Later Mughals v1.c4.s2.t2: The Later Mughals Left a Fragment
Later Mughals v1.c4.s2.t2
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- English
The Later Mughals Left a Fragment
v1.c4.s2.t2.1
But students of Indian history must lament that Mr. Irvine ever set his hand to the *Storia* and the *Army of the Indian Moghuls*; these books prevented the continuation of *The Later Mughals* to the date, 1765, after which the Persian records cease to be of first-rate value and we get full light from the documents in the European tongues. In these Persian records lay the special strength of Mr. Irvine. He had spent a life in collecting, mastering and arranging them; and his death robbed the world of all his garnered knowledge. His successor in the same field will have to begin at the very beginning and to spend years in going over the same materials, and can hope to arrive at Mr. Irvine’s position only after twenty years of preliminary study. If Mr. Irvine had rigorously shunned all such diversions of his attention and pushed on with his grand work, he could in his remaining years have placed on record his life’s accumulation of information and reflection on the decline and fall of the Mughal Empire, and completed its history at least up to its practical extinction about the middle of the 18th century. But he has not done it; and for years to come we have little chance of his unfinished task being carried to completion with anything approaching the high standard of fulness and accuracy he attained in the portion he lived to write. In this respect the world is distinctly the poorer for his having undertaken to edit Manucci.
v1.c4.s2.t2.2
Shortly after he had begun work on Manucci, Mr. Irvine was attacked by the disease to which he ultimately succumbed in 1911. For the last eight years of his life he was haunted by a sad foreboding that his days on earth were numbered and that the chosen work of his life was destined to remain a fragment. In letter after letter he urged me to hurry on with my own historical work if I wished him to see it.
v1.c4.s2.t2.3
"At my age I cannot afford to lose any time, as I fear not surviving to finish the long and heavy tasks I have on hand." (18th March, 1904).
v1.c4.s2.t2.4
"I see every reason to believe that your edition of the Alamgir letters will be a thorough, good piece of work,—but I trust it will not be too long delayed,—for I am getting old and shall not last very much longer." (16th Jan. 1906).
v1.c4.s2.t2.5
"I hope that your first volume of Aurangzib may appear before I leave the scene." (29th Jan. 1909).
v1.c4.s2.t2.6
At last in October, 1907 he mournfully admitted that he had not enough strength left to complete his original plan, and that he was not likely to write much more of The Later Mughals than the portion already sent to the press. Things looked a little more hopefully for him in the warm weather of 1910. As he wrote on 8th July—
v1.c4.s2.t2.7
"Thanks for your enquiries about my health. Decay has not come on so rapidly as I thought it would. The complaint I suffer from is under control and apparently no worse than it was five years ago,—and considering I was 70 three days ago, I have a fair amount of activity, bodily and mental, left to me. In fact I am contemplating this next winter writing out my Bahadur Shah chapter (1707—1712) and sending it to the Asiatic Society of Bengal."
v1.c4.s2.t2.8
But unfortunately the hope was delusive. On the last day of the year he was taken very ill. For some time it was expected that he might recover a certain amount of health and strength. In the summer of 1911 he was a little better and appeared to be getting stronger. On 31st August he wrote to me,
v1.c4.s2.t2.9
"I am coming downstairs once a day for 4 or 5 hours...... I am working on quietly and happily. My upper part—heart, lungs and liver, are declared by the specialist to be quite clear and likely to go on [doing their] work so long well that I may reasonably [hope for ] a continued life of five to ten years. So it is worth while going on, as I shall be able to finish one thing or [another.]"
v1.c4.s2.t2.10
The improvement, however, was temporary. Since the autumn set in, he began to fail rapidly and it was realized that he could not last the winter. He bore his long and trying illness with admirable patience and fortitude, and passed away quietly at last on Friday, 3rd November, 1911.
v1.c4.s2.t2.11
Since S. R. Gardiner died with the cry "My History! Oh, my History!" there has been no such sad case of a monumental work undertaken with the fulness of knowledge but cut short by the cruel hand of death. For Gardiner, however, there was the consolation that he had arrived almost within sight of his goal, the Restoration, and was leaving a not unworthy disciple and continuer in Prof. Firth. This consolation was denied to the closing years of William Irvine's life.