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    Bubbles of the Foam
    Bubbles of the Foam
    Bubbles of the Foam
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Bubbles of the Foam

    By F. W. Bain

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    Another magical tale from literary fraudster F.W. Bain, supposedly translated from an ancient Sanscrit text but most probably written by the author. The god Maheshwara and his consort Párwatí are flying over the desert when they see a mirage, which the Hindus call the "thirst of the antelope", and the skeleton of a camel. Maheshwara tells the story of how those bones came to be there; a sad story of love, the human mirageDuring Bain's life, argument raged about whether his stories were truly a translation from Sanskrit, as he claimed them to be, or whether Bain had written it himself. While some early reviewers took his statements at face value, many did not. A contemporary review said, in part: “Though palpably a pretence, they are graceful fancies, and might as well have appeared for what they really are instead of masquerading as "translations". No Hindu, unless of this generation and under foreign influence, ever conceived these stories. . . . Moreover, they are of a strict propriety, whereas original Hindu love stories would put Rabelais's ghost to the blush.” The book contains numerous footnotes referring to Sanskrit puns and wordplay that the author claimed to have been unable to render in English. (Excerpt from Wikipedia)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOtbebookpublishing
    Release dateOct 24, 2017
    ISBN9783958649255
    Bubbles of the Foam
    Author

    F. W. Bain

    Francis William Bain (29 April 1863 – 3 March 1940) was a British writer of fantasy stories that he claimed were translated from Sanskrit. The first of these was A Digit of the Moon (1898),[5] which Bain claimed was his translation of the eighth part of sixteen of a Sanskrit manuscript given to him by a brahmin. In the story, the king Súryakánta falls in love with the wise and beautiful princess Anangarágá, who will marry only the suitor who asks her a question she cannot answer. The king, with his clever friend Rasakósha, sets off to win the hand of the princess. During Bain's life, the argument raged about whether the story was truly a translation or whether Bain had written it himself. While some early reviewers took his statements at face value,[6] many did not. (Wikipedia)

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      Book preview

      Bubbles of the Foam - F. W. Bain

      GLENCONNER

      CONTENTS

      I. A Spoiled Child

      II. The Thirst of an Antelope

      I. A DAPPLED DAWN

      II. A GLAMOUR OF NOON

      III. THE DESERT AND THE NIGHT

      INTRODUCTION

      Four things are never far from you, in old Hindoo literature: underfoot, all round you, or away on the horizon, there they always are: the Forest, the Desert, the River, and the Hills.

      It is never very easy, to understand the Past that really is a past: and the age of Forests, like that of chivalry, is gone. But in the case of ancient India, the chief obstacle to understanding arises from our bad habit of always looking at the map with the North side up. Why this inveterate apotheosis of the North? Would you understand the old Hindoos, you must turn the map of India very nearly upside down, so as to get Peshawar at the bottom, and the Andaman Islands exactly at the top. And then, history lies all before you, right side up, and you get your intellectual bearings, and take in the early situation, at a glance. Entering, like those old nomads, through the Khaibàr, you find yourself suddenly in the Land of Streams: and as you drift along, you go, simply because you must, straight on, down the River ganging on (

      Gangá

      ) towards the rising sun, ahead, (which is the Sanskrit term for East,) all under the colossal wall of Hills, the home of Snow, where the gods live, on your left (

      uttara

      , the North, the heights;) while on the South, (the

      right

      hand,

      dakshina

      , the Deccan) you are debarred, not by Highlands, but by two not less peremptory rebutters: first, by the Desert,

      Marusthali

      , the home of death: and then again, a little farther on, by the Forest of the South: the vast, mysterious, impenetrable Wood, of which the Rámáyana preserves for us the pioneering record and original idea, with its spell of the Unknown and the Adventure (like the Westward Ho! of a later age) with its Ogres and its Sprites, its sandal trees and lonely lotus-tarns, its armies of ugly little ape-like men, and its legendary Lanka (Ceylon) lost in a kind of halo of shell-born pearls, and gems, and their Ten-headed Devil King, Ráwana, away, away, at the very end of all: so distant, as to be little more than mythical, little better than a dream. No! Those who wish to see things with the eyes of old Hindoos must not begin, as we did, and do still, with Ceylon, and the adjacent coasts of Coromandel and Malabar. That is the wrong, the

      other

      end: it is like starting English history from the peak in Darien.

