalii, 6 vols, Bankipur, 1888. These have long been out of print. The standard
edition is by Brajratnadas and Sivprasad Misra: Bhiiratendu granthiivali, 3 vols,
Banaras, 1950-75. Lately, the contents of the above three volumes as well as
some extra material ha ve been comprised in one volume: Bharatendu Samagra, ed.
Hemant Sarma, Banaras, 1987. All three collections are much more in the nature of
selected works; a large percentage of the work published in the journals continues
to remain inaccessible.
In the present study I cite from the Granthiivali, only recurring to the Samagra for
material not accessible in the former. The originals, unless specified otherwise, are
always in Hindi. The translation s into English are mine.
22 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
the very name of tradition. There could be no topic which had more con-
temporary relevance. The address was fittingly described as lalit, gam-
bhfr aur samayopayogf, gracious, profound and beneficial for the times,
when it was published soon after.
In considering the speech, which has attracted critical attention
lately, I hope to pinpoint the areas , cultural, religious and political, to
which Harischandra devoted his creative energies, as well as to use the
occasion to offer a survey of the critical evaluation of his works, in order
to provide an entry into the methodological perspectives and concerns
of the present study.
Broadly, Harischandra treated of two large thematic complexes in
order to explicate his propositions. Firstly, progress involved being
clear as to what could be expected from the governing classes, that is,
the British colon.ial government and its agents, the native chiefs. The
perspective was clearly that of the newly forming middle classes who
considered themselves the spokesmen of the nation. Since no political
representation was possible, only informed public opinion could create
some unofficial political hearing for this section of society. Secondly,
touching inevitably on the question of national identity, it meant working
together in the interest of the country. It also meant taking a stand on the
relationship of Hindus-in the sense of religious denomination-with
the Muslims of the country. Hereby, it was necessary to clarify what it
meant to be a 'Hindu' in the wider sense of 'Indian'.
After a few words of greeting, and some words of respect addressed
to the Collector, Harischandra plunged straight into his theme. Hindustan!
log, the people of India, were like the wagons of a train, which needed
a locomotive to set them into motion. If there was someone to perform
this arduous task, there would be nothing they could not achieve. But
who was to perform it? It could be either the ~industiinf riije mahariije,
the native chiefs, the nawab and rals, or the hakim, the high officers of
state. The first had no leisure, since they were constantly occupied with
piljii rituals, with food and with false talk. The colonial officers were
partly genuinely preoccupied with administrative work and partly with
their own social rounds of balls, theatres, horse racing and newspapers.
If they did have some time left, it was hardly going to be spent with ham
garlb gande kale iidmi, us poor dirty black people. Here there was not
only economic, but also racial distance. Thus change could not come
from above.
Who was to be responsible then, for spreading knowledge and autho-
rizing the changes needed for the times? Harischandra was suggesting
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
approaching doom. In the crisis of eight years of this, you found me, David
——: and what a dour childhood of preparation before it! Endless, endless.
Working for Cornelia, working for myself—working toward nothing. For I
am in it still. I shall try to put off the day of bankruptcy until I am fifty or
more: then liquidate by dying. But you caught me in the first cold
experience of being weak and sick and unable to spend prodigally and not
feel anything but bulging coffers in the morning: in the first terrible
condition of knowing I must work, though work was vile, and that no other
work was present for my hands. That, does it explain my sudden
horridnesses, my fevers, my cruelties to us both—your word? I am not
cruel, Davie, I am full of love. Oh! why won’t you—you and a few blessed
others whom I need the knowledge of in this fearful gorgeous world—why
won’t you understand? Can you not see me going out into the streets of
New York—yes, even here in Chicago—full of love for the dull men and
the stricken women, ready to give myself to them all, if only they would
take me—take me a moment——: full of love for the magic of their flesh
and the mystery of their life and the splendor of their anguish? Oh! David, I
love so much more than there is in the world willing. I am a sea of love
cluttered in a basin. And when I am cried a little welcome, I mess
everything up in my attempt to fit to a mortal measure. I have spoken to you
—we have even quarreled—about little children. Don’t you see why? Why
I was enraged at the idea of your speculating upon whether you wished a
child or no? Identification. Suddenly, I am a child, and I do not care a damn
about reason, I want only not to be left outside and unalive by my beloved.
Often when I speak to a man or woman, Davie, something bleeds in my
breast. And then I have headaches, and the wise doctor says: use ‘brakes’—
do not give yourself so much—walk the streets indifferently. Easy, eh?
Indifferently! When all of life floods all my senses like a corybantic
passion: a perpetual sea of infinite elements each of which is attached to my
nerves and to my heart. I cannot help loving people, so I hate them. For
they are not what I would have them be: they are deaf and they do not love
me. And children—whose lives go before me out of my hands and my sight
like the horizon and the skies—is it a wonder my hands are stretched after
them and that I suffer at my impotence? But, Davie, I am not cruel. I love—
and I cannot reach what I love. My hard-headed lawyer friends quip me,
calling mystic my wandering thoughts—the best of them. But I am filled
with a sense of dimensions, flaring and parabolic, and the world their sense
is comfortable in, is a strand of what I feel and see: and the magic that
draws me to the world is the fact that it careers in an element outside
myself. There, perhaps, imprisoned in the flesh of a woman is the thing I
love—and I am outside—oh, fatally outside. If I open that flesh I am
laughed at by blood and death. Life—life, I seek it. For I see it: and it is
maddening to be alive.
This is a funny letter, is it not? But you must understand, and never again
call cruel the man whose eyes are forever full of the vision of loving, and
whose body is a prison, a terribly real prison—and who knows that the
world is a bewildering texture of abyss and reality, of filth and flowers. I
shall go hunting, killing myself through life, David, simply because I am
hungry. Do not forget that. I know the falsehood of the game. Do not forget
that either. My real self, my mocking sense of life, my outrageous need of
love, of love, of love—that will go silent to the grave, when the gods have
had their laugh of it. For truly I am a little like a toyboat that the gods have
placed upon the waters, and blown upon, that scuds its pretty maddening
moment, steerless, useless, against the inevitable stop on the pool’s other
side.
Write to me.
Tom.
David’s day was pitched by it still higher. His moving through the life of
the City had a lyric lilt. Its meanest shred came to expression in the tune he
hummed. Until Mr. Barlow said:
“Is that the one song you know?”
David stopped. His energy was only for the moment without outlet. He
jumped up, and used it to propel his body.
“I don’t feel a bit like working, this afternoon.”
“There you are, thinking of this as work! Can’t you get cured of that,
David?”
The young man stopped at the desk of his Chief who had become his
friend. He was pensive. He put one hand on the blotter and looked beyond
the labyrinth of papers.
“How differently you and my uncle look at business! He prides himself
that it is the most serious and laborious work in the world.”
“That is his play,” Mr. Barlow twinkled. Then they laughed together.
 “You see,” he went on, leaning back in his swivel-chair and blowing the
first fragrant puff of his new cigar into David’s eyes, “you see, my boy,
your uncle is a romantic figure. That is why he takes business so
realistically. I am a new generation: oh yes I am, despite my age! I am a
realist: a man who sees exactly what there is to see: that is why I take
business romantically.”
David thought this a bit topsy-turvy. But he had no way out; he started
figuring Mr. Barlow’s words. Mr. Barlow kept blowing fragrant puffs up
toward his face.
“That,” he went on, “is the reason why your uncle is so much more
successful than I am.” His soft red lips curled cheerfully and he sent a
mighty wreath of smoke as salutation against David’s nose.
