The novel cast in the form of extracts from the diary of a French catholic girl, covers the period of a year and a half from the time when Marguerite, the heroine leaves her convent to her premature death. The scene is laid in France and the characters are all French men and women. The novel begins, as Mlle. Bader puts it, with ‘the pretty prattle of a young girl who has known no sorrow and whose heart is filled with pure and simple joys unclouded by sorrow. Marguerite d’ Averse is the only child of her parents a retired general and his wife, who are now living in Brittany. She has just left the convent after spending many happy years there and comes back to home to celebrate her fifteenth birthday. At her birthday party, she meets friends whom she had known in her childhood, Madame Gosevell with her two sons, Dunoins and Gaston.
Three days later a young officer, Louis Lefevre, visits their home. He is the orphan son of old friend of Marguerite’s parents. A glimpse is given of the way in which Marguerite fills up her days in her walks with her father in tending her domestic pets, and in visiting the poor and old in the neighbouring villages. Her parents want her to marry Louis Lefevre but Marguerite refuses for she has already fallen in love with Count Dunois, and his mother the countess become very happy to discover this fact. However, Dunois and Gaston, the younger brother both falls in love with the maid Jeannette, a village girl, whom Marguerite had earlier sent to the countess. Dunois kills his brother in a fit of madness and jealousy. After recovering sanity, he became aware of his crime and of Marguerite’s love for him and then he confessed his infatuation for Jeannette. He is sentenced at the trial of fifteen year’s hard labour. Afflicted by these developments, Marguerite falls seriously ill. She approaches death and, on her recovery learns that Donois has committed suicide in another fit of insanity and the countess has lost the balance of her mind in consequence. Louis Leferve visits her during her illness and impressed by his constancy in love and to her parent’s wishes, she agrees to become his wife. Both at the wedding ceremony and subsequently she has a premonition of her early death. However, she is resigned, feeling that God knows best what is best for man’s good. The sisterly affection she had at the outset for Louis develops into a deep love, and the end of the story is taken up with an account of her happy days of married life at Nice, her return home and death there , leaving a little son.
The novel though originally written in French is very different from the ordinary French novel. The story is certainly awful but not gruesome and is free from sordid details, such as we often find in a French novel of the same nature. The novel tends to be melodramatic at times, but overall, a high-toned spirit pervades it.
Reviewers complemented Toru Dutt for her unique vision. James Darmesteter, Adrien Desprez, Garcin de Tassy (the eminent orientalist) and many other French writers and critics praised it whole-heartedly. England also joined the chorus of praise for Toru Dutt and her work. Sunday Review of London observed:
There is every reason to believe that in intellectual power Toru Dutt was one of the most remarkable women that ever lived. Had George Sand or George Eliot died at the age of twenty-one, they would certainly not have left behind them any proof of application or originality superior to those bequeathed to us by Toru Dutt and we discover little of merely ephemeral precocity in the attainments of this singular girl. 20
Sir Edmond Gosse, writes about this novel :
As a literary composition, Mlle. D. Arvers deserves high commendation. It deals with the ungovernable passion of two brothers for one placid and beautiful girl, a passion that leads to fratricide and madness. That it is a very melancholy and tropical story is obvious from this brief sketch of its contents, but it is remarkable for coherence and self – restraint no less than for vigour of treatment, Toru Dutt never sinks to melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale, and the wonder is that she is not more often fantastic and unreal. 16
Reading the novel one critic remarked, “This one surpasses all the prodigies. She (Toru) is a Frenchwoman in this book and a Frenchwoman like our selves; she thinks, she writes like one of us”. She had written it from the standpoint of a devout Roman Catholic. Mile Bader feels that there are evidence in it of Oriental customs and modes of thought, which stamp it, so to speak, with the hallmark of the authoress’s own personality. Le Journal de Mademoiselle d`Arvers, in spite of the thoroughly French form and inspiration, ‘reminds us of exotic flowers transplanted in our country, which, though they may be acclimatized keep the very scent of their native soil’. It is remarkable that in recent year’s two complete translations of the novel appeared in Bengali, one by Raj Kumar Mukherjea, in 1949 and the other by Prithwindranath Mukhopadhyaya.
