[Sidenote:  Due to nature?]

Pessimism is natural in India, say such writers as we have in mind, because of the spirit-subduing aspects of nature and life amid which Indians live their lives.  Life is of little value to the possessor, they say, where nature makes it a burden, and where its transitoriness is constantly being thrust upon us.  And that is so in India.  Great rivers keep repeating their contemptuous motto that “men may come and men may go,” and by their floods sometimes devastate whole districts.  Sailing up the Brahmaputra at one place in Assam, the writer saw a not uncommon occurrence, the great river actually eating off the soft bank in huge slices, five or six feet in breadth at a time.  Something higher up, it might have been the grounding of a floating tree, had turned the current towards the bank, and at five-minute intervals, it seemed, these huge slices were falling in.  Not fifty yards back from the bank stood a cottage, whose garden was already part gone; a banana tree standing upon one of these slices fell in and was swept down before our eyes.  Within an hour the cottage itself would meet the same fate, and the people were already rushing in and out.  Or pass to another aspect of nature.  For a season every year the unveiled Indian sun in a sky of polished steel glares with cruel pitiless eye.  The light is fierce.  Then, arbitrarily, as it seems, the rains may be withheld, and the hard-baked, heat-cracked soil never softens to admit the ploughshare, and hundreds of thousands of the cultivators and field hands are overtaken by famine.  At one time during the famine of 1899-1900, it will be remembered that six million people were receiving relief.  Or, equally arbitrarily, betokening some unknown displeasure of the gods, plague may take hold of a district and literally take its tithe of the population.  At any moment, life is liable to be terminated with appalling suddenness by cholera or the bite of a venomous serpent.

With French imagination and grace, in his Introduction to General History, Michelet describes the tyranny of nature—­“Natura maligna”—­in India.  “Man is utterly overpowered by nature there—­like a feeble child upon a mother’s breast, alternately spoiled and beaten, and intoxicated rather than nourished by a milk too strong and stimulating for it."[106] One cannot help contrasting the supplicating Indian villagers—­of whom a University matriculation candidate told in his essay, how, when the rains were withheld, they carried out the village goddess from her temple and bathed the idol in the temple tank—­with the English fisher-woman of whom Tennyson tells us, who shook her fist at the cruel sea that had robbed her of two sons.  As she looked at it one day with its lines of white breakers, she shook her fist at it and told it her mind—­“How I hates you, with your cruel teeth.”

Can this Indian aspect of nature, one wonders, be the true explanation of the fierceness of her goddesses as contrasted with her gods, and the offering of bloody sacrifices to goddesses only?  Mother Nature is malignant, not benign.