Page:Echoes from Old Calcutta.djvu/24

2 connected therewith, it will soon be apparent that he feels little or no interest in what he practically knows nothing about.

In the present writer's experience it is nearly as true to-day as when Macaulay wrote his essay on Clive, that to most English readers in this fast-living age it would be uninteresting, even distasteful, to learn the "insipid" story, how "a handful of our countrymen, separated from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated in a few years one of the greatest empires in the world." Macaulay seems inclined to attribute much of this ignorance (source of the strange indifference) to most histories on Indian subjects, though admirable in many ways, being in his opinion deterrent, owing to what Johnson long ago deprecated, as the most fatal of faults—tediousness. He exemplifies Orme. How is it he asks (as Mr. Morrison recalls in his biography) that art, eloquence, and diligence, may all be employed—in making a book dull? It is obvious that to write what people like to read, as he said of Walpole; to engage attention, to allure curiosity, are gifts as desirable in the historian, or the essayist, as in the writer of fiction. Giving due weight to all this, there remains the paradox that India, apart from special reasons, is in this twentieth century a wearisome subject to the average reader or familiar talker in England. It must be allowed, too, I fear, that our countrymen, dwelling in temporary but prolonged exile in India, manifest less interest than might perhaps be expected of them, regarding the country in which their lot is thrown, in some portions, that is, of its not remote history, especially of the British India of old days. If this be so, it applies mainly to the large centres of commercial and official activity. Engrossed in the ever-increasing demands of the busy present, the toilers there have scarcely time to unseal the past; and so the generation of to-day hurries on, knowing little, and therefore caring little, about those which went before and dragged a lengthening chain over the same ground. Still, to those who are tired of the anxieties and routine of business, and take but a languid interest in the warfare and controversies of modern politics and Hterature, one may suggest that it would be a relief to seek refuge in a bygone world, and in its records to learn something of the official and everyday life of their predecessors in Indian exile. Such a retrospect, far from being profitless or dull, would afford fresh and instructive entertainment even to those who are restricted to the occupations of social life, and must grow weary of "the constant revolution, stale and tasteless of the game repeated joys." Confining the looking back to the capital of