as a matter of course, were made up of these things only. The instinct of the race
is to see life through the national pea-soup fog, which makes all things dingy,
unlovely, and ugly. Nothing is more difficult than to induce men of our race to
confess that in their lives—hard though they may have been—good things have
not held aloof, and that they have often been quite happy under the most unlikely
circumstances, and in spite of the many horrors and privations which have long
encompassed them about.
Let us take the Hell first. We often have to do so, making a virtue of necessity,
and a habit is a habit; moreover, our pains are always more interesting than our
pleasures—to our neighbours. Therefore, let us take the dark view of up-country
life to start upon. In the beginning, when first a man turns from his own people,
and dwells in isolation among an alien race, he suffers many things. The solitude
of soul—that terrible solitude which is only to be experienced in a crowd—the
dead monotony, without hope of change; the severance from all the pleasant
things of life, and the want of any substitutes for them, eat into the heart and
brain of him as a corrosive acid eats into iron. He longs for the fellowship of his
own people with an exceeding great longing, till it becomes a burden too
grievous to bear; he yearns to find comradeship among the people of the land,
but he knows not yet the manner by which their confidence may be won, and
they, on their side, know him for a stranger within their gates, view him with
keen suspicion, and hold him at arm's length. His ideas, his prejudices, his
modes of thought, his views on every conceivable subject differ too widely from
their own, for immediate sympathy to be possible between him and them. His
habits are the habits of a white man, and many little things, to which he has not
yet learned to attach importance, are as revolting to the natives, as the pleasant
custom of spitting on the carpet, which some old-world Râjas still affect, is to
Europeans. His manners, too, from the native point of view, are as bad as his
habits are unclean. He is respected for his wisdom, hated for his airs of
superiority, pitied for his ignorance of many things, feared for what he
represents, laughed at for his eccentric habits and customs, despised for his
infidelity to the Faith, abhorred for his want of beauty, according to native
standards of taste, and loved not at all. The men disguise their feelings, skilfully
as only Orientals can, but the women and the little children do not scruple to
show what their sentiments really are. When he goes abroad, the old women
snarl at him as he passes, and spit ostentatiously, after the native manner when
some unclean thing is at hand. The mothers snatch up their little ones and carry
them hurriedly away, casting a look of hate and fear over their shoulders as they
run. The children scream and yell, clutch their mothers' garments, or trip and