The presentiment of premature death must have possessed Toru, and in all probability, she wrote her novel in secret, as she never cared to mourn aloud the tragedy of her family before other people. However, through Marguerite’s Toru was able to express some of their pent up feelings. The main source of appeal of the novel to its readers is not the plot, nor its melodrama but the course of Marguerite’s development and her early death – so like the fate of the writer herself. 17
Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan
Toru’s genius reached its climax in Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, which was published in 1882 by Kegan Paul and Co. London. The need for roots prompted the poetess to write Ancient Ballads. Toru’s studies in Sanskrit extended to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Iliad and Odyssey of Indian literature. She seems to have been fired with the idea of presenting some of the grand stories of her Indian heritage in order to gain the appreciation and sympathy of English readers18 The volume comprises nine ballads and Legends - Savitri, Lakshman, Jogadhya Uma, The Royal Ascetic and the Hind, Dhruva, Buttoo, Sindhu, Prahlad and ‘Sita’. Apart from these, the volume also contains a few personal poems in a separate section called The Miscellaneous Poems.
Ancient Ballads reveal that she belonged to the Romantic tradition of poetry. B.N. Seal called her “the first neo romantic Bengali writer”. The dominant lyric in her poetry may be accredited partly to her musical gift and predominantly soft feelings and partly to her intimate study of the French Romantic poets of the 19th century. There is Jane Austenean calm in her poetry. There is also a deep nostalgic strain in it. Toru’s treatment of the myths and legends of Ancient India has “a romantic suggestion”, and her fondness for them may be said to have introduced “a kind of medievalism”19 into Indo – English verse. The poetry of Toru Dutt is notable also for the feel of Indian life in an intricate tongue.
As for the themes of the ballads, they are so evident that they hardly need any elaboration. It is not surprising; therefore, that piety in some form or other should be the theme of Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, and that in them the religious note should sound strongly. Savitri tells us about the triumph of constancy in love and purity in thought; Lakshman shows the unmistakable sense of duty on the part of that prince; Joadhya Uma recounts the sudden appearance of goddess Uma to a simple pedlar and not a ritualist priest; The Royal Ascetic and the Hind relates king Bharat’s matchless asceticism vis-à-vis his growing love for a forlorn Fawn; Dhruva is about the prince Dhruva who failed to secure the love of his royal father owing to the interference of his step – mother and hence resolved to achieve the most prized spiritual greatness; Buttoo deals with the rejection of Buttoo as a pupil by Dronacharjya and the unswerving determination of that pupil to excel in the art of archery; Sindhu depicts the character of an ideal son devoted to the service of his parents, weak and blind; Prahlad is the story of a great devotee, who did not hesitate to oppose even his tyrannical father, King Heerun Kasyapu; Sita brings to light Sita’s unmerited sufferings at the hands of Rama.20
Ancient Ballads as a whole contains narrative loaded with lyrical profusion of joy and sorrow, anger and pathos, hope and frustration. But such profusion does not in any way retard the flow of the stories of the past. It appears from the volume that the pathetic incidents of life moved the poetess most, the comic
and heroic rarely appealed to this “fragile exotic blossom of song”. 21
The stories of Savitri, Lakshman, Buttoo, Prahlad etc. are not mere tales for nursery children but are instinct with great moral values. The ballads are steeped in Hindu ideals and sentiments and give a vivid picture of Indian life and customs:
And think upon the dreadful curse
Of widowhood; the vigils, fasts.
And penances; no life is more.
Than hopeless life, – the while it lasts. 22
In fact, she transfers some vigour of Sanskrit tradition to English language when she gives a local habitation to such unique appearance and mystic actions as presented in Jogadhya Uma, Savitri and Prahlad. The atmosphere of mystery and romance and of wonder and enchantment intertwined with philosophical, cultural, political and ethical issues gives Ancient Ballads its unique character.