David pondered. His uncle, who saw too little of the world even to
understand the slightest of its parts, was by his ignorance able to take
Business as the whole, throw all of himself upon it, and be rich. Mr. Barlow
understood the pattern of life’s parts, was able to make a pleasant game of
that portion of it where he found himself. And he earned an excellent living,
even if he was not rich.
“You are happier than my uncle.”
At once, Mr. Barlow was pensive.
“Happiness is the biggest fraud of all, David. Have no dealings with it. If
it tries to make terms with you, cut it dead.”
David noticed a peculiar trait. When Mr. Barlow’s face was in repose, as
now, there was a sweet sadness upon it. But he could change this. It was as
if he were aware of David looking at his sadness. His quick clear eyes
began to twinkle as if this were in itself a joke.
“We must not compare happiness. That’s all nonsense.”
“What then is serious?”
“What is serious?” He leaned back and took David in. “It is serious that
you should leave this office this very moment and go meandering as your
fancy prompts. Go!... Get along.”
David ran for his hat.
“Well, that is for my happiness, is it not?”
“It is not! It is for your health.” Mr. Barlow looked very stern.
 David hesitated at the door. He came back to Mr. Barlow’s side and once
more, this time timidly, put his outstretched fingers on the blotter.
“You know how much I appreciate you, don’t you, Mr. Barlow?”
Mr. Barlow took up a letter, screwed his glasses grimacingly to his nose,
and began to read.
“David,” as his head moved swiftly from side to side in pursuit of the
words, “you are wasting your free afternoon.”
Now David was not wasting it. In his pocket was the letter of Tom. In his
head was the cheer of Mr. Barlow. Before him and above him swarmed the
amazing City....

He was on a street full of department stores. Women of all ages hurried

past him, talking, ceaselessly talking. In their hands were the signs of the
battle they loved to wage: packages, purses: in their eyes the promise of
further conquest. David felt that he was in a strange, not hostile land. He
was tolerated here, because he was not noticed. He stepped into a long,
dense building. Endless counters packed with women led away in the bustle
and gloom. Voices were not so high as the press of feet and the surge of
skirts. Stiff men stood above the buffeting hordes like monstrous curios in
their white linen and their flaring somber coats. Gaslamps tremored under
the oppressed ceiling as if they stood guard against an invasion from below.
It seemed that the frangent feminine commotion would swell, rise and
sweep them out. David was stifled already. There was no room for him,
there was no room even for air to breathe. He was in the street again. Here
the flood had interstices of day: the day broke with its blue gleam upon the
ranks of the women: splintered, but entered in and spread a living lightness
through their heavy marches. Here one could see, not a mass alone,
sweeping the street, but individual women with faces and eyes. Here even
one saw pretty women.
David had not known how many pretty ones there were. It was
bewildering, this extravagance of nature. The street was of stone and brick,
it reared its jagged way through the world, loaded with the metallic cut of
cars, flanked by the sibilance of uneven roofage and façades and the clamor
of advertisements; it fell swift into smallness beyond a Square. Here it was
arrogant, it domineered with its wide high skirts of stone and its bonnets
turreting aloft—the shuttle of feet like a leather lathe beneath. And yet,
immersed in it, David found that it was soaked in charm and that it drew his
senses. For he had picked out the presence of women: women that had lips
and warm bodies and whose arms could hold children. At once these were
the street and were greater than the street. In their domain he was walking.
He was not wasting his free afternoon. This was health indeed. It was
health to feel this pour of a thousand homes upon him: all of these homes’
secret tenderness and passion. It was health to shake his head at the hard
buildings, and know them worsted by women!...
But tiring. David boarded a car.
The car gave a lurch. The movement split the car’s inhabitants into two
separate groups: they who smiled and they who grumbled. David was
smiling. Clumsily he righted himself, he found that he did not wish to
change the position of his eyes. They were looking at a little girl, who had
been smiling also. But now, the two were serious looking at each other.
She was a little girl riding beside her governess. She had great black
eyes. The gleaming iris almost crowded out the white. She had brows that
were high and thin and arched and between her brows and her eyes the flesh
was dimpled.
She tilted her head backward and smiled at him.
David gripped his seat with his two hands, and smiled at her.
She was beside an opaque cutting thing that was a woman and was a
governess. Thick glasses tied to a black string that ended in a hideous
enameled clasp on a white starched waist. Eyes shiny and convex like the
glasses. Nose pointed down, mouth cutting in, chin pushing upward. And
beside her a loveliness that came across the car and that he held now far
from the car and the street, in his silence.
It came to David softly that he loved this little girl. She smiled at him, as
if she thanked him and were glad. Could he put his love in a smile and give
it to her?
She stirred in her seat. She tossed out her legs, first one, then the other.
She threw herself back so that her legs thrust out, she met him fully and
beamed on him.
She was unafraid, beyond all he had ever known. What could he give
her, and do, to show her his love?
 He had his eyes and his smile. To give her his life with. He put words
into his look at her: till his eyes had tears of their fullness. He said to her so:
“Little girl with the gray fur bonnet and the gray fur coat and the
laughing soul, I love you. I have never seen you before. I shall never see
you again. I shall always see you——”
She was smiling so clear! What did she know? What did she not know,
perhaps? Pain stopped the words of his eyes. He got up. He passed her.
Why could he not touch her, why could he not come and play with her
where she lived? A little girl!
He stood in the street and the car groaned past him. She was kneeling on
her seat and her face pressed against the window. She was motionless,
gazing into him with serious lovely eyes while the car swung her away into
the trackless future.
David’s lips moved: “Good-by. I do not understand.... Do you?...”
She was gone.
Many things were gone.
David, walking the dim sunless City, walked as through himself. And as
he went he missed the lights that an hour before, of their own cheer, had lit
the corridors of his being and made him all, all of the City, so glad a
habitation. He missed these things, he learned how many they were.
He did not think of the strange little girl. She had been fleckless
beautiful. She had been more than that in the miracle of her spell upon him.
For this he groped. In his mind was the vision of her budding life, sweet,
ineffably sweet like an unopened rose in the dew of the dawn. She had left a
wound in his heart—the stab of her vision—from which now his blood
seemed unstintingly to flow.
He thought of himself alone. Sudden all his proud contentment was
away. Not clouded, this time, as it had been so often. Away. It was gone
surely, like the little girl.
His contentment. What then had it been? The parts of it that were no
more he could piece together into a memory of his contentment.
It had been a haze covering the way of his feet, blinding his eyes,
wrapping him in darkness. He saw now. He saw that his feet had carried
him a way different from the haze of his contentment.
 He thought of his emptiness. He seemed to recognize it, now, as if it had
long been there. The absence of Tom and Constance—was this the absence
of two great parts of his emptiness permitting him at last to know them—
since their absence was in a measure their negation, the first timorous return
from an emptiness that filled him to a fullness that he lacked? He could not
go in very far. His mind was strangely cramped with pain. He knew much,
however. He knew he did not love Constance and that there is no substitute
for love. He knew he did not fully respect his dearest friend and that for this
there was no solace. Most of all he knew his life was sterile: despite its
blandishments and its colors, its devouring of hours, it lacked something he
needed. Something he needed as he might thirst for water in a land that held
everything else.
