BENGALI POETRY: SOURCES AND INSPIRATIONS. Bengali literature has a double line of descent. The older is lineal from Sanskrit literature, and especially from Sanskrit lyric and drama. More than the great epics, the writings of Kalidasa have inspired a succession of poets in the Ganges valley. Jayadeva, in his Gita Govinda, in the twelfth century carried the classical style in its decadence into Bengal, of which he was a native — into Bengal, though not into Bengali, for he wrote in Sanskrit. His poem is Vaisnava, in the floweriest and most sensuous strain.
The second line of descent is the indigenous one of folk-lyric. A main current of this, also, is Vaisnava, in the songs of Chandidas and Vidyapati, who wrote in the fourteenth century. Chandidas wrote in Bengali, Vidyapati in Maithili. But Bengal has adopted Vidyapati as her own.
The Vaisnava tradition continues the strongest to this day. Just as the softer beauty of Kalidasa’s poetry has touched the Bengali imagination far more than the sterner grace of the epics, so the cult of Krishna has made that of Rama sink very much into the background. The race is emotional beyond any other in India, and Vaisnava revivalists have again and again set flowing a wave of excitement which has covered the province. Of these the most famous was Chaitanya, in the sixteenth century — Chaitanya, whom the sight of kadàmbà trees in blossom would throw into ecstasy by reminding him of his beloved Hari, god of Springtide revels, Chaitanya, who walked into the sea at Puri, in a trance of adoration, and was never seen again. He was no poet, but poets followed in the wake of the fervour which he initiated. But a sterner cult, the sakta, has contributed its strain to folk-poetry. The sixteenth century Mukundaram Kabikankan was a sakta; and perhaps the most popular of all songs are those of Ramprasad, a sakta who wrote in the time of Warren Hastings. His songs can be heard everywhere, and on everyone’s lips. There is a vast amount of anonymous folk-poetry, variant on a few simple phrases and themes, to which the individual singer can give a turn of pathos or imaginative beauty. And there are legends, of which some belong to the great stock of Indian mythology, but others are local; many of these have been made accessible to the West, by such well-known writers as Lalbihari De and Sister Nivedita (Miss Margaret Noble).
THE INFLUENCE OF THE WEST IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 1. On Literature. Into this double stream of literary and intellectual tradition, whose diverse waters hardly mingled, the pandits and the folk-poets keeping aloof from one another for the most part, came in the nineteenth century the life and thought of modern Europe. No part of India was so powerfully affected by ‘the New Learning’ as Bengal. The tide came first through Christian teaching, the work of the Baptist missionaries at Serampur, and, especially of William Carey. Of his manifold services to India this is not the place to speak; but he took all knowledge as his province, from grammar to botany, and he set Indian pandits working at translation and compilation. A great Indian, Rammohan Ray, gave the new-found Bengali prose that distinction which only genius could provide, and which neither native scholar nor foreigner could give. He produced the first Bengali prose which can claim permanent place as literature. ) The modern education, in the thirties introduced by Dr. Duff on religious lines, and on secular ones (more than a dozen years earlier) by David Hare and Rammohan Ray, had immediate and tremendous results. Other influences contributed, among them the short-lived but electric force of that ‘marvellous boy,’ Derozio. The modern age of Bengali literature began; by the sixties an extraordinary ferment was at work. There were minds of many types busy; the patience of Iswarchandra Bidyasagar, purist and scholar; the sober skill of Hemchandra Banerji, introducing new but not very exciting lyric forms, such a decorous beginning as Bryant gave to American literature; the energy and intellectual force of Bankimchandra Chatterji, the novelist, ‘the Scott of Bengal’; the unequal and grandiose conception of Nabinchandra Sen, ‘the Byron of Bengal. Greatest of all, in literature, there had come the genius of Michael Madhusudhan Datta, ‘the Milton of Bengal, the naturaliser of the sonnet and of blank verse, whose epic, the Meghnad-bodhkahya, handling Sanskrit classical legend in an essentially romantic spirit, is to this day the darling work of his countrymen. With the old school (and with the majority of the new) the statement that Rabindranath Tagore is a greater poet than Michael rouses scoffing anger.
2. On Religion. There was religious change, also. Carey and Rammohan Ray fought primarily for religious and social reform. How brave and successful a battle it was men realise to-day, remembering that widows are no longer burned on the banks of Hugli, recognising, too, how much of Christian thought has been adopted into the very breath of Hinduism. The Christian missionaries were not alone in their belief that Hindus were idolaters. The belief was strongly held by the early Brahmos, a fact which amazes the rationalist Hindu of today. It was the incentive to the enthusiastic propaganda of Debendranath Tagore, the poet’s father, a passionate hater of idolatry, if ever there was one. In this belief Rammohan Ray founded the Brahmo Samaj, a theistic association. A presentation copy of his Precepts of Jesus, in my possession, contains the inscription, ‘Wishing the success of the cause of truth and the total annihilation of idolatry in all forms whatever. ‘The Samaj was gradually constituted out of vague beginnings, and rightly traces itself to the inspiration of the great reformer and to the small, like-minded band whom he gathered round him. After Rammohan Ray’s death in 1833, it was kept just alive by the devoted Ramachandra Bidyabagish and by Dwarkanath Tagore, who had been Rammohan Ray’s chief supporter. Dwarkanath Tagore, like Rammohan Ray, visited England, where he was received with great distinction and known as Prince Dwarkanath Tagore. When he died, he left a confused tradition of regal munificence and extravagance and a load of heavy debts which his famous son carried and paid, going very far beyond any legal obligation. That son, the Maharshi, was father of the poet. He has abundant claims to remembrance on his own account. His austere and noble life, his singularly lofty and courageous character, won the veneration of his countrymen, as his title indicates. He set the Brahmo Samaj on a firm basis; and, if Rammohan Ray was its founder, he was its first lawgiver. His Autobiography is one of the most interesting and least morbid of all spiritual documents, an exceptional book in every way. With him for a time worked the brilliant Keshabchandra Sen; but he broke away in 1866, causing the first of the Brahmo schisms.
