1. CHITRA
TO HEARKEN IS better than the fat of rams, but seldom as popular. It requires a silent atmosphere, and, when the voice is Apollo’s, an ear attentive to beauty. Rare in all places, it is almost unknown in cultured London, where there is noise without and deafness within. The Londoner, and still more the Londoness, prefers adoration to attention. It proves less fatiguing in the long run, and induces a more pleasing glow. It implies enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is surely what we all need. It implies elevation and breadth. Consequently London is the City of booms, of transient fanaticisms that raise the spirit to fever heat and pass leaving it a little weaker. There is no connection between one boom and the next. The rams are driven hurriedly from altar to altar, and their blood has scarcely cooled to Emil Reich before it is poured in unexampled profusion to Mr. Tagore.
The reviewer, while affecting to be above such hysteria, is really involved in it, and it is difficult to listen through the noise and the nonsense of the last two years and catch the authentic voice of Tagore beyond. He is a good writer. All must assent to this minimum. But how good? To that there can be no answer until the adoration and the reaction all adoration entails have passed away, until the mess of the sacrifices has been cleared up, and Beauty can pronounce across the subsiding dust.
Meanwhile, here is Chitra, a fairy play in nine scenes. Does it contain any hints for a verdict? It was written long before the boom, to be acted by villagers in India.
This is the story. Princess Chitra, of manlike appearance and garb, loves the ascetic Arjuna, and to win him prays the gods for female grace. It is granted to her for one year. At the close she tells him that the form he has loved is illusion, and that she is only Chitra, ugly, the daughter of a king. Arjuna replies, ‘Beloved, my life is full,’ and turns from illusion to reality. The story is told with faultless delicacy and grace. Its action is no stronger than a flower, and the fragrance of blossom clings round every phrase. But, of course, there is ‘something behind,’ that something for which the worshipper pants. Allegories stalk in the background, not always upon all fours. The contrast between the material and the immaterial, the contrast between pleasure and action, the nature of wedded joy, which, though only to be gained through youth and beauty, knows how to survive their departure — Chitra symbolizes all three ideas in turn. It is true that the play is not the least spoilt by the symbolism. An allegory may be as lame as it likes if it walks quietly, and Tagore’s always do that. Indeed, one’s enjoyment is increased by the sense of half-audible stirrings in the midst of the jasmine bowers. But to drag the allegory from its retirement, and proclaim it has importance in itself is to brutalize the atmosphere and pay no real honour to the author. Tagore is a poet who, like any other, must contrive some substructure on which to exhibit beauty, and, being an Indian poet, he has turned to general ideas more readily than does his English brother. That is all. He is not a seer or a thinker. He is not to be classed with Nietzsche or Whitman, or others of whom he occasionally reminds us. Such, at all events, is the verdict suggested by Chitra.
Nor is the poetry strong stuff. Despite allusions to immensities, our flight through the air is quiet, and we alight in some gracious grove. Here all is consideration and charm and tenderness, and though sincerity blows, it is as a breeze wherein champak odours linger. In this grove we see men as flowers walking. Their speech is gentle.
‘I felt like a flower, which has but a few fleeting hours to listen to all the humming flatteries of the woodlands, and then must lower its eyes from the sky, bend its head, and at a breath give itself up to the dust without a cry, thus ending the short story of a perfect moment that has neither past nor future.’
The inmates of the grove are modest and reasonable. They make no high claims for themselves, no criticisms of men who may walk as trees and mountains and everlasting suns.
‘Take to your home what is abiding and strong. Leave the little wild flower where it was born; leave it beautifully to die at the day’s end among all fading blossoms and decaying leaves. Do not take it to your palace hall to fling it on the stony floor which knows no pity for things that fade and are forgotten.’
This exquisite plea might be Tagore’s own. Whatever his claims to divinity, he has, at all events, nothing in common with his worshippers. He has known how to hearken, and to what, and the noise of London may have vexed, but cannot mislead him.
[1914]
2. THE HOME AND THE WORLD
WHEN a writer of Tagore’s genius produces such a sentence as ‘Passion is beautiful and pure — pure as the lily that comes out of the slimy soil; it rises superior to its defilement and needs no Pears’ soap to wash it clean’ — he raises some interesting questions. The sentence is not attractive — in fact, it is a Babu sentence — and what does Tagore, generally so attractive, intend by it? Is he being dramatic, and providing a Babu of his creation with appropriate English, or is he being satirical, or was there some rococo charm that has vanished in the translation, or is it an experiment that has not quite come off? Probably an experiment, for throughout the book one is puzzled by bad tastes that verge upon bad taste. The theme is so beautiful; here it is, beautifully stated:
‘While the day is bright and the world in the pursuit of its numberless tasks crowds around, then it seems as if my life wants nothing else. But when the colours of the sky fade away and the blinds are drawn down over the windows of heaven, then my heart tells me that evening falls just for the purpose of shutting out the world, to mark the time when the darkness must be filled with the One.... that work alone cannot be the truth of life, that work is not the be-all and the end-all of man, for man is not simply a serf — even though the serfdom be of the True and the Good.’
But when the theme is developed, one receives inappropriate emotions, and feels that the contrast is not so much between the Home and the World as between the well-bred and the ill-bred. The Home is not really a home, but a retreat for seemly meditation upon infinity. And the World — it proves to be a sphere not for ‘numberless tasks,’ but for a boarding-house flirtation that masks itself in mystic or patriotic talk. The action is laid in Bengal, during the Swadeshi movement, and it leads up to the theft of Rs. 6,000. How, why, and by whom were the Rs. 6,000 stolen from the safe? Tagore is scarcely at his soundest when speculating on such problems. Not here, O Nirvana, are haunts meet for thee, and we learn without emotion that they were stolen by a wife from her husband for the Cause, that they were misappropriated by an amorous and amoral Babu, and that they led to the death of another Babu, who was chivalrous and young. The tragedy is skilfully told, but it all seems to be about nothing, and this is because the contrast does not work out as the writer intends. He meant the wife to be seduced by the World, which is, with all its sins, a tremendous lover; she is actually seduced by a West Kensingtonian Babu, who addresses her as ‘Queen Bee,’ and in warmer moments as ‘Bee.’ In spite of the beautiful writing and the subtle metaphor and the noble outlook that are inseparable from Tagore’s work, this strain of vulgarity persists. It is external, not essential, but it is there; the writer has been experimenting with matter whose properties he does not quite understand.
Why should he care to experiment? Here is a more profitable but more difficult question. Having triumphed in Chitra or Gitanjali, why should he indite a ‘roman à trois’ with all the hackneyed situations from which novelists are trying to emancipate themselves in the West? These Bengalis — they are an extraordinary people. Probably this is the answer. They are more modern and mentally more adventurous than any of the other races in the Indian peninsula. They like trying, and failures do not discompose them, because they have interest in the constitution of the world. They have in a single generation produced Tagore and Bose, innovators both, and the people that has done that will not rest content. In literature, as in science, they must work over the results of the West on the chance of their proving of use, and one expects that the younger writers will reject the experiment of The Home and the World, and will adopt some freer form. —
[1919]