THE ORIENTAL MOTIVE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3004, 11 October 1911, Page 87

THE ORIENTAL MOTIVE.

j By Jbssik Mackat.

When has Anglo-Saxon literature been indifferent to the Oriental motive? In the dawn of written Saxon history we find the songs of the English moulded upon one great Eastern theme, saturated with one great Eastern book—the Bible. When the tempered fire of the Hebrew prophets blended with the barbaric energy j of Caedmon the Northman there was generated a new force in the world —a force that even then was shaping toward the later -lories of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton, and Browning. There has never been a time when that mighty foundation, has been wholly buried' under the straw of mere fantasy or the mud of realism; always there has been a Walter Neap, a Wyeliff, a Bunyan, or a Carlyle | to uncover the corner-stones of the ancient ! temple. But, putting aside that great underlying structure on which Saxon literature is essentially based, ■ there has been a lesser though insistent recurrence of the Oriental motive on lines not spiritual, or at least not spiritual in the old accepted sense. Either for love or for edification, the West, . arrogant in all that makes for earthly empire, has sought curiously, even humbly, the mystery of the silent, hooded East. First, quickened by the Crusades, came a vigorous growth of tales and lays sung by:,the minstrels "when "knighthood was in flower''—lays of Christian champions, Saracen princesses, and Persian magicians. It was then that, behind the known limits of Europe, loomed the golden realms of Prester John. India, Tartary, Cathay, were peopled by the mystic kings, the lovely ladies, the dark enchanters of a land where the laws and limits of Nature were no more in force. The current of imagination was suddenly turned westward in Tudor days by the discovery of the New World, but in the seventeenth century the old spell revived again,- with England's first settled trade relations with , India, and the cession of Bombay by the ' marriage of Charles II with the Portu- , guese princess. The eighteenth century saw a quantity of worthless stuff, Oriental shoddy, flung upon the reading market of England. Goldsmith shrewdly mimicked this tinsel romance in his discursive and gently satiric "Citizen of the World," while he adroitly turned the popular craze to profitable account. It was Beckford who wrote the most notable Eastern romance of this century—the .brilliant, ! bizarre, and repulsive "Vathek." But a sweeter fashion came in with Scott's "Fire King" and "Talisman," and his cameo legends scattered through other books, like the opal story in "Anne of Geier- ■ stein." j

The zenith of the Eastern theme in poetry was unquestionably . in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Then it was that Byron took Europe by storm with "The Gdaour," "The Corsair," and "The Bride of Abydos." Then it was that Moore received fabulous prices for "Lalla Rookh"—a thing of gauze and spangles to the modern eye, yet pretty enough to retain a kind of afterglow of remembrance, while its creator's feeble and diffuse "Loves of the Angels" has long passed to the limbo of forgotten things. In that place of oblivion they keen companywith Southey's monumental and once-admired _ "Thalaba" and "Curse of Kehama" —which contain a sounding phrase hero and there, as well as a ton of laboured research, which co lid not atone for lack of the divine afflatus that seldom attends poetry produced by the yard in Southey's businesslike fashion. Yet they had their day, as even had the Dresden China Indian rhymes of "L. E. L." This mass of verse all testified to the renewed Oriental stimulus imparted by the pioneer

publications of Sir William Jones and Auquetil Du Perron, and by Lane's translation of the- "Arabian N;ights." About that time, too, the attention of the literary world was turned once more on longforgotten and entombed Egypt. Few remember that in this connection we owe somewhat to the many-sided genius of Napoleon, who took savants as well as soldiers with him to conquer the throne of the East.

| Early and Mid-Victorian < literature, I however, owed singularly little to the ; Oriental motive. With Dickens, Thacke- ; ray, Carlyle, and George Eliol it was almost j non-existent. The novel, of manners and the gospel of humanity had superseded ! the rattle of adventure and the craving , for mystery. Bulwer Lytton alone was : faithful to the charm of the East in

| "Zanoni" and "A Strange Story," both fine specimens of the older school of ! romance. After him the silence was unbroken till almost simultaneously there appeared 'Mr Isaacs," by Marion Crawford, and the brilliant Indian stories of , Rudyard Kipling. Then, began a new ' era, when the artistic detachment of the '• old wonder-story gave way to a curious halt didactic, half contumacious cult that personally adopts the East as a mystic mother-influence transcending all tradij tions of birth and race. Thus on the one 'hand we have Marie Carellrs florid "Soul of Lilith" and '"Ardath," and on the other Lafcadio Hearne's magnetic "Kokoro" and other Looks., thrilled with the ultra-sentient poetry of old Japan. The very breath of the desert, haunted, haunting, imperious, lives in the bold pages of Ethel Stevens when she writes of the Mountains of God and of the spell that' tarns the ichorous blood of an Englishwoman to strange Bedouin flame. Equally beautiful but more sanely Western are the desert studies of Robert Ilichens. A crowd of less known writers are filling the magazines with Eastern tales of love and hate and magic. Flora Annie Steel, with her strong yet difficult style, and her photographic fidelity to the life she describes, stands in the forefront of historical novelists. ~ The most idyllic and beautiful book of the season is Mrs Maud Diver's "Lilama.ni," the tale of an Anglo-Hindu marriage. Two factors in the vast output of AngloOriental literature to day invests it with a deepened and almost disquieting interest. It has become a propaganda with such writers as Mrs Besant and A. P. Sinett. The school of thooso.phy founded by Madame Blavatsky a generation ago still holds its ground, and fo.r good or ill is permeating Western thought to an appreciable degree with doctrines of Yogi and Vedanta. Also it has become an articulate mode of expression for the Oriental-born, who are conquering in the very citadel of Western art. Such a one is the gifted Christian Parses, Cornelia Sorabji. whose symbolic prose poetry is a thing of iridescent beauty. Such are several of the newer school of Japanese writers, who are jnainly in touch with America.

This Oriental motive, then, is now vital. insistent, commanding, as never before. Its potency has never been m> evident, its .appeal has never been so person ail as now. It is no longer a literarv toy, it is past being a fetish ; it is a living pewer, and ac such it must be reckoned with.