RABINDRANATH THE REPRESENTATIVE MAN OF BENGALI LITERATURE AND THOUGHT. It has been part of Rabindranath’s greatness that he has gathered up into his work all these influences, and has cut a channel in which all these streams have flowed. To the classical and folk-poetry traditions he has joined the eager curiosity of the most modern mind Bengal has known, with a very wide, if not very deep, acquaintance with physical science. The beauty of his religious poetry has made him world-famous; but he was a love-poet first, and a nature-poet first and last and throughout his work. In — literature, he has been the representative man of his time, in touch with the fulness of his intellectual heritage. Even in language he has been a mediator and reconciler. He brought the diction of the road and market into poetry, and married it with the great style of Sanskrit literature.
His HOME AND SURROUNDINGS. He was fortunate in his home. There is a Bengali proverb that the goddesses of Learning and Good Fortune, Saraswati and Lakshmi, will not live together. Yet an exception must be admitted in the case of the Tagores. The family has known times of embarrassment and debt, but it has remained throughout(one of the very first families of Bengal, with extensive possessions in land. At any rate, the poet has never known the grinding penury of so many of his ‘threadbare, goldless genealogie.’ Indeed, I do not think financial difficulty has ever been the cause of anything that was done or left undone in his education and upbringing. But, though Lakshmi has been good to the poet, who has praised her in many a tender personification — Lakshmi, the ever-gracious, ever-smiling goddess — Saraswati might be said to have made his home her temple. No other family has a record like the Tagores. In addition to the distinction of leading the thought of the Brahmo Samaj and of so much of society in other than religious ways, in the persons of Prince Dwarkanath and his son the Maharshi, the family has been rich in genius and talent. Rabindranath’s eldest brother, Dwijendranath, now living in happy, extreme old age at Bolpur, is philosopher, and possessor of a prose style adequate to his thought; another brother, Jyotirindra, is an amateur artist whose pencilled heads have won the enthusiastic praise of Mr. Will Rothenstein—’ I know few modern portrait drawings that show greater beauty and insight.’ A third brother was the first Indian to enter the Civil Service. His nephews, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath, are the Great Twin Brethren of Bengali, or, indeed, Indian Art. The former is head of the Art School which attracts pupils from all parts of the land, and often from foreign lands; for a long time, he was headmaster of the Government Art School. His paintings have now a world-wide reputation, several being particularly well known. He writes short stories, especially for children; writes as well as he paints, according to Dr. Brajendranath Seal. His brother, Gaganendranath, is unequalled as a black-and-white artist. The family leads in music no less than in the — other arts; and the women are only less talented than the men. So that Rabindranath, from his earliest days, grew up in the one house where all the surging tides of the Indian Renaissance might flow round his daily life, and fill the air he breathed with the exhilaration of their fresh airs. That rambling Jorasanko house held
‘magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands’
that were anything but forlorn — rather, their waters thronged with the white sails of innumerable and noisy, eager voyagers.
BOYHOOD. He was born on May 6th, 1861. His Reminiscences have sketched the story of his early days. His austere father, more and more withdrawn from the world, yet aware of everything that happened in his vast household, was at first a pervading presence, seldom seen or spoken with. The boy lost his mother in childhood, and his up-bringing devolved much on to servants. Of these first days he writes critically. Yet he does not seem to have had much to complain of. Tutors were provided, to whom he paid little attention.
Schools were tried, which he soon managed to escape. All his life, he has declined the orthodox paths, with great satisfaction to himself and with almost unalloyed gain to his poetry. He was one of those boys who are unfitted for any sort of rough-and-tumble. It took a lot of apprenticeship to life, to make him forget his shrinking nervousness. His real education came, not from the desultory and experimental alternation of tutor and school, with a background of time spent with servants, but from the whole circumstances and environment of his life. The Jorasanko house is a vast, rambling congeries of mansions and rooms, representing the whims of many generations. These run round a central courtyard, and look out upon crowded Calcutta. In the poet’s youth, he could watch the strange, alien life of the poor who inhabited a cluster of miserable huts before the great house; and perhaps the dominant picture of his Reminiscences is that of a dreaming, interested child, standing with face pressed against the veranda railings. He could watch, too, the folk who came to bathe in the tank; and in these early days his mind was already storing many a vignette, many a swiftly-taken glimpse of habit or idiosyncrasy. Within doors was a life so varied and busy that it was abundant compensation for the outside fair that he missed, except as spectator. Here every movement found echoes, and the political and literary and religious disturbances rippled against these banks. His brothers were eager and full of genius. He was encouraged to write verse almost as soon as he could walk; and he was a member of secret societies that studied politics in what was felt by their members (though not by Government) to be a very bold and revolutionary freedom. Music and drama were the air he breathed. He has told us of the way his eldest brother entranced the household with the poetical opulence of his Dream Journey, and of the way his fourth brother improvised melody after melody. The women were hardly less gifted, and were certainly not less eager. The shy, sensitive boy made friends early with women, and found the best and most delightful of confidantes in his brother Jyotirindra’s wife. Her death was the event which clouded his young manhood, years later.
