A Syrup of the Bees
F. W. Bain
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A SYRUP OF THE BEES
TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT
BY F. W. BAIN
_Love was the wine, and Jealousy the lees, Bitter of brine, and syrup of the bees._
WITH A FRONTISPIECE
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
LONDON
TO MRS. THEODORE BECK
And I rove on the breeze with the world of bees like the shadow of a bee: For a dead moonflower which the worms devour is the tomb of the soul of me.
O the hum of the bees in the mango trees it murmurs _taboo! taboo!_ _Should a dead moonflower which the worms devour smell sweet as the mangoes do?_
What! shall I deem my flower a dream when I do find, each morn, Wet honey sips left on my lips, and in my heart, a thorn?
PREFACE
The Young Barbarians, when Rome's ecclesiastical polity got hold ofthem, were persuaded by their anxious foster-mother to sell theirScandinavian birthright of imagination for an unintelligible, theopathicmess of mystic Graeco-Syrian pottage. But the "demons," though drivengenerally from the field, lurked about in holes and corners, watchingtheir opportunity. They took refuge in bypaths, leaving the high road:they lay in ambush in a thicket, whence nothing ever could dislodgethem: that of fairy tales and fables.
In India, the "demons," _i.e._ the fairy tales and fables, have neverhad to hide. But the fairy tales of India differ from the fairy tales ofEngland, much as their fairies do themselves. The fairies of Europe arechildren, little people: and it is to children that fairy stories areaddressed. The child is the agent, as well as the appeal. In India it isotherwise: the fairy stories are addressed to the grown-up, and thefairies resemble their audience: they are grown up too. They form anintermediate, and so to say, irresponsible class of beings, half-waybetween the mortals and the gods. These last two are very seriousthings: they have their work to do: not so the fairies, who exist as itwere for the sake of existence--"art for art's sake"--and have nothingto do but what people who have nothing to do always do do--to getthemselves and other people into mischief. They are distinguished bythree noteworthy characteristics. In the first place, they are_possessors of the sciences, i.e._ magic, and this it is which givesthem their proper name (_Widyadhara_),[1] which is almost equivalent toour _wizard_. Secondly, every Widyadhara can change his shape at willinto anything he pleases: they are all _shape-changers_ (_Kamarupa_).And finally, their element is air: they live in the air, and are thusdenominated _sky-goers, sky-roamers, air-wanderers_, in innumerablesynonyms. These are the peculiar attributes of the fairies of Ind.
[Footnote 1: Some kindly critics of these stories have objected to theW, here or elsewhere. The answer to this is, that European scholars havetaught everybody to pronounce everything wrong, by _e.g._ introducinginto Sanskrit a letter that it does not contain. There is no V inSanskrit, nor can any Hindoo, without special training, pronounce it: hesays, for instance, _walwe_ for _valve_.]
Like many other persons in India (and out of it) who are far from beingeither fairies or wizards, they are extraordinarily touchy, andviolently resentful of scorn or slight: things not nice to anybody, butthe Wizards are not Christians, and generally take dire revenge. A verytrifling provocation will set them in a flame. The Widyadhari lady isjealousy incarnate. Jealousy, be it noted, is a thing that many peoplemuch misunderstand. Ask anyone the question, where in literature isjealousy best illustrated, and ninety-nine people in a hundred willreply, Othello. But, as Pushkin excellently says, Othello is notnaturally a jealous man at all: he is his exact antipodes, a confiding,unsuspicious nature.[2] Jealousy not only distrusts on evidence; itdistrusts before evidence and without it; it anticipates evidence andcondemns without a trial: it does not wait even for "trifles light asair," but constructs them for itself out of nonentity. Its essence iscauseless and irrational suspicion. Your true jealous nature nevertrusts anything or anybody for an instant. Othello is of noble soul: nojealous man ever was or could be. With women, it is not quite the same;but even here, real nobility of character excludes the possibility ofjealousy, because it trusts, until it is deceived, and then its glass isshattered, and its love gone beyond recall: sympathy is annihilated.Compare Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth: the one, the noblest, theother, the meanest creature that ever sat upon a throne. Mary trustedeven Darnley till she discovered that he was beneath every sentiment butone: Good Queen Bess never trusted anyone at all. _Mauvaise espece defemme!_
[Footnote 2: This "detached reflection" of Russia's national poet isendorsed by Dostoyeffsky, the greatest master of jealousy that the worldhas ever seen.]
And so, they are not much to be depended on, these Wizards; anybodytaking up with one of them, male or female, had better be careful. Youcan never tell where you are with them; their affection is unstable;they are fickle, as might be expected from creatures of the air: theirfeelings are as variable as their shapes. They can be just as hideouslyugly as unimaginably beautiful. The stories that deal with them containa moral entirely in harmony with all Indian ideas: it is a mistake notto stick to your own caste. When two of different castes are throwntogether, the trouble inevitably begins. The gipsies, who cameapparently from Sind, brought this notion into Europe, in a form notpreviously familiar to it. That difference of kind is insurmountable, isthe fundamental axiom of Indian theory and practice. The owl to the owl,the crow to the crow: otherwise, Nemesis and catastrophe. _A Syrup ofthe Bees_[3] is another instance.
[Footnote 3: The title has a secondary meaning (with reference to itsplace in the series), _she that is loaded with the nectar of Maheshwara,i.e._ the moon that he wears.]