Sterile work: sterile friendship: sterile embraces. It was not so simple as
this, but here was the germ that desiccated him, turned his impulses from
action, deflected life from living. He did not live. Thence came that he did
not risk, that he went safe, that he won materials and pleasures. To what end
since he did not live? He compromised with love, he compromised with
dreams. That was the technique of his succeeding: to cheat his body into
love-affairs, his mind into business, his loyalties into friendship. To what
end since he did not live? And if the miracle was, that life lay in the risk
rather than in succeeding, in love rather than in the love-affair, in the dream
rather than in any fact?
Oh, he could not understand. He did not know what to do. If his ways
were wrong, his relations false, how could he change them? He dragged
through a morass, not knowing.
Now suddenly, his clear thoughts held within them, as if in an embrace,
the little girl. He saw the resilience of that fresh young life: its pride, its
firmness. He saw how it must stoop and bend and give, if it would avoid the
pains that waited it growing into the world. If it would win ease, it must
lose—lose all that made it lovely! Lose its fine fresh sweetness. David
pondered on this. Would that election satisfy him? Would it be well to see
that loveliness gray away in price for the escape from pain? He heard his
answer clear. At all costs the bravery of youth, the firm coolness of which
her flesh was symbol—at cost of any pain, of all defeat!
A deceiving gladness came to David: a gratitude that he was still
somewhat like that little girl.... Had they not smiled at each other?
 XII

T HE train swung Tom southward from Chicago about the duned neck of
the Lake. The sun broke at last in clear sky upon him. The everlasting
smoke sank behind like dust of a departed battle.... Tom had the vision
of the town of his childhood.
The train was swimming up the path of the sun. The world cut flat from
the train’s stride like a sea from the prow of a racing vessel. The horizon
swayingly scooped: trees low and faint in the shrill sky, nude in young
leaves, lascivious in blossoms, almost bowled over by the roll of the world
—and the blue belch of sturdier chimneys beyond, scattered half-acres of
hell spewing soot and shadow over a scarred and flowered prairie. In his
eyes now an old sick town....
The long street swooned under foliage. Trees crowded between the two
rows of houses as if they had burst them apart. Under their arrogant verdure
the little wooden boxes of men crouched and were smothered. A man came
out from the dull pressure: he walked into the sway of the trees: he went
forth to his toil: he was immersed in the redundance of fields.
Tom went back to the town of his childhood armed with his intelligence.
He thought he saw with understanding. Through the window of the train, he
found his face fleeing across the prairie. “I understand,” he whispered to
himself.
“I understand the tyrannies that oppressed my people: the tyrannies that
formed them. The vastness of the soil and of its fruit: the dying spiritual
world my fathers packed with them from Europe, and into which they tried
to cram—what new bursts of passion, what new world’s splendors! I see
what treasure and promise were these fields and hills—and the little hands,
the littler minds and tools with which to work them. Of course, there came
blindness upon the dazzlement, penury upon their drunken spending, fear of
the Spirit upon their rape of the Earth. What masters my fathers must have
been not to have been mastered by America!”
Tom understood why the men of ripe New York were shrunken midges
beneath the stuff of their buildings: and the still unuttered fate of Chicago:
and why Chicago, with its long soiled lazy hands, had held his heart.
 “I am of the West. I had forgotten—but I am of the West! To think that
ten years of New York could have made me forget. Chicago claimed me!”
New York was a place of exile. There they whose lives were done or
were denied builded State upon the principle of their death. New York was a
gaunt, ghost City: a dwelling place of shadows that towered above men.
What was New York against this splendor of plains, against Chicago?
wide crude child city with the loud voice and the playful heart, with the
swift gait and the lumberly laborer’s mind? What was New York against the
love of his discovered home?
Tom began to wonder what irony had drawn him Eastward.
“The promise of life?” he whispered to himself, “the promise of life?”
His chair was toward the window, he spoke to his reflected face and the
fleeing plains. A knoll of green flashed past with a stream curling and in the
shadow a clustered farm: the remembered scent of clover and the warm
sweetness of new green life were a cloud over his mind.
“I wonder, does the lure of death come always disguised as a fulfillment?
Perhaps, when a man takes his life does he hope to achieve it? Cornelia and
I—God! how we were glad of the calculated pavements of Manhattan.” But
surely, he had left death behind? Was he growing sentimental? What a
strange mood he was in. His father, the dilapidated farm—life, that? Very
well: law, the nervous flutter he called success in the city—life, that, more?
He shook his head. He saw he did not understand after all.... And yet,
America in Chicago—Chicago in the American plains—gripped him and
called him as never before....
Chicago? where Industry, a dirty giant, flung and heaped its refuse upon
the dwellings of men? He could not understand. But he felt a poignance—of
symbol—in himself yearning Westward, yearning backward against the
way of the train to where America lay impassioned beneath the coming sun.

He stepped into New York, its life came to him through splinter of
movement with a sharp pathos. The dust of their traffic were these men and
women swirling slow: their impress upon the places they had built was
naught. An air of enervation lay over the clefts of houses, seeped down into
the channels of men.
 Then Tom lost the sense of separation. The great Metropolis came like
an iron cloak and made him invisible....

Out of the confusion of his life he saw some things clearly and aimed at
them: he saw some things vaguely and these he avoided. He sensed that the
vague things were the vital: were of the color and stuff of that confusion
which was his life: and that the dear things were trivial and lying.
Marcia Duffield and King Van Ness were not yet engaged. A particular
and naked problem. Tom feared the cynicism of the girl he had loved. “One
thing, one thing alone can spoil this,” went his thoughts. “If she out of some
mood abandoned her resistance. She might for spite, bravado, bitterness,
what not? One such false gesture and Van Ness stops the hunt. He might
possibly do an injury to himself: grow thoughtful for instance. But he’d
never marry a girl that let him kiss her without a diamond ring.”
Laura Duffield held out her hand for his. “I am young yet. This is my
only life. What am I doing with it?” Tom thought and clasped the hand of
his friend and laughed—the lust of the Game, Van Ness, Stone and
Company to be pried open, the delicious recalcitrance of Marcia to be tasted
and crushed—and forgot.
“You are worrying about something? What is it?” At last he was
conscious of Laura Duffield: his trivial words were over.
She was ageing. There was a drawn tightness about her eyes, a sag at her
throat. It was a day on which she was not looking well. And looking well
was coming to be an art, these years of life when art grows difficult. Debts.
The incredible burden of holding up her head.
“Come and sit beside me, Tom.”
She was graceful. The couch was low. She sat ensconced in a corner, her
outstretched arm hung in a flimsy sleeve, color of faded violet. Her skin like
the sleeve was dim. Her eyes and the stones in her rings were bright.
“You are so quick to understand. I am going to tell you. I’m worrying
about Marcia.”
“That won’t help us, you know.”
“Why can’t she make up her mind to love some one?”
Tom laughed. “What a lot of contradictions in a little sentence!”
“I don’t know—I don’t know what we may have to do.”
 She seemed, after all, resigned. If Marcia could love no one, with her
mind or without, let her stay single.
“She hasn’t accepted Van Ness yet?”
Laura Duffield shook her head.
Tom thought swiftly.
“Where is Marcia? Is she in? Tell her I am here?”
The mother arose and called the girl. Marcia came to the door, stood
silent.
“Hello, Marcia. I came to see you, this evening. Not your Mamma.” He
believed it. He wanted to be with her—all else was a pretext.
“Yes: and it’s lucky too,” Mrs. Duffield bustled to her desk. “I have a
thousand letters to answer. Do be dears, and leave me alone.”
She was settled and her back was on them. She was looking better. Such
confidence she had in Tom!