In an age of imperialism and totalitarianism, Toru had the courage to strike a note of socialism and democracy. Like a true genius, she reduces to fragments the empty social beliefs and political concepts:
What is rank or caste
In us is honour, or disgrace,
Not out of us…23
As we read the following lines with a proper understanding, the modern women’s liberation movement gets an impulsion:
In those far – off primeval days.
Fair India’s daughters were not pent
In closed zenanas.24
It is this note of modernity, which accounts for Toru Dutt’s universal appeal. Sir Gosse pays only a well – merited tribute to Toru Dutt when he remarks “No modern oriental has given so strange an insight into the conscience of the Asiatic as is presented in the stories of Prahlad and of Savitri or so quaint a piece of religious fancy as the ballad of Jogadhya Uma.25
Toru Dutt is a great lover of nature and she takes us to that almost Keatsian world where beauty and truth become each other’s revelation. A sunset or a rainbow in the sky, a fresh flower or a shaded grove sent her into raptures and she sang gaily of them. This is a charming portrayal of the sunset on a reddened Indian lake in Sindhu:
Upon the glossy surface fell
The last beams of the day
Like fiery darts, that lengthening swells.
As breezes wake and play.26
Then there are seven miscellaneous poems contained in the second part of Ancient Ballads and legends of Hindustan. They are more or less autobiographical in content and they show her power at its best. In these poems, the poet expresses certain impressions and experiences, which are purely personal. Her father among her papers found these poems after her death. They covered the whole of her creative period.58 The earliest piece was composed during her stay in England (1870 -1873) and the latest a few months before her death.27 Keeping their quality in mind scholars have suggested that in spite of her short life Toru might have written “beautiful lyrics”28 and “a powerful sonnet sequence or poetic tragedy”.29
In some of miscellaneous poems she depicts the beauty of nature; in others her painful awareness of human predicament and human suffering. Her ‘sweetest songs are those tell of saddest thoughts.’
Near Hastings, records, with Toru’s characteristic clearness and simplicity of style, an incident in her life in England. She and her sister, the latter still suffering, were resting on the beach near Hastings, when a woman passing by noticed them. She stopped and entered into friendly conversation with them, and before going, gave Aru some beautiful roses, and thereby won Toru’s undying gratitude. Years afterwards, she sang:
Her memory will not depart,
Though grief my years should shade,
Still bloom her roses in my heart!
And they shall never fade! 30
E.J. Thompson remarks, Near Hastings is a lyric which brings a lump to the throat and should convince the most careless and supercilious of the grace and wisdom, the political expediency even of receiving with kindness theses strangers with whom destiny has so strongly linked us and who so often find our manners like our northern climate cold”.31
France 1870 is a little poem, which shows Toru’s love and admiration for France. Like Sarojini Naidu, she was an ardent lover of liberty, which is evident in this poem. In this piece, the poetess expresses her true sympathy for France during the troublesome days of Franco-Prussion war.
The piece entitled The Tree of Life describes a vision in sleep. Toru Dutt expresses her wonderful experience, how an angel, his face lit up with pity and love divine, once stood by the side of ‘a tree with spreading branches’ and crowned her head ‘a few small sprays’. This is the nearest to the recordation of a ‘mystic’ experience in Toru’s poetry. Biographically, it is of great interest to us, as the last poem composed by Toru.
The next poem On the Fly–Leaf of Erckmann–Chatrian’s Novel Entitled “Madame Therese”, is the about a patriotic woman of France, who has become immortal for her heroic deeds.
This poem and France 1870 have touches of a bold imaginative vigour, absent in her earlier works. According to E.J. Thompson, “Her (Toru’s) love for France was passionate, a second patriotism; but no one today is likely to quarrel with her enthusiasm for the generous nation that has so long and so signally served civilization. Her letters show that the France – Prussian war stirred her sympathies; no Frenchwoman could have felt more poignantly for her bleeding country. 32 She wrote:
….. When rose high your Marseillaise
Man knew his rights to earth’s remotest bound,
And tyrant trembled. Yours alone the praise!