His boyhood had notable experiences. He went into the country, a few miles above Calcutta, and his Reminiscences tell of the ecstasy with which he first saw fresh mornings and unspoiled sunsets. In words often quoted, ‘every morning, as I awoke, I somehow felt the day coming to me like a new gilt-edged letter with some unheard-of news awaiting me on the opening of the envelope. And, lest I should lose any fragment of it, I would hurry through my toilet to my chair outside.’ Past the garden flowed the Ganges, in later days the lifeblood pulsing through his manifold work in prose and verse. Then his father, an incessant traveller, took the boy with him. He stayed some time at Bolpur, which today is world-famous for his school and, retreat. It was characteristic of the boy that he should keep his eyes tightly closed, when journeying the two miles between the railway station and his father’s home. He was unwilling to have anything gradual or disenchanting about his first sight. After Bolpur, came a month in Amritsar, and then the Himalayas.
BENGAL: ITS LANDSCAPES. There are two Bengals. There is Bengal by the Ganges, a land of luxuriant vegetation, of fields of an incredible lushness and greenness, of pools where black-and-white kingfishers dart and hawk, of great white-headed kites sitting on telegraph wires and poles, of stretching sandbanks climbing out of the lazy stream to sun their broad backs, of drowsy, drifting sails, and of that mighty, worshipped river. This is the Bengal which Rabindranath knows and has celebrated in countless passages, his life one with its life of steady flow and sudden storm and flood. He knows its rain-swollen currents, its dreadful roar and tussle of cloud and lightning and thunder, its exquisite peace and stillness, its vast spaces. Then there is the other Bengal, lifted off the malaria-belt, dry and arid, a land where sandstone crops up, and laterite, where the jungle is sal and mimosa and rough tangle of zizyph, with splits and fissures where dwarf date-palms grow and which palas crowds in Spring with brick-red flowers. This Bengal, judging by his work, he hardly knows at all. His knowledge of it came late, when he settled at Bolpur, — for this first Bolpur sojourn was a very brief one, and the years of his manhood were spent beside or upon the great flood of the Ganges. Hence, his forests are conventional, are ‘flowery forests’ and entirely lack any distinctive word which shows that he has seen. But his river-scenes are as perfect as they are numerous. He is a river-poet, first and last. The Himalayas were the very soul of his father’s passionate delight. But to the son they have been very little. They are magnificent scenery — towering, dripping forests, and slopes on which he has gathered a few charming conceits and comparisons occasionally. They have never given his spirit a home. In this respect, he differs not only from his father, but from his master, Kalidasa, a mountain-poet, if there ever was one.
His WRITINGS: BEGINNINGS AND JUVENILIA (1875-81). In his Reminiscences, he has left some desultory notes on his first appearances in print. These occurred before he was fifteen. He thus has the doubtful honour of standing beside Cowley and Mrs. Browning in precocity; and his first productions were no more valuable than theirs. Verse and criticism appeared in Gyanankur — Sprouting Knowledge. — His brother Jÿotirindra launched many projects, among them a line of patriotic (i.e.. Bengali-owned and run) steamers and a monthly, the Bharati. The latter enterprise had the boy-poet as one of the crew, and for long enough it was his medium of expression, so much so that his first fifteen years of literary activity might be called the Bharati period. His first long poem, The Poet’s Story, saw the light in Bharati, and presently in book-form, — his first work to attain that distinction. In was his Endymion or Alastor. But for long enough he was to be writing Endymions and Alastors. It was no accident that Shelley became his favourite poet for a time. The shadowy world of a poet’s inner adventures, of his loneliness, of his vast, vague, universal benevolence of love, — this spacious world held him in thrall, as the Realm of Faery held True Thomas. In such a world, years may pass and yet seem to the captive like weeks. Another book, Banaphul — Wild Flowers — appeared about the same time, a collection of his lyrics, written at the mature age of between eleven and fifteen. Their character is sufficiently indicated by the book’s title. Only a few keep their place in his collected works. He wrote, too, verse tales, Gatha, lyrical ballads, influenced by Scott. Wrote, also, most of the Bhanu Singh songs, with which, as nearly twenty are still in print, his literary career is usually considered to have begun.
Rabindranath has always been exceedingly susceptible to the simpler melodies, drawn by these far more than by the great classical achievements of the Muse, which win intellectual recognition from him rather than enthusiasm. The lyric forms which Hemchandra Banerji was introducing from English were too ordered and conventional to take his fancy, but such artless strains as the songs of Biharilal Chakrabarti charmed him, and so, even more, did the old Vaisnava lyrics. He read about Chatterton, and, as was natural, his imagination was fired to emulation. He incarnated his Muse as Bhanu Singh — Lion of the Sun — a sort of play on his name, Radi, which means Sun — a supposed ancient Vaisnava lyrist. His intense admiration for the Sikhs and their martial history, so unlike anything in the annals of his own race, was probably responsible for the Singh. With these pseudo-archaic songs, he fooled his countrymen in plenty. He tells with glee how Dr. Nishikanta Chatterji was awarded a German Ph.D. for a thesis on Bengali lyric poetry, in which Bhanu Singh was given high honour as one of the ancient glories of his land’s literature. He says today that the poems could have passed as old with no one who really knew the older Bengali poetry. The verses echo the conventional themes and style, flutes and flowers and forests, Radha lamenting Krishna’s absence or neglect and the poet comforting her. Rabindranath dismisses them with scorn, as the tune of a ‘hurdy-gurdy’ compared with the genuine music of the real Vaisnava poems. They are better than that, however, especially two or three which were written several years later than the rest. —
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND, 1877. (On September 20th, 1877, he sailed for England. He returned a year later, reaching Bombay on November 4th, 1878. ) His stay was not a very happy experience, and he has preserved some unpleasant stories and added some unpleasanter comments, in his Reminiscences. His prejudice against England, and things English, dispelled for only a short period following on the success of the translated Gitanjali, probably struck root in this visit. Letters of a Visitor to Europe, descriptive of his experiences, appeared in Bharati. He found England as inimicable to the Muse, as English poets have found India. As Schiller has observed — and the lines apply more to poets than to most men —
‘Cling to thy fatherland, keep hold upon it
With all thine heart! For in this soil thy strength
Has its firm roots, while in an alien land
Thou art absorbed for ever, or remainest
A shivering reed, for every wind to snap.’
