Page:The empire and the century.djvu/740

 warm advocates of the study of English literature by their countrymen.

What are the ideas, one naturally asks, which Indians derive from English literature? That literature is a record of the hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, of the English people for the last three centuries; it reflects their pleasures, their politics, their vanities, their religion. There is in it matter for all tastes. It is not the expression of one idea or sentiment, but of thousands the most diverse, and yet to most Indians there is one dominant note, one characteristic teaching, running through it. The answer which almost all Indians give to the question, 'What has English literature taught you?' is that it has taught them liberty to think for themselves; it has freed them from slavery to authority. This, perhaps, is not the lesson which a German or a Spaniard would extract from English literature, for the value and suggestiveness of any new idea defends largely upon the previously existing stock to which it is conjoined; but the intellectual antecedents of the Indian were such that this idea more than any other appeared to him novel and suggestive. The characteristic of all Indian teaching in the past, whether Hindu or Mohammedan, has been reverence for authority. The young scholar has been taught to justify his views by citing a great Pandit or Maulvi, and when he had elected to follow a certain school of thought, it was sheer blasphemy to question the teaching of any of its great masters. With such antecedents, it is not surprising that the most wonderful and illuminating idea in English literature should have been the freedom and independence to which it introduced them. They found themselves suddenly brought into a world in which independent private judgment was a duty, and the conscientious exercise of it a virtue.

Probably no other literature in the world could have taught them this lesson so forcibly, because no other literature is so saturated with the love of liberty as that of England. From Elizabeth to Victoria