He followed Marcia. She went to the opposite corner of her room: near
her cheval glass. She stood there. Tom closed the door, let his weight lean
upon it, then seated himself in a broad arm-chair. Her whiteness was taut:
her black hair and eyes were hot. A tremble swift and faint sang through
her. She found she could not stop it. She moved and took up an ivory brush,
she strove to let her trembling flow from her two hands to it. It was a very
long time since Tom and she were alone.
“Marcia, please sit down.”
She complied at once: she flushed with anger that she had. Tom came
and leaned over her. He looked obliquely at her great black eyes and the
sharp perfection of her chin and the way of her white throat. He put his
open hands on her hair, he turned her face upward toward him. He placed
his dosed lips on her parted ones. His hands slipped down her face, her
neck, her body. He stood away. She said:
“Why do you do that, Tom?”
“That is how I feel.”
“Don’t lie, Tom.”
“I am not lying, Marcia.”
Her eyes blazed up. It was a burst of bravery and challenge. They
crumpled. She hid her head in her arms, she wept.
 Tom put his hand firmly to the back of her head where the hair was
caught away from the neck.
“Listen, Marcia, I am not lying. Listen, please, Marcia.”
She was silent, if she was still weeping. She did not raise her head.
Tom leaned and kissed her neck. The faint scent of her hair in his eyes.
Marcia straightened sudden. He met the attack of her gesture.
“Now listen, do you hear?”
She stayed balanced, looking at him straight: her eyes filled with an
ironic hunger. So Tom wanted her. He began before she changed.
“You have never understood me, Marcia. I can’t blame you. I have never
understood myself. I am honest with you. I have always been. Perhaps it
was expecting too much, dear, that you should be able to stand that....
Marcia, I care for you now, as I did before, more than for any woman in the
world.”
She dropped her eyes and began to finger the embroidery of her chair.
“I go through strange tides, Marcia. I cannot help that. Most men have
hypocrisy to hide these ebbs. Most women have passiveness. I have neither.
So I suffer.... Marcia,” he went on, “I do not want to lose you. But also I do
not want to hurt you. Can’t I have you, without hurting you, Marcia! It was
because I had not answered that question, that I forced myself away, forced
myself cool.”
“What do you mean, Tom?”
He took a chair and brought it beside hers and seated himself. With a
great calm he heard himself say:
“Marcia—will you marry me?”
“I should love to, Tom.”
“We could manage. I might even gradually start to pay off your
Mamma’s debts. A little flat. Two weeks at the seashore. A cook....”
He spoke very seriously, with each item stroked the slender pearly hand
he had taken.
Marcia withdrew it. “Don’t be a silly, Tom.”
He jumped up. He drew her after him: he held her close, kissed her
throat.
“It is not impossible. I want you, Marcia.”
 “You have had me.”
“I have never had you.” He thrust her away and walked to where she
first had faced him. “You know I have never had you, Marcia. How can you
—oh——!” He threw up his arms and stopped.
Marcia came closer. “Tom,” she said, “what do you really want of me?”
“Yourself....” He paused. “But without the sense that I am harming you.
Yourself, without restraint.”
“Why did you leave me, Tom?”
“I’ll tell you. Despise me, if you will. I’ll tell you. Because I had a guilty
conscience. Because I thought not alone of your future but of your mother.
Because I seemed unable to be either your lover or your husband.”
She smiled.
“You’re not the sort of man one should marry.”
“Unfortunately I lack qualifications.” He put bitterness into his voice.
She was sure—and glad—she had hurt him. “But civilized standards have
nothing to do with love. I could love a woman, if only she were in a
civilized way disposed of, so that we could afford the luxury.”
Marcia laughed and placed her hand back in his.
“Why have you never put things this way before?”
“Never put things this way before?” He was amazed. He burst out
laughing. “Really, my dear, this is too ironic. I had given you up: I had
given you a free hand to marry. I was prepared to lose you permanently
rather than stand even temporarily in your way. But you did not marry.
What did that mean? I didn’t know. How could I? But what should keep me
from hoping? Any fool may do that. At least there was the circumstantial
evidence that you had not married. That is why I came to-night, Marcia. I
came to ask you to marry me. To plead with you. For the first time I was
prepared to sacrifice you for my own desire—altogether. And now, when I
am acting my most selfish self, for the first time you see the sacrificial
mood that I was in before!”
She placed her arms about him.
“Strange contradictory dear.... You shall have me, dearest. Wait and see
how soon. I think I never wanted you quite so much.”
“Marcia!”
 “Don’t let your feelings blind you to reason, Tom. Our feelings. You
don’t want a wife. If I was rich—or you were—even then, would you want
a wife? You want me. I you. Without alloy, dear. I’ll marry King.”
She smiled brightly.
“Do you know why I put it off? Because I thought it might mean real
captivity. It must have, Tom—without you, there, to rescue me. Oh,” her
face darkened, “I could not stand the thought of him without the antidote!”
She was silent, brooding. Her eyes seemed full of the picture of her life
with the dull rich man. It stifled her, blinded.
“I could not have stood it, Tom. I can now! Without you, it must have
meant prison. Now, it means release—adventure. Yes!” She seemed to be
emphasizing her resolve—bringing it clear before her eyes to see it. “You’ll
see that I am game. I am almost happy.”
She sank down in her chair, and smiled at him; tears kept her from
seeing how he smiled a bit wistfully away.
She needed to be silent. If for no other reason, for the tears.
She wanted to ask him simply: “Do you love me, Tom? For Tom, if you
did love me....” She did not dare her question. She did not dare, even in her
silence, to conclude it. She was afraid of his answer. Both for him and for
her she was afraid. Both of his “yes” and his “no.” After all, her mind faded
and veered, she had better marry King. It would be going on.
She was dry-eyed.
Tom took her hand and kissed it.

“What do I really mean by all these things I do?” When Tom was alone
his question came often, came without answer. When he was with David, it
hurt and these things he did were like ash in his mouth. But even the hurt
was better than the reverberating silence. So Tom fled solitude.
But what of David? What did he want of David? Was he glad of him or
bitterly, passionately sorry? Did he want him close or far away? His acts
and moods, were they designed to hold or to repel him?
Tom was at a pass where all these things were chaos. The clear facts of
living were straws in a heaving sea: straws he reached for. He went brightly
about his profession. It prospered. But it became more and more a thing to
hide from David. And all such things were more and more to be hidden
from himself. Marcia was engaged. He feared her marriage which he had
manoeuvered, vaguely, as the time of a demand he could not face. Also he
looked forward to her marriage: the senses of him: his blood and his wits as
well. Marcia’s marriage must be a function of both.
He tried, close to David, to blot out his conflicts. He tried to realize that
it was David himself who brought about the conflicts: and to pursue the
rational conclusion that it was David who must be blotted out. His
reasonings had the way of playing him into some dark dilemma. The forces
driving him toward the constant agitation of his wits seemed all too clearly
irrational and heart-sent. He could not isolate the verbs of his reason. If he
did, he found them without subject, object—dead waifs of sound flecking a
hollow mind. His reaching for the true drive within him left him a streak in
imponderable Space, as if he had grasped a Comet. It was better to be
confined to straws.
The schemings pertinent to Marcia, straws: the intricate work downtown,
straws also: the being with friends, the satisfaction of his senses, straws
again. The effect upon his mind—this passionate bestowal upon work he
could not respect, upon pleasure he could not enjoy—was a slow
desiccation. He was dry, cynical, erethic. He needed to rouse himself to
heights of activation: his work called for no less. And the impulse rousing
him was ever one he was cold to. A strain on his nerves. As in a man
making himself drunk with drink he forces himself to swallow.
