Poets of John Company. Theodore Oliver Douglas Dunn

Introduction.

       Table of Contents

      NO complete anthology of verse written by Englishmen in India has ever been compiled; and the reason is not far to seek. Those writers who have achieved distinction have won for themselves a permanent place in the records of English literature. No history of our poetry will neglect the names of Bishop Heber and of Sir Edwin Arnold. Those writers who have failed to secure such recognition have been forgotten; and their published works, no longer in circulation, have become the hobby of the bibliophile and the collector.

      Three attempts have been made to rescue from neglect our English poets in India. Captain David Lester Richardson, who was on the staff of Lord William Bentinck, added, as an appendix to his Selections from the British Poets, several specimens of the poetry then produced in Bengal. This work was published in 1840. By that time the amount of this poetry was not inconsiderable; and Richardson contrived to bring together some eighteen names including his own. The specimens of the verse selected, if not of the highest order, are full of interest. This is the first anthology of Anglo-Indian poetry; and for its time it was the best. Richardson also compiled and edited The Bengal Annual, a collection of prose and verse that appeared on seven occasions; and much of the poetry of these annuals he included in his Selections from the British Poets. The work of Thomas Philip Manuel, who in 1861 published in Calcutta The Poetry of our Indian Poets, does not extend appreciably the range of Richardson's collection. The poems of this book are few in number and have been unskilfully chosen; but there are brief introductory biographies of the authors, and these are useful to the investigator. In 1868, Thomas Benson Laurence published his English Poetry in India, being biographical and critical notices of Anglo-Indian poets with copious extracts from their writings. This work ranks with that of Manuel, and is of ​equal value to the student. While these three publications show a certain interest in the poetry written by Englishmen in India, the date of their production makes them useless for the modern reader. The work of Richardson is inaccessible; and, if the anthologies of Manuel and Laurence were now available, they have been so badly produced and so inadequately edited, that for all save the lover of the curious, they are utterly without value.

      The reader who desires some acquaintance with the poetry produced by Englishmen in India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has no conveniently single book of reference. Unless he is prepared to spend hours of investigation in a few selected libraries, he will read none but the best known authors. He will not discover the delightful Letters of Simpkin the Second, nor revel in the Hudibrastic nonsense of Qui Hai. Tom Raw, the Griffin, will be unknown to him; and all that occasional writing, often coarsely realistic, that belongs to an age when the trick of pleasing expression in verse came as easy to the gentlemen of England as the nimble handling of a rapier. He may come across the gentle verse of Reginald Heber, and learn something of the vigour of John Leyden; but he will not make the acquaintance of Henry Meredith Parker, whose delicate humour illumines historical and topical themes. He will miss the scholarly work of David Lester Richardson, whose varied career as soldier and teacher brought him into touch with every phase of Anglo-Indian life in the first half of the nineteenth century. Sir Alfred Lyall's verse may lie to his hand, along with the Departmental Ditties. But, unless he has unusual good fortune, he will not easily find the Leviora of Thomas Francis Bignold, nor delight in that unexampled quatrain that has immortalised Eastern Bengal. In short, he will be deprived of a great amount of the pleasure to be found in the occasional verse written in and about India throughout the first three quarters of the nineteenth century.

      It would be unreasonable to maintain that, apart from authors of established reputation, there is any great quantity of valuable poetical work in the English literature ​of this period in India. Those writers who have fallen short of permanent recognition have, let it be admitted at once, deserved their fate. But, even if he miss the laurel wreath, an author may merit re-perusal. The peculiar conditions of their work, combined with its frequent historical interest, have given other than a purely literary value to the verse of several writers whose names this volume seeks to revive. There are poems whose appeal is enhanced by the special circumstances of their origin: of such is the amusing Ballad of Henry Torrens written in 1836; and, in far different mood, the Lay of Lachen by Colman Macaulay. In these works the "note of universality" may not be sounded; but their interest remains undisputed. There is much verse of this kind; but English poetry in India was not at all times occupied with ephemeral themes. Whatever may be said finally upon the value of the work produced by our exiled poets, their range and enterprise have been considerable. The best of them sought to interpret Eastern life and thought through the medium of English poetry, and so to assimilate their knowledge and experience of India as to enrich the literary inheritance of their countrymen. Less ambitious writers were content to find occasional topics in the comedy of Anglo-Indian life and in the varied scenery around them. Their handling of such themes was made the surer by long residence in India; and, in virtue of this, their work has a character and distinction of its own. Others, working through the medium of translation, have produced English poems of original value; and have contributed to that type of literary work which is associated inevitably with the masterpiece of Fitzgerald. Lastly, throughout much of the verse of this volume, there is illustrated the spirit of the literature of exile; and this, for an imperial and sea-faring people, must ever possess a peculiar attraction. In India the distinctive note of this literature was struck at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and it has been re-echoed in varying degrees of intensity, and in a great variety of moods, up to our own time.

      ​To the eighteenth century we must look, if we would understand the beginnings of English poetry in India. The traditions of that great age will die hard in the East; and it would be strange if the period that includes the career of Clive and Hastings had left no literary work of permanence. Towards the close of the eighteenth century the history of India had been given definite direction. England and France had fought to a final conclusion their duel in the East; and the shadow of Napoleonic dominance had been dissipated by the lightning of Nelson's guns at the battle of the Nile. In those triumphant days began the literary work of Englishmen in India; and, as befitted the eighteenth century, there was a high seriousness in this beginning. To Sir William Jones the heaped treasures of Oriental learning made as urgent an appeal as the hoarded wealth of the Moghul Empire to the merchant-adventurers of the Company. Apart from his work as a translator, he attempted to explain and illustrate the Hindu mythology in a series of original odes. His verse became a vehicle of scholarly instruction, exemplifying the stately dignity that derives from Milton and Gray. By the time of his death in the year 1794, he had ennobled the activities of his countrymen in the East, and had revealed to Europe a whole fresh world of literary investigation.

      At the beginning of the nineteenth century the romantic movement in the literature of England had begun to influence the small group of writers of whom Reginald Heber and John Leyden were the chief. The first has much of the gentle spirit of William Cowper; and the second has the fire and vigour that belong to the Scottish Border. Leyden was the friend of the great Sir Walter who alluded to his death in The Lord of the Isles.

      Scarba's Isle, whose tortured shore

       Still rings to Corrievreckan's roar.

      And lonely Colonsay:

       Scenes sung by him who sings no more,

      His bright and brief career is o'er,

      And mute his tuneful strains;

      ​

      Quench'd is his lamp of varied lore,

      That loved the light of song to pour:

       A distant and a deadly shore

      Has Leyden's cold remains.

      A third writer, Henry Derozio, whose birth and education in Calcutta sealed his connection with the East, was an enthusiastic follower of Byron. The work of these authors falls within the period preceding Macaulay's arrival in India. The year 1835, the date of the latter' famous minute on education which prompted Lord William Bentinck's decision to introduce English in Indian schools and colleges, may be