Ah, had a Washington but then been found! 33
Everyone has appreciated the two sonnets, Baugmaree and The Lotus. In the first memorable sonnet, the poetess describes the scenic beauty of the place where she passed a major portion of her life. It is about her Indian garden, girt round with its ‘sea of foliage’ of varying shades, with its vivid splashes of colour where the Seemuls lean above the pools:
Red, red and startling like a trumpet’s sound. 34
In the midst of such natural beauty, one is sure to feel all fresh and cheerful. Toru calls her garden a primeval Eden to be seen only with amazement. Toru’s love of nature is apparent in this sonnet.
The Lotus deals with the birth of that charming flower. To end the dispute as to whether the lily or the rose were queen, Psyche at last went to Flora and asked for a flower that should be delicious as the rose and stately as the lily in her pride: And Flora gives him :
“____ The lotus, “rose red” dyed,
And “Lily – white, queenliest flower that blows.”35
Our Casuarina tree, her best-known poem is rightly treated as the norm of her poetic achievement and potentialities. The tree is both: a tree and a symbol and it I has implicated both time and eternity. It communicates the poet’s sense of loss due to the deaths of her brother and sister as defined through the relationship between them and the old Casuarina tree in her garden. The poet evolves the relationship in three stages. The first two stanzas present a vision, which establishes the present changeless reality of the tree in its static – dynamic beauty.
The third stanza marks the strategic point of departure from the present into the past and links up the tree with Toru’s memories of her lost brother and sister.
O sweet companions, loved with love intense.
For your shakes shall the tree be ever dear!
In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes! 36
If the first two stanzas describe the tree’s eternal identity, the next two explore its more authentic identity in the context of the poetess’s personal life.
And every time the music,-before
Mine inner vision rose a form sublime,
Thy form. O Tree, as in may happier prime.
I saw thee, in my own loved native clime.37
The concluding stanza connects the past with the future. Here Toru made a wish for the immortality of the tree as she was listening the footsteps of approaching death towards herself.
<
br /> May love defend thee from oblivion’s curse. 38
The poem sets in action a double process of commemoration. It commemorates the tree, which already commemorates the departed ones. The success of the poem lies in the concretization of some thing as amorphous as nostalgia, which is a common enough experience of all exiles 39 In this poem the intellectual element of poetic speech passes into an ecstasy of a spiritual vision. More then being the poetic evocation of the tree, the poem is a meeting – point for the past and the present, for time and eternity.
Letters
Toru Dutt was also an outstanding writer of letters. Most of her letters were directed to her Cambridge friend Miss Mary Martin and some to the renowned French authoress Mlle. Clarisse Bader, whose love and admiration she won through correspondence. She wrote 53 letters to Mary in all between the dates of December 1873 and July 30, 1877. These letters reveal her closeness with Mary as well as sensitive feminine nature. They are collected in Harihar Das’s monumental book The life and Letters of Toru Dutt (1921). They are rich with ‘the evolutionary growth of a nascent personality’. 40 In her letters, Toru comes out as a woman–child, pure, sweet, modest and essentially lovable, with a real Indian’s love of home and country. Toru has no reservations with Mary, and pours out the joys and sorrows of her affectionate heart. Nevertheless, the letters are not mere exchanges of confidences between two girls and records of mundane events – they bear a cultured and literary stamp. According to Harihar Das, if Toru’s genius ‘had been allowed to reach maturity, her letters might have ranked as English classics.’
It is through the letters that we have a clear and comprehensive view of Toru’s hopes and longings and everyday doings. It must be mentioned here that she, in her letters, is a tenderhearted little maid, merging imperceptibly into a woman, a woman still of tender heart and pure thought, but gifted with a keen insight into the life of things. Her letters to Mary show that she always irradiated the atmosphere of her parental home in Calcutta with mirth and laughter, fun and beauty, and that she did not forget to oblige her friends with a line or two even during her dire illness.
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