A Mine of Faults
Translated from the Original Manuscript
By
F. W. Bain
Was it a Swoon or the Wine in her Eyes?
Ha! the whole World is one Azure Abyss.
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1910
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY
F. W. BAIN
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
DEDICATION
sic barbare vertendum.
uxor-mater-amica-soror-dea-filia-concham
vas infirmius hanc, helleborose, vocas?
aut sic
What! this mother-sister-daughter-goddess-wife-secreting Shell
This, the weaker vessel, holding Love and Life and Heaven and Hell!
Introduction
Though the old literature of the Hindoosis deficient in the department of politics—ithas no history, no orators, no Demosthenes,no Polybius, no Aristotle; for the dialectic ofpolitics appears to have been invented by thedivinely discontented Greek—though, I say, ithas no politics, it is permeated with policy. Theancients, says Aristotle, wrote politically, butwe rhetorically: and his remark is admirablyillustrated by e.g. the old Panchatantra,whose author certainly had in him as muchpolicy as Thucydides, although he chose todeliver his wisdom in apologues, rather thanin the prosaic and somewhat pedanticphotography of actual affairs. The Hindoo term,níti, means, not so much policy, as diplomacy,and so their níti-shastra, or doctrine ofpolicy, refers rather to the clever conduct ofaffairs in negotiation, than to anything else.And therefore, love-affairs, which we shouldhardly include under politics, fall in with theHindoo conception, and in this sense womenare, as the Hindoos think, and their annalsabundantly testify, at least the equals, inpolicy, of men. When the author of Eothencommended certain women of the Ægæan islesfor their admirable [Greek: politiue], he was using theterm exactly in the sense of níti. And thiscorrelation of diplomacy and love is thesubstance of the present story, the story of alove-affair, in which, if we may believe a greatauthority, the poet-king, Bhartrihari, thespecial quality required and exhibited is craft.The Hindoos in fact resemble women, andwomen the Hindoos, in this particular, thatthey are both of them apt to identify policywith craft, and like rivers, generally preferto reach desired ends by crooked ways: andthis is why both of them, though often verydexterous negotiators (like Wellington's "OldBrag," whom he thought superior to Talleyrand),have too much finesse to make reallysolid statesmen. For intrigue may be good,in war, and it may be good, in love, but itis not good, save in a subordinate and secondarysense, in state-affairs. Nothing durablewas ever built upon it. Strength is simple,but cu