Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan | Page 2

himself distinguished among his countrymen for the
width of his views and the vigour of his intelligence. His only son,
Abju, died in 1865, at the age of fourteen, and left his two younger
sisters to console their parents. Aru, the elder daughter, born in 1854,
was eighteen months senior to Toru, the subject of this memoir, who
was born in Calcutta on the 4th of March, 1856. With the exception of
one year's visit to Bombay, the childhood of these girls was spent in
Calcutta, at their father's garden-house. In a poem now printed for the
first time, Toru refers to the scene of her earliest memories, the circling
wilderness of foliage, the shining tank with the round leaves of the
lilies, the murmuring dusk under the vast branches of the central
casuarina-tree. Here, in a mystical retirement more irksome to an
European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, the brain of this
wonderful child was moulded. She was pure Hindu, full of the typical
qualities of her race and blood, and, as the present volume shows us for
the first time, preserving to the last her appreciation of the poetic side
of her ancient religion, though faith itself in Vishnu and Siva had been

cast aside with childish things and been replaced by a purer faith. Her
mother fed her imagination with the old songs and legends of their
people, stories which it was the last labour of her life to weave into
English verse; but it would seem that the marvellous faculties of Toru's
mind still slumbered, when, in her thirteenth year, her father decided to
take his daughters to Europe to learn English and French. To the end of
her days Toru was a better French than English scholar. She loved
France best, she knew its literature best, she wrote its language with
more perfect elegance. The Dutts arrived in Europe at the close of 1869,
and the girls went to school, for the first and last time, at a French
pension. They did not remain there very many months; their father took
them to Italy and England with him, and finally they attended for a
short time, but with great zeal and application, the lectures for women
at Cambridge. In November, 1873, they went back again to Bengal, and
the four remaining years of Toru's life were spent in the old
garden-house at Calcutta, in a feverish dream of intellectual effort and
imaginative production. When we consider what she achieved in these
forty-five months of seclusion, it is impossible to wonder that the frail
and hectic body succumbed under so excessive a strain.
She brought with her from Europe a store of knowledge that would
have sufficed to make an English or French girl seem learned, but
which in her case was simply miraculous. Immediately on her return
she began to study Sanskrit with the same intense application which
she gave to all her work, and mastering the language with extraordinary
swiftness, she plunged into its mysterious literature. But she was born
to write, and despairing of an audience in her own language, she began
to adopt ours as a medium for her thought. Her first essay, published
when she was eighteen, was a monograph, in the "Bengal Magazine,"
on Leconte de Lisle, a writer with whom she had a sympathy which is
very easy to comprehend. The austere poet of "La Mort de Valmiki"
was, obviously, a figure to whom the poet of "Sindhu" must needs be
attracted on approaching European literature. This study, which was
illustrated by translations into English verse, was followed by another
on Joséphin Soulary, in whom she saw more than her maturer judgment
might have justified. There is something very interesting and now, alas!
still more pathetic in these sturdy and workmanlike essays in unaided

criticism. Still more solitary her work became, in July, 1874, when her
only sister, Aru, died, at the age of twenty. She seems to have been no
less amiable than her sister, and if gifted with less originality and a less
forcible ambition, to have been finely accomplished. Both sisters were
well-trained musicians, with full contralto voices, and Aru had a faculty
for design which promised well. The romance of "Mlle. D'Arvers" was
originally projected for Aru to illustrate, but no page of this book did
Aru ever see.
In 1876, as we have said, appeared that obscure first volume at
Bhowanipore. The "Sheaf gleaned in French Fields" is certainly the
most imperfect of Toru's writings, but it is not the least interesting. It is
a wonderful mixture of strength and weakness, of genius overriding
great obstacles and of talent succumbing to ignorance and inexperience.
That it should have been performed at all is so extraordinary that we
forget to be surprised at its