Yet the English stay was not altogether fruitless. He saw snow for the first time close at hand, a magic sight anywhere; he made the discovery that human nature is very like human nature everywhere; and he read the Religio Medici with Henry Morley, an experience whose delightfulness he mentions gratefully to this day. Also, he had talks with Loken Palit, a fellow-student, the brilliant and unfortunate friend whose abounding vigour and eager appreciativeness carried Rabindranath forward into so many poetical assays.
BEGINNINGS AND JUVENILIA CONTINUED. This brief English sojourn was hardly a break in this first literary period. Scattered over, or rather, crowded into these years were a number of writings which deserve mention, if only to show his abundance and variety. Some were before the English visit, some followed it; but all preceded his twenty-first year. The prose was, on the whole, more noteworthy than the verse. His Letters of a Visitor to Europe, already mentioned, are fresh and free from pose. They are still procurable. He has always been a first-rate letter-writer, whether in public or private correspondence. Then there was a famous assault on Michael Dutt’s Meghnadbodh. The poet smiles over this today, and expresses remorse. Yet it is vigorous and acute, and at the time when it appeared attracted much notice. The poet has always been the most independent critic of literature in Bengal, and one of the very few whose opinions have reason behind them.
Then there was a very early novel, Karuna — Pity. There was Rudrachandra, a blank verse tragedy. Young poets revel in gloom, and in these years the young Rabindranath took the mournful view of life which is usual at such an age. The drama, says Mr. Mahalanobis, ’is very melodramatic, with a stern father, a poet as lover, and the inevitable Ophelia-like Amiya. Both father and daughter die in the last scene, leaving the poet lamenting.’ This poetic gloom is summed and massed in Bhagna-Hridaya — The Broken Heart. This was a lyrical drama, very popular at the time. Its songs and a few lyrical passages he has preserved in his Juvenilia. Of this poem he wrote, thirteen years later, in language which recalls Keats’s famous distinction between the imagination of a boy and that of a man, with his remarks on the imagination of the period between: ‘When I began to write Bhagna-Hridayay I was eighteen — neither in my childhood nor my youth. This borderland age is not illumined with the direct rays of Truth; its reflection is seen here and there, and the rest is shadow. And like twilight shades its imaginings are long-drawn and vague, making the real world seem like a world of phantasy. The curious part of it is that not only was I eighteen, but everyone around me seemed to be eighteen likewise; and we all flitted about in the same baseless, substanceless world of imagination, where even the most intense joys and sorrows seemed like the joys and sorrows of dreamland. There being nothing to weigh them against, the trivial did duty for the great.’ He adds, ‘This period of my life, from the age of fifteen or sixteen to twenty-two or twenty-three, was one of utter disorderliness.’
PERIOD OF INTELLECTUAL FERMENT AND LITERARY EXPERIMENT (1881-87). With Evening Songs, it became clear that he was a poet, and a new and true one. Yet it cannot be said that they were remarkable, taken on their absolute merits. One can say of Queen Mab that it contained the prophecy of genius, but not that it had any permanent worth. Something more can be said of Evening Songs, and much more of the two or three best pieces; but the group as a whole cloys with sameness of thought and epithet. Its great achievement is atmosphere; and the poems are free, straying and feeling after a metrical liberty undreamed of as yet in Bengali literature.
Evening Songs are almost more remarkable for the swiftness and completeness with which they were overpassed, than for their own merits, merits real enough but entangled in a jungle of subjectivity and hidden and choked by monotony of style. A break in this mood was provided by two musical comedies, Balmiki Pratibhd — The Genius of Valmiki — and Kal Mrigaya — The Fateful Hunt. Music is in his blood, and Rabindranath has always been able to lift himself by its wings out of depression or morbid concern with his inward life. A famous singer in his own country, he has delighted many Western friends also by singing his own tunes, of which he has composed hundreds. I remember, when we were looking over translations together, if I asked, ‘What is the Bengali for this phrase?’ he would answer, ‘Wait a minute,’ and then, tapping the table, would sing through the poem in question till he reached the passage. He told me that once, when he was seventeen, he was speaking in a large meeting; and after his speech, the audience clamoured for a song, which he gave, straining his voice, so that (so in his modesty he alleges) it has never been right since. It is safe to say that this deterioration has been noticed by no one but himself. To his two musical comedies he gave a rapture which he tells us has never gone to the making of any other work of his. If so, it must have been rapture indeed, for no poet is more inspired, with a very fury of concentration, than he when he works, or more exhausted when the influence has ebbed. When Balmiki Pratibha was written, his house was a fountain of song, whose rejoicing centre was his brother Jyotirindra. Rabindranath, with his characteristic feeling after and annexation of whatever was useful to him, mingled Western tunes, from Moore’s Irish Melodies, with Indian. The poem shows traces of the influence of English folklore. Its robbers are very like Robin Hood’s band and it has a chorus of woodnymphs who are very like English fairies. Some of the songs remain popular.