Needfully, since this vast disharmony gained on his life and since each
part of it warred against the others, Tom came to bestow upon its various
factors the quality of respite and escape. He needed a makeshift harmony in
order to live. One instant of admitted anarchy in our minds means madness:
in our bodies death. Since discord was there, it must be balanced with other
discord. One group of his thoughts swelled, sagged out of place: he propped
it into a semblance of poise with another hypertrophy. So discord
propagates itself. Life went on.
David was there to cleanse him of the tastes of his worldly work, restore
his self-respect, give him a vantage point against the scheming Tom of the
day. His other friends—shallow, quick fellows ready to give what he asked
and forward-coming, helpless women like Laura Duffield—were there to
balance the reticence of David, ease his diseased hunger, throw him
momentarily free of the strange dissatisfaction of his one satisfying
friendship. The function of work was to sustain him, flush his energies until
such time as he knew how he wanted to play. Marcia was compensation for
that in him which could not look to David. David was compensation for that
in him which was ashamed of Marcia. His hours with David and Cornelia
were sleep in which he lived as he dreamed, won strength to face the
waking: his hours of work were respite from the starved clamor of his
dreams—a way of winning time from their insistence.
So his life stumbled and shook ahead. It held together. But it was
textured of half-true, half-meeting elements. Its hazardous solution caused a
continual ferment. The sign of ferment was his growing pain in a life
stumbling, shaking ahead.
He walked down a Square with that lithe pacing stride of his. Half
clenched fists swung at his side. There was a fairly constant strain in his
eyes that lifted them in their sockets. With teeth tight set, he hummed a
tune. Energy was forever thus escaping from him. When he did nothing, he
fell at once into a state of preparedness for flight. He wanted to get away:
get out. He could not. Life gripped him and he loved it. But much energy
was born of this deep impulse to escape. He scattered it about. Much he
applied—and applied to perfect the conditions of that very life from which
his nerves rebelled. His vitality in talk, his speed of impressions, his
plasticity of posture in the world grew from this energy. So that he shook
along in a vicious circle. Much of his power to throw life into his work
came from the secretions of his dissatisfaction with it: from the energy of
his dissatisfaction. But life is full of such mechanical paradox. All of
civilized life is such a one. Many a man succeeds in the conscious world
because of the failure hidden in his heart.
Tom stopped. He was before a crumbling brownstone house: a rusting
iron grille, a gate thrown out on useless hinges. A tiny plot of grass flanked
the narrow walk. The soil was rocky: sediment of the City—cans, flakes of
cloth, splint eyes of glass—choked the slim green. From the low stoop the
house flared up, soft in decay.
Tom turned his back on the house. He looked North on the Square. In his
eyes was a hunger for open places. His glance consumed the narrow breadth
of the Park with its dapper walks and its trees. It broke impatient on the row
of red-brick houses. It spent itself. Tom’s gaze narrowed. He turned and
went up the stairs. They were dirty and dark—four flights. Odor of mildew
and misspent lives seeped from brown plaster.
He struck his fist on the door. Behind him was a hall painted the color of
stale chocolate. In the center of the fly-blown ceiling a sudden cupola,
picked out in glass—green, yellow, blue. Sky came through dim and soiled.
A young stout fellow opened the door and gave a cry of pleasure: let
Tom in.
“Hello, Rennard! Flora. Florissima! Company’s complete.”
Tom pressed Lars Durthal’s hand. “Hello, Lars,” he passed him.
A long narrow table spread in the square small room. The heavy mantel
was ribald with knick-knacks of varicolored glass, purchased in useless
shapes at Coney Island and Asbury Park. Their gayety, adance in the boxed
mirrors of the yellow wood, seemed irrelevant above the table, with its high
unlabelled bottles of red wine, its mounds of Italian bread, its platters of
cervelat, tomatoes, sardelles. The table’s order was disturbed by its broken
wreath of guests.
Most of the diners lounged already in their chairs. Between laughter and
smoke they sent their eyes lazily toward the kitchen. They had begun with
their wine.
“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” a slender fellow spoke, upon whose long neck
poised a head remarkably round and small; within his face with its fat
sanguine cheeks the eyes and mouth and nose took up an inconspicuous
space.
“Good evening, Marquese.” Lagora was a nobleman: a dealer in marble
according to his one report, in Italian oils and spices according to his other.
A clever, shifty, cloudy fellow with hands like a girl’s.
Tom sat down with an air of temporariness beside him.
“Well, Dounia—comment ça va?” He leaned and placed a finger on the
cheek of the woman across the table. Dounia Smith put down her glass.
“I’ve no cigarettes.”
Tom placed a box in her expectant hand. They were enormous hands:
gaunt, naked, acquisitive, with a wrinkle about the finger-joints that was
sinister against the smooth calm of her wrists. Behind her hands, Dounia
Smith rose diminished. She was tall, handsomely cut: her hair swept black
and low over her temples: her eyes had a gray slant that offset the thin lips,
the sharp tilt of her chin. When she lighted her cigarette she showed all of
her teeth. They were white. But as the gaunt huge hand came near her face,
the rest of Dounia Smith went into eclipse.
A man came up, neatly and drably dressed, with a red tie that flared
against the pale primness of his face.
“Glad you’re here, Rennard. Business particularly boring, to-day. Fun
particularly needed, to-night.”
This was Christian Hill—sedate, rebellious—a man of business who
craved intoxicants of life. All his sentences sounded like telegrams. All his
money, too sanely earned in a broker’s office, was at the disposal of his
search for madness. He looked on Tom as his ideal. He would have sold his
wife into slavery for a lust sufficiently great to make him commit the folly.
“I want to introduce you,” he beckoned toward a girl that had sat yonder
beside him. “Madeline—this is Mr. Rennard—Miss Gross.”
She came sidling. She was richly clad, very blond, very powdered.
Beneath the simper of blue eyes, the hot curl of placid lips and the ringlets
of blond hair teasing her tiny ear, Tom saw that she was Jewish.
He took her tiny hand, gloved in fawn-colored kid.
“It is nice to have you here, Miss Gross. I hope our rough manners won’t
shock you.”
She propelled herself a little nearer.
“Oh, please do, Mr. Rennard!”
“You want to be shocked, Miss Gross?”
Hill intervened. “But you can’t, Rennard. You don’t know my little
Madeline.”
The little Madeline simpered and tapped her escort’s mouth with the
back of her gloved hand.
“How do you know, Christian? Just because you couldn’t.” Bending her
body back, she threw her head back also. She gazed at Tom through the
lashes of her half-shut eyes.
Durthal came up.
“Your place is there, old man. Between Lunn and me.”
“Good evening, Flora. Say, you have room for Markand? I made him
promise he’d be here.”
 A thick-set woman, with face incredibly composed and large bare arms
crossed over the gray width of her dress, nodded to Tom and to the others.
“Good evening, Flora.” “Hello, Flora,” the greetings came. Flora did not
budge from her place in the kitchen door. Hill dragged Miss Gross through
the scatter of chairs.
“Oh, Signora Sanni,” he said, “I want to introduce my friend.”
Flora Sanni wiped her right hand slowly, methodically on her apron.
“Buena sera, Signorina.” She took the gloved hand, dropped it, turned
about. Her eyes were steel. She had taken longer to wipe her hands on her
apron.
