IN THE AUTUMN of 1912, Rabindranath Tagore was another writer who proved to Pound that the decaying heart of the Empire needed to draw strength from its peripheries: he was perhaps responsible for Pound’s new consciousness of England as an imperial power, and he gave Pound his first significant contact with non-Western literature. Pound had told Dorothy on 1 October that he was to meet Tagore the next day, reporting with excitement three days later: ‘I dined with Tagore on Wed. – discussed metres etc. Spent most of yesterday P.M. (2–6) with him. Discussing prosody, watching [William] Rothenstein paint his portrait, listening to him read & sing … He is very fine & makes me feel like a painted pict with a stone war club – Naturally I’ve done nothing else.’150 He had arranged, he told her, to send six of Tagore’s poems from his forthcoming book to Poetry. He had already let Harriet know that he would try to obtain some poems ‘by the very great Bengali Rabindranath Tagore’ for her: ‘They are,’ he assured her, ‘going to be the sensation of the winter’.151 He was right. The book, entitled Gitanjali (Bengali for ‘Song-Offerings’), appeared later that month in an expensive and elegantly finished limited edition published by the India Society (750 copies, of which only 250 were for sale at 10s. 6d. each), and was an immediate and phenomenal hit, even though its circulation was comparatively limited. It was published again the next year by Yeats’ publisher, Macmillan, and went into several editions. In 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and given a knighthood. For Pound, it would be his first significant success in reshaping the cultural marketplace and changing the criteria by which poetry was judged.
The India Society, which first brought Tagore to the notice of the West, was then just two years old, having been founded in 1910 by the artist William Rothenstein, whom Pound had watched painting Tagore’s portrait. Rothenstein, the Bradford-born son of Jewish immigrants, later Principal of the Royal College of Art, had developed a passion for Indian drawings, which he says in his memoirs he was able to purchase very cheaply, as they were in general regarded as valueless.152 The one informed enthusiast for Indian art that he knew well was a remarkable woman artist, Christiana Herringham, then almost sixty, who had organised an expedition to India, largely funded by her own extensive private means, to copy the magnificent Buddhist paintings in the Ajanta caves near Hyderabad.153 The British administration had no interest in preserving these, and was allowing them to deteriorate; copies were needed so that a record would exist. It may have been Herringham on whom Mrs Moore in A Passage to India was based; E.M. Forster certainly knew her and was aware of her sympathy for Indian culture, saying of her copies of the Ajanta paintings, which were exhibited at the Festival of Empire in 1911, that they ‘revealed to us marvels of which we were unaware’.154
Until then, the usual British view of Indian art was that, whilst there had been, in the dim and distant past of Aryan purity (reckoned to be approximately 900 BC – AD 300), a ‘classical period’ of Indian architecture that had produced impressive enough art, the racial mix in India had muddied the Aryan inheritance and India had had a steep cultural decline. Although the authorities would admit some charming craft work was carried out, there was now no real art. Considering the high regard among theosophists and occultists for Indian religion and philosophy, it is surprising that such an attitude lasted so long, when Japanese art had been arousing interest for almost half a century and even African art had emerged, albeit as a controversial category, in the late 1890s. British rule in India, however, depended on training its officials to despise the native population, and this blindness to their art perhaps illustrates the pervasive power of the imperial mind-set.
Yet by 1910 change was coming. Rothenstein attended a lecture by Ernest Havell, the former Principal of the School of Art in Calcutta and one of the first British campaigners for Indian art. Havell deplored the British scorn for Indian culture; students in government art schools, he said, were taught European traditions, and learnt to be ashamed of their own, even though art survived throughout India as a part of their traditional culture, intimately bound up with their religious beliefs and everyday life. These government schools aimed to train industrial designers, not artists: as in Britain, industrialisation was destroying art and craftsmanship. Havell, clearly influenced himself by the arts and crafts movement, argued against the distinction between applied and fine art, and told his audience that a revival of traditional Indian painting and sculpture was at last being led by a highly talented former student of his in Calcutta, Abanindranath Tagore, and his brother Gaganendranath. Indian art had been sleeping under British rule, but now was reawakening.