From Sandhya Sangit — Evening Songs — we pass naturally to Prabhat Sangit — Morning Songs. The two books are usually coupled together. But I cannot understand how anyone can fail to see the immense advance represented by the latter and only slightly later book; advance in technique, in firmness of treatment, in objectivity, and in healthiness of tone and atmosphere. Ajitkumar Chakrabarti, the best of Rabindranath’s critics, saw this, and always insisted that Morning Songs was one of his key-books, an epitome and microcosm of his later work. A shorter book than the Evening Songs, it has more variety.
In a style new and immediately popular, he wrote his Bibidha Prasanga, or Various Topics. In these, the subject is of scant importance, the matter existing for the manner’s sake. It is the young tiger sharpening his claws on the bark of any trees that took his fancy; and beautifully scarred the trees are, by the keenest of claws. The first novel which he cares to acknowledge, Bauthakuranir Hat, belongs to this period. More important than any outward manifestation of it was the inward illumination which pierced through his world at this time, reaching him in a drab corner of Calcutta and flooding his mind with a happiness which has never wholly ebbed and has known many periods of renewal. His body, no less than his mind, travelled now, and his environment changed. He sojourned at Karwar, on the Western coast, in 1883, where he steeped his mind in the vast, spreading landscapes so beloved by him, the sandy beach and winding estuary of the Kalanadi River. In December of this year, he married.
THE DOUBLE AIM OF HIS ART. Even thus early, the double aim of his art had manifested itself — to get into touch with the vast world, in all its endless moods and expressions, and to escape from it. From first to last, his poetry has been the faithful transcript of his soul. Hence, when his mind has been confused and muddied, his poetry has been clouded and clogged. And when his mind has attained to serenity, either in clear vision of life outside or sitting aloof from the world-pageant, he has achieved that poise and calm for which he is best known in the West. His earliest poetry represented rather that side of him which sought escape and evasion than the wandering pilgrim-side. Therefore, in the collection of his works edited by Baba Mohitchandra Sen, his first poems are entitled Heart-Wilderness, and Prabhat Sangit is placed in a section called Emergence. But now, in his Karwar stay this Emergence phase became what it was to remain for twenty years, the ruling mood of his activity. He wrote Nature’s Revenge, the first of his non-symbolical plays. This has been englished as Sanyasi and the reader can see how remarkable it is. On his return to Calcutta, he wrote Pictures and Songs, a series of lyrics sufficiently characterised by their title. These are more objective than any previous lyrics. ‘Whatever my eyes fell upon found a response within me.’ He had drawn closer to the stirring life without, though he had drawn closer as spectator only. From his Jorasanko home he watched incessantly and with deepening sympathy the life of that jungle of poor huts before his door. He is still entangled in his mannerisms; but the technique is growing firmer with every book, and this book contains some very vivid effects and impressions. Nalini, a short prose drama, followed. This is no longer in print, and its theme, ‘a tragedy of errors,’ has been more mercifully worked out in Mayor Khela. Nalini, the heroine, is in love with Nirad, but hides the fact. Disappointed, Nirad marries Nirajà half in pique. The latter, learning the story, dies, possibly by suicide, and attempts in dying to reconcile her husband and his first and real love. But Nalini refuses reconciliation, announcing that she will soon join Nirajà. In Mayar Khela, the heroine coquettishly sends away her lover, but afterwards repents in vain, for he has returned to a former forsaken love.
LITERARY EXPERIMENT AND EFFORT IN MANY KINDS. These were days of extraordinary busyness and happiness. He was writing and speaking constantly. Prose and verse came alike with ease and abundance.
Alochana — Discussions — miscellaneous essays, chiefly critical, was like nothing in Bengali hitherto. Rabindranath is a subtle critic, especially on the side of form. His criticisms are impressionist, as those of poets often are, but they frequently lay bare by a flashing stroke deep-buried truth which the professional critic misses, with all his careful search and adequate equipment — as the casual Bedouin may find an incription worth all that the whole effort of the archaeological survey party and their elaborately furnished camp has unearthed. But he has hardly taken his critical work seriously. Rajarski — The Saint-King — is a novel of this time, afterwards used as the basis of his greatest drama, Bisarjan (Sacrifice). Mayor Khela — The Play of Illusion — a musical drama, shewed his genius feeling out again in the directions it had taken in Balmiki Pratibha. It is hard to say whether his genius runs more naturally to music or to verse. Many of his songs owe their popularity to their tunes at least as much as to their words; and in many cases words and tune are inseparable. Mayor Khela added to the number of his popular songs. Like Balmiki Pratibha, it has a chorus of fairies, called ‘Maids of Illusion.’ Santa-lockana, a second volume of prose miscellanies, was published. He made many disconnected raids into public life and social politics, wrote and spoke on educational questions. Altogether, he was considerably the most important figure among the younger literary men. His activities drew him first into comradeship and co-operation with Bankimchandra Chatterji, the novelist, and then, when Bankings reactionary religious views became pronounced and aggressive, into conflict with him. More than once, Rabindranath found himself and his words the centre of sharp controversy, notably after a lecture on Hindu Marriage in 1887. And, to crown this period of work, his first great burst of activity before he attained maturity of thought and expression, he published Kari O Komal — Sharps and Flats. This book, with Pictures and Songs, represents the high-water mark of his early lyrical achievement. Ajit Chakrabarti’s distinction may be admitted, that Pictures and Songs have more imagination (? fancy) and Sharps and Flats more emotion. Sharps and Flats contains some of his best poems, or, at least, poems only just below his best Pictures and Songs, as its title suggests, has his double characteristics: his melody, and his gift of landscape (not forgetting human figures). In these landscapes there is already present his quality of wonderful repose; but the pictures are disjoined and fragmentary. There are far greater things in Sharps and Flats, especially a group of splendid sonnets. This form he was to use with great success for the next four or five years, after which he abandoned it for an easy-flowing form, of seven rhymed couplets, the Muse in slippers. On the whole, he has written the rhymed couplet better than any other metre, and this particular modification of it is one he falls back on for expression of odd moments of observation or feeling. With these sonnets were others, more or less amatory and dedicated to glorification of woman’s physical charm. These are flawed by conceits, often of the most extravagant kind. Bengali opinion had never condemned these; indeed, does not condemn them to this day. Michael’s work, as well as that of older poets, is a mangrove-swamp of conceits— ‘silly even in the Bengali,’ as Mr. Mahalanobis remarks, ‘whereas Rabi does not sound so silly in the Bengali as he does in English.’ The puerilities of the worst Elizabethan verse did not sound silly to the writer’s contemporaries. But, though these sonnets did not horrify on literary grounds, they did on moral ones, and won for Rabindranath a quite unjustified reputation as daring and wicked. This reputation he enhanced in Ckitrangada, before flinging all excuses for it behind him for ever.