      But our particular concern, in these pages, is with the Desert. The conventional notion of a desert, as a colourless and empty flat of sand, is curiously unlike the thing itself, which is a constantly changing, kaleidoscopic sea of colour, made up of rainbow stripes, black, golden, red, dazzling white, and blue, with every kind of lights and shadows, strange hazes, transparencies, and gleams. True, the ground you actually tread upon is bare: but it is clothed with raiment woven by that magic artist, Distance, out of cloud and heat and air and sky. And so, when these old Hindoo people came to make a closer acquaintance with the Desert, so dangerous to enter, so difficult, as Mahmood subsequently found, to cross, they discovered, that over and above the plain prosaic danger, this Waste of Sand laid, like a very demon, goblin snares for the unwary traveller's destruction, in the form of its Mirage. Ignorant of optical phenomena, they gazed at this strange illusion, these phantom trees and water, these mocking semblances of cities that vanished as you reached them, with astonishment, and even awe. It struck their imagination, and they gave to it a name scarcely less poetical than the thing: calling it "

      deer-water

      , or the

      thirst of the antelope

      ."[1] Nor was this all. For the apparition was a kind of symbol, made as it were expressly for their own phenomenology: it contained a moral meaning that harmonised precisely with all their philosophical ideas. What could be a better illustration of that Máyá, that metaphysical Delusion, in which all souls are wrapped, which leads them to impute Reality to the Phantasms, the unsubstantial objects of the senses, and lures them on to moral ruin as they wander in the waste? And accordingly, we find the poets constantly recurring to this

      thirst of the gazelle

      , as an emblem of the treacherous and bewildering fascination of the fleeting shadows of this lower life (

      ihaloka

      ;) the beauty that is hollow, the Bubble of the World. And thus, Disappointment is of the essence of Existence: disappointment, which can only come about, when hopes and expectations have been founded on a want of understanding (

      awiweka

      ;) a blindness, born of Desire, that sets and keeps its unhappy victims hunting, in vain, for what is not to be found.

      Especially, essentially, in love: love, which has its origin in Dream, its acme in Ecstasy, and its catastrophe in Disillusion: love, which is life's core and kernel and epitome, the focus and quintessence of existence. A life that is without it has somehow missed its mark: it is meaningless and plotless, a string of casual episodes, like a bad tragedy. For what, after all, is Love? Who has given an account of it? Plato's fable, which makes Love the child of Satiety and Want, or Poverty and Plenty, is a pretty piece of fancy: it is clever: but like mathematics, an explanation of the brain rather than the heart. Something is missing. For Plato, almost always delicate and subtle, is never tender: the reason is, that he was atrophied on the feminine side: he does not consequently understand sex, being himself only half a man: that is, only man and nothing more. But all the really great imaginative men are bi-sexual: they have a large ingredient of woman in their composition, which gives to their divination an extra touch of something that others cannot reach. And so, with equal poetry, yet with a pathos infinitely deeper, our Milton makes Love the child of Loneliness:[2] a parentage evinced by the terrible melancholy of Love when he cannot find his proper object, and the blank desolation and despair of the frightful void and blackness left behind, when he has lost it. But now, it is just this intolerable loneliness which makes him idealise the commonplace, and see all things in the light of his own yearning, creating for himself visions of unimaginable happiness, which presently vanish, to resolve his Eden into nothing, and leave him, with no companion but the horror of his own intensified isolation, in the sand. A situation, which hardly any lover that really is a lover can endure, without going mad. They are very shallow theologians, who by way of pandering to sentimental prejudices make the essence of the Deity to consist in Love. Poor Deity! his life would be a Hell, past all human imagination: an everlasting Loneliness, with no prospect of release. For it is precisely to escape from this hell that so many forlorn lovers take refuge in the tomb: a resource not available to those who cannot die. Death is not always terrible: sometimes he is kind.

      Such then is the theme of

      Bubbles of the Foam

      : a little love-story, whose title, like that of all her elder sisters, has in the original a double application, by reason of the ambiguity of the last word, to Love, and to the Moon. We might also render it,

      A Heavenly Bubble

      , or,

      Love is a Bubble

      , or

      Nothing but a Bubble

      , or

      A Bubble of the World

      ,[3] thinking either of Love or the Moon. For the Moon, like the goddess of Love, rose originally from the sea: and they retain traces of their origin, both in their essence and their appearance. For what is more like a great Foam-Bubble than the Moon? and what is more like the delusion of love than a bubble of the foam, so beautiful in its play of colour, while it endures: so evanescent, so hollow, leaving behind it when it bursts and disappears nothing but a memory, and a bitter taste of brine? And as love is but a bubble, so are all its victims merely bubbles of a bubble: for this also is mirage.

      Mirage! mirage! That is the keynote of the old melancholy Indian music; the bass, whose undertone accompanies, with a kind of monotonous solemnity,

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