Tom moved in Durthal’s power toward the nearer end of the table.
A young girl shut the door.
“Here you are,” muttered Lagora.
She nodded timidly to her neighbors—maliciously to Dounia Smith, a
defensive malice—and sat down beside the Marquese. He drew close his
chair. The two began muttering together. Lagora leaned forward. The girl
bent back from the thrust of his mood and his body. She was a frail creature
—a tissue of harried nerves with great black teeming eyes. Her hand tapped
on the plate. She lit a cigarette, inhaled a great gust, emptied Lagora’s wine
glass and then blew out the smoke. Her body was draped in a short tight
smock of blue hung from her shoulders. Her tiny breasts stood up in it quite
clear. Lagora’s brows worked up and down. Her big eyes sharpened and cut
him. He looked at her twitching shoulders.
“Hello, Mr. Rennard,” she cried as she passed him. She threw up a
diminutive hand. Her breasts bobbed.
“How are you, Lettie?” Tom, taking her hand, had the sense of Lagora
smiling with snakish eyes. He passed on.
A lumbering boy got up, nodding and saying no word.
“Well, Darby?” Tom sat down. “I’ve not seen you in a week.”
“A long time,” synchronously growled the other. Tom heard him and
laughed.
“And the painting?”
Tom and Darby Lunn were lost together in talk. From the table’s farther
end Durthal saw them together. The laugh of Dounia Smith, the shrill sneer
of Lettie tossing her heels, the mutter of Lagora were a wave, gathering,
crumpling upon the calm of Signora Sanni. Durthal extricated himself from
Hill and Miss Gross. He headed through the disserried chairs. Stretched
arms reached for wine and tastes of antipasto. The evening splintered and
swirled. Food would draw it together.
Durthal stood over Tom.
“Here, old man. Change over. You sit between us.”
Finding his seat, he also had the sense of haven beneath the spray and
scatter of the room.
Of the three, Tom was the only one whose voice carried beyond them:
laughing. Dounia Smith eyed him with a tilt of her head. A finger, like a
talon, flecked her cigarette. Her brows were thin and straight like the stroke
of a sharp pencil on hard paper.
Flora Sanni stood above the table, with a vast white bowl of minestrone.
The crowd coalesced.
The table narrowed. The chandelier, relic of fluted brass and drooping
crystal, took on the tawdry tone of office and gave its light, self-
consciously, heatedly, like an old servant, too laden with memory and years
to want to work for so crass a gathering. The carved clock ticked: a clatter
of plates drew down bent necks, beading foreheads. Sharp streakings of
sound ribboned the table: swathed it: covered it with a warm liquidity. Then
the whipped undertone of selves seeped up again, lapped over the inorganic
sound, deluged it, drowned it in angular surge of assertions.
The door gave a knock that was heard at last....
David had followed upstairs a pair who were held to slowness by the
constant claim of the woman that she was too weary to go another step.
“Come along, Phoebe!” The man had a high straight back. He wore a
soft collar that bared his neck. David observed that it was wiry and clean.
The hairs were clipped high from it. David had time to observe. Whenever
the pair came to a rest, he rested behind them. Something impeded his
passing. Timidity in part. The disclosing thereby that he had overheard
them, that they were moving too slowly. His own scarce unconscious
resistance to mounting those stairs at all. He hated the place. But he had no
reason to give to Tom. And Tom took offense at his not wishing to come.
 “Why, dear man. Don’t you like Flora? I think Flora is splendid. Such
poise! Or is the place too noisy for you. David? Davie, you must get
accustomed to dirt!”
A vehemence in Tom that silenced David. Doubtless this was life, and
life no thing to shrink from.
“But I do like Flora!” He could not add that he felt that Flora did not like
him: did not seem to like any one who came there: nor the feeling that if she
had known him different and uncomfortable, perhaps she would have liked
him.
“Well, then!” said Tom.
The stout lady was sighing. “Why we ever come here, Jack! These
stairs!”
“You know it is lots of fun, Phoebe. Go along now. You like it as well as
I.” He spoke immaculate English, and urged her with a slap on her rump.
“Well, the people——”
“——the food?” he chuckled. “The mysterious bottom of Signora
Sanni’s pot. One more hoist, old lady. Th—th—ere! Where else, pray, can
one meet such a delightful assortment of bulls?”
“Don’t call them bulls, Jack Korn! Call them detectives.”
“Here we are, dear.”
David and they entered together.
“Korn, I am glad to see you!” Tom reached over the table and greeted
him. “How’s business?” He had nodded to David and Korn’s woman with a
perfunctory politeness.
“Meet my dear friend, Mr. Korn,” he laughed. “Same profession as
myself.” The three sat opposite Durthal and Tom and Lunn. Mrs. Phoebe
Raymond was on one side of David. On the other sat Dounia Smith. All of
them laughed, except David.
He looked at Korn. A big, athletic fellow, clad in somber serge. He had
black hair and a significant nose.... Why had all of them laughed?
“I have never seen you here before, Mr. Markand,” said Phoebe
Raymond.
“I—I come quite often.”
 “Well, I don’t,” she looked full at him. “One gets so little time.” Her
round face was pretty. But it was fat: its petite features were lost in flesh.
Her bosom obtruded like a robin’s breast. David seemed to see, investing
the round comeliness of her mouth and nose, layers of sloth and greed. A
scaly dimness was already over the blue eyes. “I like small gatherings more,
don’t you?” she confided. “One could get to know a person then.” David
had the sense that if he drank enough of the wine Mrs. Raymond would
seem very pretty indeed.
He began to eat. Words pattered and burst about him. The food had an
exotic charm. The air was full of heated eyes and bodies. Glances and
edged remarks trembled like flung spears in the flesh of the women. David
kept still and went on eating.
Phoebe Raymond tried to engage him in talk.
“My husband and I were in Maine at the time. Do you know New
England, Mr. Markand?”
“Of course he knows it! Can’t you see it written all over him, Phoebe?”
It was Tom drawing her away. “How dare you talk to my friend about your
husband! Have you no sense of decency?”
The immediate half of the table was his. He played it like an instrument.
His eyes were too bright and too hard, thought David. He had little to say to
him. To Durthal and to Lunn, to the women on David’s side, to Hill even
and Lagora, he had more to say than to David. Most of all to Korn. But he
looked often at his friend—sharp glances while his attention swathed from
right to left. David was enmeshed in his running comment: all Tom said
seemed to run through him and knit him.
“It is hard not to be moral,” he said. “One is pushed so into good
behavior.”
Jack Korn sat back smiling. He was a strong man. He was very quiet.
“What do you think of good behavior, Korn?” Tom asked him.
“It is as good a game as another.” He paused. “Surer.”
“But why should we want to be sure? Since we are already sure of
death? Look at Dounia, there. She has never done a risky thing in her life.
Run over her investments. Burton, Klein, La Soule—all good gold bonds.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself, my dear. You remind me of
Markand’s uptown relations.”
 “And what are you crowing about?” Dounia retorted. “You’re as safe as
an eel.”
“I have at least the good manners to be ashamed of it,” Tom laughed.
“To hide it and even lie about it. I am gaining strength.”
He looked admiringly at Korn. “Here, old man, I drink to the logic—to
the beauty of your life!” He held forth his wine glass.
Korn raised his to his eyes, nodded and sipped. Tom drained.
“Did you get that, Davie?” he said. “The contempt Korn showed in
answering my toast? I do not blame him. I’ve never earned his respect.