Rothenstein was intrigued, but horrified when the chair of the meeting, Sir George Birdwood, who had worked all his life on Indian affairs, fiercely disagreed, insisting that there was no such thing as fine art in India, intriguingly linking the Indians’ decadent imagery with that of the French symbolists, and saying of their statues of Buddha that a ‘boiled suet pudding would serve equally well as a symbol of passionless purity and serenity of soul!’155 It was the blinkered and prejudiced philistinism of those words, Rothenstein later said, which made him immediately propose the founding of an India Society, to promote the study and appreciation of Indian art. ‘If artists,’ he responded, ‘had only realised earlier in their Western art the value of Eastern ideas … Western art would have had an entirely different character.’ They could have learnt from Eastern art that ‘reality and realism are not the same thing, and that the essence of art was reality’.156 Here he sounds close to what Roger Fry, whom he knew well, said in 1912 about reality in Post-Impressionist art. Rothenstein himself was dubious about the Post-Impressionists, but Fry quickly became fascinated by Indian art and was one of the first to join the India Society.
The India Society officially came into being in April 1910, and Rothenstein began to plan a visit to India with Christiana Herringham, who was returning that autumn to complete her work of copying the Ajanta cave paintings. His reasons for going caused consternation in the India Office, where it was feared that an interest in Indian art would encourage the Nationalists, but he managed to avoid the constraints they tried to impose on him. He was deeply impressed by the art that he saw, as well as by the great beauty of the country. Abanindranath Tagore, Havell’s gifted former pupil, had written to him after seeing a letter he and twelve others sent to The Times expressing their admiration for Indian art, and while in Bengal Rothenstein visited the wealthy and cultured Tagore family’s elegant home. There he met their uncle, Rabindranath, though he did not discover then that he was already a famous literary figure in Bengal, writing both poetry and novels, as well as being a fine musician and painter. When Rabrindranath visited London in 1912, however, he contacted Rothenstein, and showed him some translations he was making of his own Bengali poems. Rothenstein was impressed, and alerted Yeats, whom he had known since the early 1890s and who rapidly became even more enthusiastic than Rothenstein. Tagore’s success in the West was assured.
Tagore was then fifty-one: ten years older than Rothenstein, and four years older than Yeats, a strikingly impressive, handsome and gracious man. Rothenstein did several drawings of him, in which, with his long hair and flowing beard, he looks remarkably like Victorian representations of Christ, no doubt the impression Rothenstein wished to convey. Yeats, with his interest in the occult and theosophy, had always been drawn to the East; at twenty-one he was profoundly and lastingly influenced by another Bengali, Mohini Chatterjee, whom he met through the Dublin Theosophical Society. Chatterjee preached the virtues of a particular variety of Hindu mysticism, Samkara philosophy, whose end was to express ‘the supreme in the individual self’, an aim which much appealed to the young Yeats.157 (He was deeply disappointed many years later when he discovered that, after his return to India, Chatterjee had become a rich barrister.) Tagore, for his part, though he was opposed to British imperialism, was very open to the West, for although he wrote in Bengali he knew English well, and was widely read in Western literature.
Most importantly, perhaps, for Yeats, Tagore was a cultural nationalist who wanted to restore the Bengalis’ pride in their heritage through his celebration of the country and its traditions, much as Yeats had been doing for the Celts. Yet he, like Yeats, was becoming wary of the political factions among his fellow-nationalists, and both of them had been condemned in their own countries for their refusal to go along with a narrow or reductionist nationalism. Just as Yeats had argued in his 1893 lecture that a national literature should be fed from many sources, Tagore believed the same, and his work blended Eastern and Western traditions. Moreover, Tagore argued that a truly national literature was also a universal one: in 1912 he wrote of Yeats, in an article published in Bengali in India shortly after he had met the Irish poet, that ‘In the poetry of Yeats the soul of Ireland has found its expression’, and went on to explain that ‘the people of any country, be it Ireland, Scotland or any other reflect the light of universal humanity in their own fashion and present hues’. He likened the Irish experience to the Bengali: instead of despising their own language, as the English had taught them do, Bengalis like himself have ‘realised that we could have a literature of our own and our own provision to appease the hunger of our minds’.158
It is intriguing that Tagore, given his commitment to writing in Bengali rather than English, doesn’t mention the fraught question of whether Irish literature should be written in Gaelic or English. Perhaps he was not aware of the issue; it wasn’t in any case quite comparable to the Bengali versus English choice, because there was a far smaller percentage of people in Ireland for whom Gaelic was a living language. Nor does he mention the Protestant/Catholic divide, which could have been thought to make Yeats’ ability to express all of the Irish soul somewhat problematic. But if there were things about Yeats’ position of which Tagore was unaware, he did not reinvent Ireland quite so thoroughly as Yeats reinvented Bengal in his introduction to Gitanjali. One of the things that excited Yeats most in what he was told about Tagore was that his songs – he set his poems to music himself – were sung by ordinary people as well as being appreciated by the most cultured. Here in Bengal, he thought, was a culture where all levels of society took its poets seriously, just what had attracted Couchoud to Japan, and Monroe to China. For this modernist moment, non-Western societies represented an idyllic world where art and beauty flourished without the bane of commercialism and utilitarian values. In Yeats’ introduction, he reports that an Indian doctor said to him: ‘No poet seems to me as famous in Europe as [Tagore] is among us. He is as great in music as in poetry, and his songs are sung from the west of India into Burmah wherever Bengali is spoken.’ Yeats comments that
These lyrics – which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention, display in their thought a world I have dreamed all my life long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble. If the civilization of Bengal remains unbroken, if that common mind which – as one divines – runs through all, is not, as with us, broken into a dozen minds that know nothing of each other, something even of what is most subtle in these verses will have come, in a few generations, to the beggar on the roads.159
As Richard Ellmann pointed out, this bringing together of ‘the metaphors and emotions of unlearned people with those of the learned’ was precisely what Yeats had always looked for.160 For Yeats, Tagore’s work achieved a fusion and wholeness impossible in modern culture.
