The most popular of Anglo-Indian novels are probably those which deal in exact reproduction of ordinary incidents and conversation, related in a sprightly and humorous style. This accords with the taste of present-day readers, many of whom take up a book only for the momentary amusement that it gives them, and are well content with interminable dialogues that do little more than echo, with a certain spice of epigram and smart repartee, the commonplaces interchanged among clever people at a country house or in a London drawing-room. Nevertheless, we believe that Anglo-Indian fiction is seen at its best in the novel of action, since war and love-making must still, as formerly, rule the whole kingdom of romance; since as emotional forces they are the same in every climate and country. Each successive campaign in India, from the first Afghan War to the latest expedition across the Afridi frontier, has furnished the Anglo-Indian writer with a new series of striking incidents that can be used for his heroic deeds and dire catastrophes, for new landscapes and figures, all of them bearing the very form and stamp of impressive reality. If he is artist enough to avoid abusing these advantages, if he is neither an extravagant colourist nor a mere copyist or compiler, he has this fresh field to himself, he can give us a stirring narrative of frontier adventures, he can sketch in the aspect of a country or the distinctive qualities of a people that have preserved many of the features which in Europe have now vanished into the dim realms of early romance. His danger lies, as we have seen from some examples already quoted, in the temptation to make too much use of the attractive materials that are readily found to hand in military records or in such a real tragedy as the Sepoy mutiny, so that the novel is liable to become little more than authentic history related in a glowing, exuberant style of writing and portraiture.
In short, the Indian novel belongs to the objective outdoor class; it is full of open air and activity, and the introspective psychological vein is almost entirely wanting. There are, indeed, passages which indicate that peculiar sense of the correlation, so to speak, of the environment with the moods and feelings of men, the influence upon the human mind of nature--a sense which has inspired some of our finest poetry, and which is so well rendered by the best Russian novelists, by Tourguéneff and by Tolstoi. One work of Tolstoi's, _Les Cosaques_, might be especially recommended for study to the Anglo-Indian novelist of the future, as an example of the true impress that can be made upon a reader's mind by the literary art, when it succeeds in giving vivid interest to the picture of a solitary officer's life upon a dull and distant frontier.