Think how he must despise you!”
Korn did not turn his head. Lunn grunted and smirked—in his plate.
Dounia and Phoebe came to David’s rescue.
From Dounia: “I am sure Mr. Markand is br-raver, much b-raver than
you!”
From Phoebe: “Jack, deny that you despise Mr. Markand.”
Tom drove ahead. “But I’ll earn your respect yet, Jack Korn. I may be
earning it now....”
Christian Hill was nudging Miss Gross.
“He’s a wonder, is Rennard. You must get him. The other man, the one in
the black suit, Madeline, he—he is——” Hill whispered in the young girl’s
ear. Her fork clattered: her little eyes lost their dim cunning: became bright
and large.
“Really?” she gasped. She gazed at Korn and was speechless. Her hand
went to the old bead bag in her lap.
Talk like a comet drew to the head of Tom and Korn. They held it: they
swung it: it was a dazzle of gyre to the jerk of their directions. At the farther
end of the table, Signora Sanni came and went: sat imperturbable. She was
a woman of more than forty. Disillusion was sweet in her firm, strong face.
It was a preservative. It did not keep her pretty, it kept her content. Her
features had set. It was as if they had thrown away their woman’s tricks of
blandishment and surprise: as if they had sold their power to impassion at
the price of passion itself. At her side were Lagora and Lettie Dew. These
three alone were intact from the ebullient pull of the other end of the table.
Lagora was incapable of an objective interest. He ate seriously, he spoke to
Signora Sanni, he nagged Lettie. The eyes of Miss Dew wandered from
their circuit between her plate and the ceiling, to David. For a moment, their
gaze softened; something swam in her eyes, something stirred like a cloud’s
rift in her mind. With a violent gust of smoke—for she smoked incessantly
—she blew it away.
“But I maintain,” Tom said, “that the law makes the game all the more
delicious. The more rules, the more brains to overturn them.”
Korn smiled and nodded: “Goethe put it—‘In der Beschraenkung zeigt
sich erst der Meister.’ ”
“What does that mean?” Tom was held up.
“Just about what you are saying,” replied Korn.
“Well, then, Goethe is right.” Every one laughed except David.
Tom raced: “I like obstacle races: I like hurdles. Society is made up
simply of men who run flat, like you, dear Korn, or go in for steeple-
chasing, like myself. Now, I have a friend—tell me, Korn, what do you
think of this for manipulation ...?”
It was amazing, thought David, how little Korn said for one who held
such sure attention.
“——with the girl married, he controls her life. Do you see? Of course
he must pay his minimum—let us say his taxes—for that. But say what you
want, love or no love, there’s always about the same ratio of satisfaction in
a love affair. Eh, Dounia?” he baited her. “Come, Dounia, tell us for once.
Down with the veils. Is there so much difference whether you love the man
or not? I am convinced that woman’s pleasure is utterly subjective. Who
gives it to her is of no consequence—unless she lets herself be imposed on
by Society’s mandates, standards, sentimentalities. Won’t you enlighten us,
Dounia?”
She looked at him with a defensive sharpness. How did he guess how
women felt? how utterly subjective passion was—at least in her? Phoebe
also stirred back in her chair. His arrows were scattering too near. How
could he tell—he was peering mischievously at her—that she strove often
to forget her man in order to be happy with him?
“You see, she won’t tell. These women who think that being dumb is
being secret. As I was saying, he controls the lady. And she controls her
husband. And since he is high in power in the world downtown, my friend
controls that also. No prettier, no more outlawed game could be imagined. I
maintain it is pretty enough, Korn, for your praise.”
Korn chuckled. Tom raced on.
David had the sense that in a circling way he was the goal of Tom. Tom
threw out flaring lines, struck here, flung there, with himself as center of his
operations.
He lost this sense. It was replaced by the poignant one that Tom ignored
him. If anything remained of the earlier impression, merely that the
avoidance was planned. Tom paid more heed to every one in the room! His
attention was flattering and was canny. He baited Dounia, but Dounia could
not bait him. Durthal and Lunn were subsidiary strings that reënforced his
theme: and the women. He wove his complex music with the lives and
thoughts of all those present. And when he noticed David, it was to prod
him—to hurt him.
Then, still another sense. David began to feel himself separate from this
noisy element he was immersed in. He put forth spiritual fingers to explore
it. He drew his shredded findings in; he began to explore himself.
He felt a hazardous balance, swung safe from fall by an impalpable
thread, between himself and this room: himself and Tom. Even the
gaslights, naked and stiff and hot, were elements of Tom. He was on the
other side and was alone. But there was a joy in the experience of
separation. He was apart, impregnable. He could poise somewhat the
laughter, the surge, the flection about him; arrive at himself.... Was he
impregnable after all? Why, then, hurt?
... Wine soaked soft these men and women—these prisons of sense.
Sense swirled unhindered upward, danced with spiraling cohesion beneath
the gasjets....
The door pushed open again. A man, dull shouldered, with heavy head
and tread and unlit eyes, came in and nodded and sat down at the end of the
table beside Korn. With the door wide for a moment a strange world stood
in the hall beside the room: a world, cool and hidden.
He was also an accustomed guest. He came with heavy breath as if each
breath lifted a weight of flesh against some obstruction in his gullet. He
nodded dully, with a brighter gaze alone for Tom.
“Too bad you weren’t here earlier,” said Tom. “The law needed your
defense.”
 “So?” he was dully aware. His eyes peered out, like a big dog’s,
disturbed at feed.
“I think Officer Murphy might do well to ar-r-rest you all,” said Dounia.
“Oh, you wouldn’t have him do that,” cried Hill, with a slightly
trembling voice. “It is such fun breaking all the Commandments.”
“So long as glasses are not broken,” said Tom.
“How is work, Murphy,” asked Korn with a serious full face whose
irony was far beyond the detective’s wit.
“Oh, slow ... glp. Ain’t much ... glp ... doin’.” Murphy looked up and
down the table, interested at last, lacking something. “Say, Flora,” his gross
voice thrust out. “A little of the red?”
The gathering paused momentarily about the intrusion: swirled about it.
He was a gap in its midst, a load on its vital spirit. His fleshly dullness must
be smeared over with raillery and laughter. The crowd began to digest him.
Murphy disappeared.
His heft, now dissolved, was an added strength in the room’s swelter.
Tom rode the wave of broken personalities and whipped it and steered it.
Lagora forgot his duties toward Lettie and tried to make love to Flora. He
flattered her. He owed her money. He thought it might be well not to have
to pay for his dinners. Signora Sanni flicked off his words like flies. She
was learning the unlikelihood of being paid. And Lettie Dew, released,
allowed herself to gaze full and long at David who was back in the storm
taking its breast, distinguishing no thing. Phoebe was moist and breathing
hard. She was safe, however, beside Korn. Her sense of safety crowned
with smugness her bibulous affection.
“I believe truly,” she said to David, “we should be going.” She had said
this over and over. It gave her the excuse she somehow wanted for finishing
each succeeding glass of wine. She spoke measuredly. She was passionately
anxious to have David know she was more the lady than Dounia Smith or
Flora.
Lettie leaned over and smiled at David. Very suddenly. David smiled
back. Lettie scowled. David was hurt. As soon as he looked away, her eyes
were once more on him.
Miss Gross, cool, unliquored, chuckled and took the varying scene; she
wondered why Mr. Rennard evaded her diagnosis. She knew that later, Hill
would try to kiss her. He would take her home in a cab for no other purpose.