FIRST PERIOD OF MATURITY: PURELY LITERARY PERIOD (1887-95). Pictures and Songs and Sharps and Flats make up together Mohit Babu’s Dream of Youth. That Dream has never quite left the poet; and it was to throw glamorous wings about his wonderful years of manhood. He now tried to put his dream into concrete experiment He went to Ghazipur, famed for its roses, and here he lived the poetic life, shut in with flowery thickets. Here he wrote most of Manasi, the book with which his genius definitely attains maturity, both in power over rhythm and thought The verse is compact. After this, when he searches for form, it is not because he is not form’s master. He experiments to enlarge the range of his instrument and not because he fumbles with it within its present range. There are poems in Manasi — The Mind’s Embodiment, or Expression — which explain why the Ghazipur sojourn finished. There is the group of poems which savagely satirise his countrymen, the ‘rice-eating, milk-drinking tribe of Bengalis.’ From his rose-bowers, the poet was watching with the angriest scorn the bigotry and brag and variegated folly of the Neo-Hindu movement. One of the poems, Dharma-Prachar — Preaching of Religion — is at once a lofty and generous tribute to a Salvationist missionary who was brutally assaulted, and a scorching arraignment of his assailants. Other poems pour the fiercest contempt on the ‘Aryan’ boasting which arrogated to the Bengalis of the present all the virtues, real and imaginary, of the Indian heroic age, while it left them complacent regarding the cruelties sanctioned by social rules. Other poems, again, make a frontal attack on those social rules, and especially on the abominations of child-marriage of girls. It is no wonder that a poet so militant amid his roses should have soon sallied out from their shelter. Manasi shows, too, the virile influence of Browning, who had succeeded Shelley as the chief English influence on the poet.
Manasi brings us down to the year 1890. The same period of detachment from the world produced King and Queen, one of the best of this first group of dramas, those in which the symbolism is subordinate to the action. In this play, Bikrâm’s selfish love and its fate are a reflection of the poet’s own conclusions from experience. Man can be freed from the serpent-coils of such a love by sorrow, and by sorrow alone. These two works, the lyrical and the dramatic, are the real Emergence in the story of Rabindranath’s work. For his entry upon the world of ordinary men, an entry so long delayed, till now he was on the threshold of his thirtieth year, was at hand. Leaving Ghazipur, he determined to travel across India in a bullock-cart, on the Grand Trunk road, to Peshawur, ‘eating vastness,’ to quote Ajit Babu. He would be a spectator of life’s pilgrimage, using watchful eyes. But the Maharshi, who saw most things that happened in his family, now intervened with the suggestion that his son should go to Shileida and manage the family estates. At first, observes Ajit Babu drily, ‘the poet was just a little afraid at the name of Work, but at last he consented.’ But first he paid a second brief visit to England, chronicled in his Diary of a Journey to Europe. He travelled on the Continent, and studied German and European music.
AT SHILEIDA: THE SADHANA PERIOD. He was now thirty. At Shileida he spent the most prolific period of his amazingly prolific career. The next five years might be called the Sadhana period, from their close connection with the magazine of that name, ‘incomparably the best periodical Bengal has known.’ This succeeded to Bharati, and has itself been succeeded by other magazines. Each new phase of activity, literary or political, has seen the poet expressing himself through a new medium, as if new thoughts required a new dress. Years have made no tax on his readiness to adopt new ideas, on his boyish willingness to start new movements or societies. Today, we hear of a scheme to start an International University, just as 1917, several years before the non-co-operation movement began to look about for an indigenous scheme of education, saw him eagerly arranging for a Bengali Home University Library. A great part of Sadhana he wrote himself. One striking feature of the magazine was its eager interest in the latest science of every kind. This interest has always been an outstanding characteristic of the poet. But ‘the Skibereen Eagle had its eye on’ other matters as well. Rabindranath’s Diary of the Five Elements provided a criticism of life, of remarkable charm and philosophical insight. Miscellaneous articles gave full play to his powers of vivacious journalism. He smacked at society and at tradition. Important political writings belong to these incisive pages. Most of all, he enlarged upon the meanness and mendicancy of always petitioning Government — a foreign Government — for things wanted. Much of what is most independent, and not a little of what the authorities have found most troublesome, in recent Indian political thought, owes its spring to Rabindranath’s teaching. He is the parent of many movements which today he disowns.
JOY IN NATURE. Yet this crowded time was one of the deepest and most joyous communion with Nature. The family estates are not very widely scattered, yet sufficiently so to entail a good deal of travelling by boat. The chief, indeed almost the only feature of the land scape is the Padma, or Ganges. On its breast he spent wonderful days, and these leisurely hours built up the tranquillity of his later years. He is rarely happy in his landscapes till he has added a river to them. In the hunted years of his world-fame, when notoriety became too much for him, he has many a time fled to his ‘ducks and reedbeds,’ as he once put it in a rejoicing letter to me.