Bengal was in fact a deeply divided society, not just British and Indian, but Hindu and Muslim, high and low caste, rich and poor, extremists and moderates in the struggle against the British. Tagore’s family were Brahmin, but not acceptable to other Brahmins, some ancestor having offended tradition, and Tagore believed in a reformed Hinduism, anathema to traditional Hindus. He was, according to Mary Lago, ‘somewhat outside the mainstream of community life, a fact of his own life that Rabindranath bore continually in mind’.161 As a cultural nationalist, his work drew on what was traditional, but it was in an attempt to heal a damaged and divided culture, not something which sprang, as Yeats implied, from an integrated world. For Yeats, art is under threat in the West, because the artists have to battle with a philistine culture, a belief he was at the time impressing strongly on Pound. Western artists wear themselves out in critical attack: ‘our minds gradually cease to be creative … Four fifths of our energy is spent in the quarrel with bad taste.’ In Bengal, poetry is taken seriously; it isn’t something left lying on ‘ladies’ tables’, or only read by students who lay it ‘aside when the work of life begins’. In the West, he says, ‘We write long books where no page perhaps has any quality to make writing a pleasure … just as we fight and make money and fill our heads with politics – all dull things in the doing – while Mr Tagore, like the Indian civilization itself, has been content to discover the soul and surrender himself to its spontaneity.’162 Yeats’ enthusiasm for Tagore was very real, but his introduction to these poems was as much an attack on his own culture as a paean to Tagore’s.
Yeats praises Tagore for his life-affirming attitudes – he even mentions Nietzsche and Blake in the introduction, those two exemplars of yea-saying for Yeats – but he says very little about Tagore’s subject-matter, which draws on Hindu mythology to present the relation between God and the human soul as a love affair between a couple, so his songs could be read as erotically or as spiritually as one pleased. (The reader for Macmillan the next year would suggest that the songs in Gitanjali were influenced by the Song of Solomon, which is not the case, but one can see why he thought so.) It is hard to believe that Yeats was not attracted by this fusion of the erotic and spiritual, though he insists on the poet’s ‘innocence’, ‘simplicity’ and childlike closeness to nature.163 Pound must have seen this as the same fusion of the sexual and the religious as that which lay at the heart of the pagan mysteries that fed into his troubadours’ Religion of Love, though his only comment on Tagore’s subject-matter is a reference to Dante’s sublimated version of this, when he says Tagore’s treatment of love is ‘not the Vita Nuova but it is as delicate’.164 Both he and Yeats were to associate Tagore with the Provençal poets, since in his work, like theirs, poem and music are joined, and in Bengali intricately rhymed, as was Provençal poetry. In the English prose translations, however, Tagore’s poems, like the Japanese haiku, perhaps appeared to offer the combination of directness, simplicity, and exoticism at which imagism would aim; certainly, according to Pound, in an article he published on Tagore in Poetry that December, the poems had affinities with both the troubadours and the ‘most advanced artists in vers libre’. Tagore’s songs, he points out, ‘are sung throughout Bengal, more or less as the troubadours’ songs were sung through Europe in the twelfth century’, something a modern Western poet could only yearn for.165
Pound’s enthusiasm for Tagore was unmistakenly genuine while it lasted, though, as with Yeats, it was also a weapon with which to castigate the utilitarian West. Pound did not have Yeats’ personal investment in cultural nationalism, but the struggle to produce an art in the face of the British establishment was one with which he entirely identified. James Longenbach has suggested that Pound’s assertion in Poetry that ‘world fellowship’ would be brought nearer by Tagore is simply absurd posturing to impress Yeats.166 But the year before Pound had already written something very similar to the Japanese poet Yoni Noguchi. Pound’s belief in the power of art should not be underestimated. Longenbach also finds preposterous Pound’s claim that the West’s discovery of Tagore would be for the modern world what the culture of Greeks from Constantinople had been to the Renaissance; yet eighteen months later Pound was to assign a similar role to the Chinese. He was looking for a new renaissance, and was coming more and more to feel the West needed something from elsewhere, from some older, purer, more vital tradition to set it in motion. The terms in which Yeats saw the mercantile modern world in contrast to Tagore’s holistic vision became foundational to his thought. In a longer article on Tagore the next March in the Fortnightly Review, Pound wrote that the humanism introduced by the Renaissance is largely finished, and he quotes what he had written in ‘Psychology and the Troubadours’ about its impact: ‘Man is concerned with man and forgets the whole and the flowing.’ Tagore can reintroduce the West to the whole and ‘into the emotion of “the flowing,” of harmonic nature, of orderly calm and sequence’.167 As he had said in Poetry, perhaps another such period is opening up through this contact with the Bengali, which ‘brings to us a pledge of a calm which we need overmuch in an age of steel and mechanics. It brings a quiet proclamation of the fellowship between man and the gods; between man and nature.’168
Quiet and calm: no wonder Pound came to lose interest in Tagore, if that was how he interpreted his work; such qualities were not for him. (He was wrong of course – if Tagore believed that when ‘man realizes the kinship between himself and the universe … he sees the whole with the eye of the poet’, he also talks of the ‘agony of this direct perception of the universal’, and the poet’s ‘inner anguish of realization’ which creates ‘an affinity between [the poet’s] language and the language of ancient melody … Each new experience relives the ancient myth’ – in fact, much closer to his own thinking than Pound realised.)169 Another element in Pound’s disillusionment was, as with Hulme and Bergson, his dismay the next year at Tagore’s growing popularity. But for now he made commendable efforts to understand the form of Tagore’s work. He has a very full account of the intricate rhyming system of the Bengali lyrics in the Fortnightly Review article, some of which he may have learnt from Tagore himself, and some from Tagore’s fellow-Bengali, Kali Mohan Ghose, whom he met through Tagore. Ghose, whom he described as Tagore’s ‘charming disciple’, was persuaded to teach him Bengali (he told his father in December that he was ‘struggling with the Bengali alphabet which seems to have about 125 letters that all look exactly alike’), and together they translated some poems into English, like Tagore’s lyrics, what one might call spiritual love songs, which were published the next year in the Modern Review, an English-language journal in Calcutta.170 Yet for all Yeats’ and Pound’s praise of Tagore, even at the height of their enthusiasm they shared an unquestioned assumption that Tagore represented something earlier and older than the modern West, hence in one sense leading to their high estimation of him, but on the other consigning him to what Simon Gikandi has called a ‘retrogressive temporality’, to a past if better world; they did not recognise him as a contemporary struggling with a different version of the modern condition.171 (May Sinclair, perhaps more perceptively, describes Tagore as a ‘modern, very modern poet’, and ‘too various to be bound by one tradition’.)172 Tagore’s English was, however, a great deal better than Pound’s Bengali ever was; he knew Yeats’ work much more fully than Yeats or Pound ever knew his, as so little of his output was translated; he had far more of a handle on their culture than they on his, though it is not likely that this struck either of them. Yeats and Pound were challenging quite powerfully the low esteem in which Indian culture was held by the majority of the British, but one should not be surprised that some of their racist assumptions did not vanish overnight. Even Havell, the great advocate of Indian art, believed it owed its power to the Vedic, that is Aryan, philosophy on which it was based, still implying the racial superiority of the Aryan tradition, while Roger Fry’s essays in Vision and Design on African and Indian art are full of deeply conventional references to lower and higher races. Still, the steps towards what Pound called ‘world fellowship’ that people like Pound, Havell and Fry took, making it possible for later generations to move beyond their own limited liberalism, should not be underestimated, even in the case of Pound, who later did so much to support the cause of one particular form of racism, anti-Semitism.
Pound has one other comment on Tagore that is worth noting: towards the end of his article in the Fortnightly Review, he wrote: ‘He would have, I think, little use for “Art for Art’s Sake”’.173 It is clearly a statement of approval, and I quote it simply because there are still those who believe Pound espoused ‘Art for Art’s Sake’. Nothing could be further from the truth. Tagore left for America on 19 October, but Ghose remained in England, and Pound continued to see him. Six of Tagore’s poems would appear in the December Poetry, along with three of Yeats’, all solicited and sent in by Pound. He felt very satisfied.