She was debating whether she wanted to be kissed by him, or no. It might
be fun. He was a married man! There he was pendulous, at her side. He
looked down more daring at her light-lashed corsage. How far dared he be
mad—was Madeline worth madness? The price——: He was dismayed to
find himself sobering under his question: deciding against it.
“Damn it!” He jumped to his feet and brandished his glass. “Let’s be—
let’s be——” his voice died down: “——free souls, to-night.”
He found his seat limply. It was his tragedy to be sane. This Madeline
Gross—pretty though she was—was not yet the creature for whom he
expectantly and religiously waited: not yet the love for whom he was to
abandon his wife and child, with whom he was to be lost in the sacrament
of irreparable Folly. Not yet. Perhaps never! He was sober. He put a bottle
to his lips and emptied it. It gave him a stomach-ache. He began to recall
that Madeline lived far uptown, and that a cab would cost a considerable lot
of money.
The night was mellow and soft. It grew smeared with the sweat of wear:
hard with broken clusters of decay. It was over....

Tom and David walked homeward in silence.

David knew one thing, and it hurt: Tom had been showing off to the man
called Korn. He had one question. At last he asked it:
“Who is Mr. Korn?”
Something quailed in Tom. He took his answer, flung it brutally against
his quailing.
“Korn?” He was looking ahead, far ahead. “Korn—why, Korn is a
pickpocket.”
There were no more words. They went down the hall of their home: each
entered his room.
Tom closed the door.... It was very white and very quiet and clean. He
sat on his bed. Resting his chin in his hands, he went on looking ahead,
looking far ahead. Seeing nothing. The alarm-clock was obtrusive with its
tick-tack-tick. The window was open from the top. A faint breeze made the
white mesh curtains stir. Tom felt a soiled self sitting on the bed, felt soiled
feet on the tidied floor. Tom felt a desecration.
 He was up. He was almost like a somnambulist. He was in David’s
room. They were looking at each other.
“I have done nothing. You fool, acting as if you were guilty!” he said to
himself.
“Yes, Tom?” David did not understand the stillness.
Tom was in conflict. “Are you sure—are you sure you are not guilty?”
Words cried to be spoken. He had none.
“Don’t be shocked, Davie,” he spoke at last. “One must meet all sorts
——”
“I am not shocked. But it is strange. He seemed so intelligent a man.”
Tom pounced, with passion of relief.
“He is intelligent, Davie! That is life. You don’t know how life is lived in
New York. There are no sharp distinctions, Davie, between criminals and
honest men....” He stopped. That sounded wrong. He plunged in, to make it
right. “—- What I mean is, the ways allowed by the law and the other ways
—there are conventions, Davie. Now-adays, to get along, a young man
must break in, must break in somehow. Strictly speaking, that is never quite
a righteous——” He stopped again. David looked with gentle eyes: was
Tom pleading, was Tom pleading for Korn or for another? Tom’s rage came
sudden, a birth of weakness....
“Look here,” he attacked him, “what a prig you sometimes seem, man!
What do you know about life? You who have always gone a greased path,
sliding into fortune! Do you think all men have uncles to do the cheating
and the robbing for them?”
David’s fists closed. He held himself.... By God, was Tom right?
Tom felt his victory. He was enraged still more. He struck again. “If we
all had the fat lap of your aunt to coddle us, or the pure lips of your cousin
to teach us love for nothing! Perhaps you think that any man who hasn’t
some one else to lay the dirt for him had better stay under? A lot you know
about life.”
“But Tom——”
“Look about you. I don’t apologize for Korn. He is what he is. He is the
typical social being. Nakedly. The rest of us think we are the pretty names
we are called by.”
He stopped. David was silent. A great fear ran through Tom.
 “When you learn, David, to be a man, to give a little understanding—
you may deserve the friend you have.”
Still David looked at him, looked beyond him, searched for a reason.
Tom went out. It was as if the air that enveloped David sucked him
backward.
Once more Tom was in his room. Its clear white calm was unbearable to
him. He would be less harried in the dark. He shut off the gas. He flung
himself upon his bed. He could not bear the darkness. He could not bear the
light. Doubtless, next door, David was quietly taking off his clothes. Slow,
slightly puzzled—unbearable David! Oh, he could murder! He jumped up.
Something dim, something gray, something dirty and simple and soft: this
was his need. He rushed down to the street....

Reaction.... Tom was contrite. He watched David sharply, aloofly even,

then did some good thing for him. Some intimate thing none but a loving
eye could have devised: and with a quiet tact. So there was David more
bewildered than before. But not David alone. He understood no less than
Tom. The storm of their relationship seemed moving toward no issue.
David was sick—a little sick.
“You shan’t go downtown, to-day, do you hear!” commanded Tom.
“This is a busy day for me, but if you don’t give me your word you’ll stay
home, I’ll stay home myself to make you.”
He went out and telephoned to David’s office. He came back with a
doctor. Tonsillitis.
Tom nursed him. Mrs. Lario found there was really little she could do.
David had an assortment of dainties to sip. “This won’t hurt your throat.”
He had books. He had a splendid array of cushions architected for his back
to prop him for reading.
Mrs. Deane came and found her nephew lying happy in the large front
room.
“More sun,” Tom explained. “It was no job moving the bed.”
“It is wonderful, child, how Mr. Rennard nurses you. I would no more
dream of interfering.... You do not appear to be very busy downtown, Mr.
Rennard.”
 Tom laughed. “Oh, no, Mrs. Deane. Nothing to do at all. But do not give
me away.”
David understood.
“Supposing work does go to hell? It won’t. But supposing it did? Pooh!”
David could not forget such things.
Nor, in their light, could he forget Tom’s accusation that he was selfish:
that he had no idea of service. This one rift there was in the harmony of
Tom’s helping: a certain flavor of rebuke as he served, a certain stress and
reminder. “Here is how I serve my friend.” Yet David could not be sure. The
rebuke he felt in Tom’s ministrations for his own lazy selfishness might
altogether lie in his own guilty conscience. What did he ever do for Tom?
So far as he could see, what did he ever do for any one at all? His life was a
sliding down greased paths. Fortune or no fortune, what hold had he on the
way? Lying there on his cushioned couch, he found himself wishing Tom
had not come back so soon from work in order to see how he was. And
wishing this, he felt his guilt the more....
In flashes, like blaze in an empty sky, the emptiness of David came to
him and filled him and gave him great hurt. Whither indeed was he going,
and where was he? If Tom was querulous, irritable, weak, if Tom scoffed at
his relatives, refused to be serious about his friends and would hear no word
of his loves, what was David to complain? His relations were nothing to
Tom: he knew too well what earthy ones they were. Had David respect for
his own brief amours? Was there one of his relationships with man or
woman that was noble, that lifted him up? Was there one, who worked for
him and served him, as Tom did? Tom was faulty. Yes. But David was a
monster in that he seemed to partake neither of the virtue nor of the sin of
man. He was a trimmer. He was clamped down in some chill Limbo.
Knowledge came to him, even now, of his idle and empty ways, like
lightning in a lazy summer night: flashing and gone, muttering afar, doing
no work upon him.
He was a spiritually sprawling creature. He had no coördination. If his
heart was touched, how did his mind respond? If his mind, where was the
response in deed? It seemed to David that what he did wore away the
energy of his mind, dullened his heart: and what he felt and thought became
impediments to those acts which his living called for. He was a loose-bound
bundle of life, rolling down a chute....
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