IN CONTACT WITH THE PEOPLE. At Shileida he came into intimate touch with the people at last. No man ever had less of class-feeling; in this, as in many features of his poetry, he has resembled Shelley. Both aristocrats by birth, both have never accepted their heritage of social superiority. Now at Shileida the poet showed himself a good business man, and the zemindari prospered in his charge. He has always taken the keenest interest in agricultural improvement, and many new methods of farming have been introduced by him. In later years, his son Rathindranath was educated in the United States, the country which, in his father’s opinion, gives the best training in practical science.
Torn Letters a delightful correspondence, gives a close picture of these dreamily wideawake years, with their leisurely busyness. In them we can trace the genesis of many, if not most, of his short stories; in them is many a beautiful sketch of life or landscape. Of the peaceful beauty of his mood in these days, the following passage gives a picture:
‘I have an old acquaintance now with Evening on the Padma. When I came here in winter, and used to be late in returning from office, I had my boat moored to the sandbanks of the further side. I used to cross the silent river in a little fishing-skiff. This Evening waited for me with grave kindliness. A peace, a goodwill, a rest were ready for me throughout the whole sky. This silence and darkness on the waveless Padma in the evening seemed like a room in the inner apartments. My mind is one of Nature’s household here, and her near kin — I have an intimate relationship which no one but myself knows. No one will understand how real it is, however I express it. The deepest part of life, which is always silent and always hidden, gently stealing out here in the unveiled evening and unveiled noon, walks with silent fearlessness.... We have two lives, one }n this world of men, and the other in the world of feeling. I have written many pages of the story of my life in that world of feeling, in the sky above the Padma.’
These Letters reveal his ever-stirring sympathy with the toilers. Towards them his attitude is never tinged even with mockery, far less contempt, while he rarely presents the more pretentious society of his land without a touch of bitterness or of scorn. Something of his pity and love for children was called out by the helplessness and simplicity of the rayats, who scrape their fields and look up for rain, perishing uncomplainingly if it does not come. Against this background of the broad, laden river, of humble lives, of stretching, solitary spaces, we see the loftiest and most fastidious mind in India, watching with infinite kindliness. His own loneliness is brought out in the Letters, with undeliberate but sometimes startling clearness. I have used the word ‘fastidious.’ We find him passing over such universally accepted writers as Milton, without a word to suggest that their work meant anything to him, while he expresses his delight in Amiers Journal. I have mentioned the joy with which, on his first visit to England, he read the Religio Medici with Henry Morley; and I have two enthusiastic letters lyrical in their thanks for the gift of William Canton’s Child’s Book of Saints and W.V. Her Book. It is these quieter, more intimate books that he has loved best.
SHORT STORIES. These Torn Letters contain many passages of the best prose that he ever wrote. But the period of their composition saw a swift succession of prose and verse, often of the highest merit. No poet has ever experienced a greater Maytide, following on the first flush of spring-blossoms. To many, this is his greatest period, and Chitra, its lyrical culmination, his greatest book. Chitra cannot hold this pride of place against the far stronger and deeper Balaka of later days. But the other opinion has justification, when we remember the time’s astounding record of achievement, in short story, in drama, in essay and miscellaneous journalism, and in lyric. The short stories began in 1891, with the publication of The Baby’s Return (englished as My Lord the Bab, a title smacking too much of journalese for such a simple, touching story). His short stories continued to appear monthly for several years. They have had boundless popularity, and boundless influence on other writers. The opinion is often pronounced that they are better than his poems, an opinion which deserves mention as bearing witness to their popularity and merit.
THE FIRST GROUP OF GREAT DRAMAS. His earlier (and greater) dramas, the non-symbolical, belong to this period. Lyric, he tells us, he wrote in spring and summer and the rains, drama in winter. Truly the Gods filled the horn of his strength to overflowing, when he could so confidently allocate separate seasons to the service of different Muses! To this rule of work, however, there was an exception Chitrangada, a drama which was written during the songtide, and is itself an epitome of all the songs he ever sang, a glorious thing throbbing with lyrical power and beauty. This is englished as Chitra, and the reader can see how masterly it is, in whole and detail. It is one of the summits of his work, unsurpassed, and unsurpassable in its kind. Immediately before Chitrangada, he had written King and Queen, already mentioned, and Sacrifice. If Chitrangada, on purely artistic grounds, must rank above these, as I think it must, it is only because in it he had no double purpose to serve, but simply followed Beauty. Not that the play is without its symbolism — for it is the shrine of the loftiest and noblest meaning — but the poet for once was so captured by the loveliness of his own imagination that he wrote a play which is sufficient in itself, apart from any purpose maintained by it. The play met with its measure of rejection, as was fitting; was scorned and abused as ‘sensual,’ the sort of work that might be expected from the author of the sonnets of Sharps and Flats. But never was Wisdom more completely justified of one of her children. The play’s form is superb, his splendid farewell to blank verse. From now on, he used prose or rhymed couplet for drama, finding (to use his own words) blank verse ‘not graceful enough.’
If Chitrangada is the lovelier poem, Sacrifice is the greater drama, indeed the greatest in Bengali literature. It is amazing that work so excellent and varied in kind should have come together. The Sadhana period produced, a fourth drama, Malini, as wistful and beautiful as King and Queen and Sacrifice. All these dramas are vehicles of thought rather than expressions of action; and they show the poet’s mind powerfully working on the subject of such things in popular Hinduism as its bloody ritual of sacrifice. The dramas show also how the poet was emancipating himself from the tangles of the solely artistic aim and life. He is a strayed Hercules trapped, as he slept, in the woodnymphs’ flowery meshes, and he breaks free in showers of scattered radiance. Chitrangada shows the failure of mere physical beauty, compared with the strength that is equal to life’s tasks and needs — shows its failure even as beauty, on the plane of final artistic values. King and Queen, as I have already said, shows how selfish love can lead only to sorrow and ruin. Sacrifice shows how greatly we slander Eternal Truth, when ‘The wrong that pains our souls below We dare to throne above.’