* * * * *
Everywhere to-day we hear people singing a very different song: from allsides is dinned into our ears the cant of humanity, "our commonhumanity." In the meantime, men differ in many ways more than theyagree, and the differences of humanity are practically far more vitalthan the common base. Just as, though all men have weight, yetgravitation simply by reason of its universality does not constitute anelement of politics, and is altogether a negligible quantity, factthough it be, so is it with humanity: the generic identity is nothing,the peculiar distinctions all. The world is not like a plain, but anirregular region such as that of the Alps or Himalaya, consisting ofinaccessible peaks that separate deep valleys, at the bottom of whichlive parcels of humanity drowned in thick fogs or mists of totallydifferent colours and intensities, that distort and transmogrifyeverything they see: so that if here and there any single individualsucceeds in climbing, by dint of toil or special circumstances, to thetops, where in the clear ether all the situation lies spread out in itstruth before his eye, he will find that he has thereby only cut himselfabsolutely off from communion and sympathy, not only with the denizensof his own valley, but that of all the others too. From that moment heceases to be intelligible to the rest. No reasoning of his can evertouch them, or succeed in opening their eyes, because their error is notone of reason, but of perception: they cannot, because they do not, seethings as he sees them: the mists,[4] with all their refraction anddelusive transformation, are always there. Say what he will, he will notawake them: he will gain nothing in return for all his efforts butridicule, abuse, or neglect. So Disraeli, in his generation, seemed tohimself to be like one pouring, from a golden goblet, water upon sand.To be above the level of humanity is to be counted, till after you aredead, as one who is below.
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br /> [Footnote 4: No mere learning will remove them. Pundits, as a rule, endwhere they began, "lost in the gloom of uninspired research."]
And this is the exact condition in the India of to-day. The irony offate has thrown together, as though by some vast geological convulsion,the dwellers in two valleys, one of whom sees everything through, so tosay, a red mist, and the other through a blue: they move about and mixin a way together, totally unable to see things in the same light: andall the while this melancholy cuckoo-cry of _common humanity_ fills theair with its reiteration, and people persist in handling the situationwith a wilful and almost criminal determination to ignore what staresthem in the face, and by so doing, still further accentuate the verything they will not see. If you take two men who are infinitely far frombeing brothers, and forcibly unite them, on the pretext that they are,you will produce by irritation an enmity between them that would neverhave existed, had they been let alone.
* * * * *
I stood, a little while since, on the very edge of a plateau, that felldown sheer four thousand feet or more, into the valley of Mysore. Far inthe distance to the north, the dense dark green forest jungle stretchedaway like a carpet, intersected here and there by Moyar's silverstreams, with here and there a velvet boss, where a rounded hill stoodup out of the plain. That carpet, as it seemed from the height, souniform and close in its texture, is made of great trees, under whichwander wild elephants in herds. To right and left, the valley ran bothways out of sight, like a monster chasm with one side removed. And inthe air below, above, around, light wreaths and ragged fragments ofcloud and mist floated and streamed and drifted, casting the mostbeautifully deep blue shifting shadows not only on the earth, but on theair, like waterfalls of colour, half hiding and half framing the distantview, and cutting the sunlight into intermittent fountains of a goldensemi-purple rain that fell and changed, now here, now there, now, as youlooked upon them, gone, now suddenly shooting out elsewhere to transformevery colour that they touched into something other than it was, like amagic show suddenly thrown out by the Creator in the silent andunfrequented solitude of his hills, for sheer delight and as it weresimply for his own amusement, not caring in the least whether theremight be any eye open to catch and worship such a beautiful profusion ofhis power, or not. For, strange! the spell and mysterious appeal of allsuch momentary glimpses lies, not in what you see, but in what you donot hear: it is the dead silence, the stillness, that by a paradox seemsto be the undertone, or background, of moving mist and lonely mountainpeaks.
So as I stood, gazing, there came suddenly from the east, a whisper, amutter; a low sound, that suggested a distant mixture of wind and sea.And I turned round, and looked, and I saw a sight that I never shall seeagain; such a sight as a man can hardly expect to see twice, in the timeof a single life. Rain--but was it rain?--rain in a terrific wall, adark precipice of appalling gloom, rain that rose like a colossalcurtain from earth to heaven and north to south, was coming up thevalley straight towards me, and it struck me, as I saw it, with a thrillthat was almost dread. That was what the people saw, long ago, when theDeluge suddenly came upon them. It came on, steadily, swiftly, like athing with orders to carry out, and a purpose to fulfil, cutting thevalley athwart with the edge of its solid front, sharp as that of aknife laid on a slice of bread: a black ominous mass of elementalobliteration, out of which there came a voice like the rushing of aflood and the beating of wings, mixed with a kind of wail, like thenoise of the cordage of a ship, in a gale at sea. It blotted outcreation, and in the phrase of old Herodotus, day suddenly became night.A moment later, I stood in whirling rain and fog that made sight uselessa yard away, as wet as one just risen from the sea, with a soul on thevery verge of cursing the Creator, for so abruptly dropping the curtainon his show: forgetting, in my ingratitude, first, the favour he haddone me; secondly, how many were those who had not seen; lastly, andabove all, that it was the very dropping of that stupendous curtain thatgave its finishing touch and climax to the show. For he knows best,after all. Introduce into Nature were it but a single atom of stint, ofparsimony, of preservation, of regret for loss; and the power, and withit, the sublimity of the infinite is gone. Were Nature to pose, toattitudinise for contemplation, even for the fraction of a second, shewould annihilate the condition on which reposes all her charm. Ruthlessdestruction, even of her own choicest works, is the badge of herinexhaustible omnipotence: add but a touch of pity, and you fall back tothe littleness and feebleness of man.
And I mused, as I departed: how can that be communicated to others,which cannot even be described at all? And if so, in the things of thebody, how much more with the things of the soul? Who shall convey to thesouls that stumble and jostle in the foggy valleys, any glimpse of thevisions, denied to them, above; any spark of comprehension of the thingsthat they might discern, on the tops of the pure and silent hills, thatstand uncomprehended, kissing heaven above the fog?
POONA, 1914
