Memoirs of a Griffin: A Cadet's First Year in India
9781465680242
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Good wine, says the proverb, needs no bush; on the same principle, some will think that a book, if readable, may dispense with a preface. As a general rule this may be true, but there are occasions, and I take leave to deem this one of them, when, from the peculiar nature of the subject, a few preliminary observations, by creating a clear and possibly a pleasant understanding between the author and the gentle reader, may not be unacceptable or out of place. In the following little narrative, in which I have blended fact and fiction—though always endeavouring to keep the vraisemblable in view—my object has been to depict some of those scenes, characters, and adventures, which some five-and-twenty or thirty years ago a “jolly cadet”—alias a Griffin—was likely to encounter, during the first year of his military career; men, manners, and things in general have, since that period, undergone considerable changes; still, in its main features, the sketch I have drawn, admitting its original correctness, will doubtless apply as well to Griffins in the present mature age of the century, as when it was in its teens. The Griffin, or Greenhorn, indeed, though subject, like everything else, to the external changes incident to time and fashion, is, perhaps, fundamentally and essentially, one of the “never ending, still beginning” states, or phases of humanity, destined to exist till the “crash of doom.” The characters which I have introduced in my narrative (for the most part as transiently as the fleeting shadows of a magic lantern across a spectrum) are all intended to represent respectively classes having more or less of an Oriental stamp, some still existing unchanged—others on the wane—and a few, I would fain hope, who, like the Trunnions and Westerns (parva componere magnis) of the last age have wholly disappeared before the steadily increasing light of knowledge and civilization—influences destructive of those coarse humours, narrow prejudices, and eccentric traits, which, however amusing in the pages of the novelist, are wondrously disagreeable in real life. It is true, the gradual disappearance of these coarser features imposes on the painter of life and manners the necessity of cultivating a nicer perception—of working with a finer pencil, and of seizing and embodying the now less obvious indications of the feelings and passions—the more delicate lights and shades of mind and character—but still in parting in a great measure with the materials for coarse drollery and broad satire, the world perhaps on the whole will be a gainer; higher feelings will be addressed than those which minister to triumph and imply humiliation: for though ’tis well to laugh at folly and expose it—’twere perhaps better to have no folly or error to laugh at and expose.