Malini, that wistful and beautiful play, teaches that love and not orthodoxy worships God, and it burns like a slow, deep fire against bigotry. In all these plays, it is the woman who brings truth near; and often, the woman who is a mere child. It will be remembered that in the earlier Nature’s Revenge it was by the path of love for a simple little girl that the Sanyasi, a Bengali Paracelsus, was brought home. ‘The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.’ But Rabindranath’s shepherds (who are mostly kings and priests) when they become acquainted with Love find him an inhabitant of their own homes, unrecognised and overlooked long.
The Curse at Farewell, dramatic in form, is a one act phantasy. It might have been made tragic, deep, or sublime, but is none of these things. It is simply charming. After all, a poet is entitled to rest his mind sometimes, and merely amuse himself. And this poet’s genius had been flowering and fruiting with the most unresting fecundity. The Curse at Farewell is the first appearance of a characteristic and delightful class of poems, dramatic snapshots, interviews and dialogues, — the poet’s Gods and Goddesses, as they might be called, his counterpart of Browning’s Men and Women.
EMERGENCE OF THE JIBANDEBATA DOCTRINE. After Manasi, the next lyrical volume was Sonar Tari, The Boat of Gold. This important and difficult book exposed him to a new charge, that of mysticism, which he has found harder to throw off than that other, of sensuousness. In this book, the prevailing theme is the immanence of the Universal in the common and particular. The poems are haunted by sense of the transitoriness of life. But the chief mark of Sonar Tari is the emergence in it of what was to be the characteristic idea of the phase of work through which Rabindranath was now to pass, — the jibandebata doctrine. Jibandebata means ‘Life-God.’ The jibandebata idea was a phase only, disappearing because through it he went on to his mystical apprehension of his Creator and Friend, God. But, while it lasted, it was important; and without some knowledge of the doctrine many of the poems of this period must seen the vaguest gibberish. It is partly because such poems have been translated and printed in the West, without a word of explanation of any kind, that so widespread a belief has sprung up that Rabindranath is a weaver of beautiful but meaningless words and images. The fact of the doctrine’s clear emergence at this time may be mentioned here, while consideration of the doctrine is postponed.
Chitra — Beauty — is the crown of this first half of the poet’s career. This is a volume of lyrics, to be carefully distinguished from the drama englished as Chitra, already considered under its Bengali name of Chitrangada. Chitra is flawed by his usual inequality, and by the verbal repetitions which are, sown so thickly through his earlier works, a jungle which a whole lifetime of poetic effort has only gradually thinned, and has never utterly cut away But the book merits its simple, inclusive title. In no other book has he attained to more single-minded adoration and celebration of Beauty. Half-a-dozen of the poems are of the most exquisite loveliness — the poem which he has englished, with even exceptional inadequacy, as The Gardener, The Farewell to Heaven, Evening, A Night of Full Moon, Moonlight. The greatest poem of all, Urbasi, is perhaps the greatest lyric in all Bengali literature, and probably the most unalloyed and perfect worship of Beauty which the world’s literature contains.
Chitra finished this first lap of his race. In its most consummate moments, he said all that he could say, out of this first period of aesthetic development. Never again was he to be sheer poet. From now on there is ‘a human trouble in the hills,’ and all perception of beauty comes stained with reflection, often melancholy reflection. Increasingly there is an intellectual admixture, often where he should be most imaginative; and there is sometimes a very prosy admixture, hands catching at wings that would soar. Greater poetry comes, in the best moments of Kshanika and especially in page after page of Balaka. But nothing lovelier, nothing more entirely poetical, than Urbasi and The Farewell to Heaven.
CLOSE OF EARLY LITERARY PERIOD, 1895. In 1895, Sadhana ceased to be issued. The same year saw most of the poems of Chaitali, the placid and beautiful sunset of this period of work. Chaitali is the late rice gathered in the month of Chaitra. The book of this name shows the poet gathering up the ‘fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.’ He is gleaning in fields which have given magnificent harvest. There is an autumnal atmosphere over the book. It is one of the most prophetic things that have ever come out of the human spirit. It looks back, in a mood of tranquil reminiscence, knowing the day’s work well done; and forward, with serene anticipation. It is written almost entirely in ‘Rabindranath’s sonnet,’ that flowing, peaceful form of seven rhymed couplets. Its poems are a succession of pictures. ‘The light that never was on sea or land,’ the utter peace and toleration of the poet’s mood, is over everything, transfiguring the commonest sights, a girl with a buffalo, a baby and a kid, a prostitute, the ferry plying between villages, folk going forth to their labour at dawn, making them all sub specie aeternitatis. It is good that this ‘season of calm weather’ was given to him, for there were stormy years awaiting him. Some tattered rag of storm-cloud from the storms he has known already occasionally drifts on even these quiet skies, as in the ferocious ‘sonnets’ in which he castigates his own countrymen who wear European dress. ‘Mother, you have fifty million sons who are Bengalis, but you have not made them men.’ Yet even this anger is for new reasons. He rages less now because of the wrongs that are indigenous, the cruelties committed by Hindu society; and more for wrongs that are imported, for imitation of the West. He is entering on his ‘patriotic’ period. The first collected edition of his poetry appeared in 1896.
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