PERIOD OF TRANSITION AND UNCERTAINTY (1896 1900). So Sadhana ceased in 1895; and Chaitali appeared shortly after its death. These events heralded a very great break in the poet’s career, which divides it almost as sheerly into two as Milton’s time as Latin Secretary broke up his. The difference is twofold.
POLITICS. First, as already indicated, the stream of his activity became muddy with politics. This was not unnatural, for politics were increasingly occupying the Bengali mind, till they became the obsession that they are today. What is strange is not that Rabindranath should have been drawn into the popular movement, but that he should have kept aloof from it so long; and, further, that, even when in it, and exceedingly prominent in it, he should have remained so lonely and independent a figure. To understand this, we have to remember, first, how detached his life had been, how austerely aristocratic his family traditions, mixing only with the best and most eclectic in Indian thought and life; and, secondly, with what a sense of the Real he was gifted. His attitude has always puzzled both his countrymen and the Government. Just as once an incredibly silly official proscribed as ‘seditious’ Dharma-Prachar, that throbbing protest against his own countrymen’s bigotry and cowardice, and generous recognition of the courage and selflessness of foreigners whom he considered mistaken, so Bengalis, especially the ‘patriotic’ party, have complained that he criticises even when taking their side. One of the silliest of the many silly catchwords that are today devastating Indian thought is the one that ‘solidarity is essential’ and that it is treason to criticise what your own party thinks. Criticism must wait, like a thousand other good things, till Swaraj is obtained. You must postpone a visit to the doctor, no matter how ill you are, till you have a brand-new coat to go in. Rabindranath has never accepted this, or any other catchword. Nevertheless, I am bound to say that I think his real sense suffered a temporary eclipse, during the decade after Chaitali, and that it has had phases of obscurity from time to time ever since.
CHANGE IN RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE. The second new element now entering his work is religious. Hitherto, he had been an artist for Art’s sake. His religion had been a sense of oneness with the Universe, such a religion as is common with literary men, the religion we find in Richard Jefferies’s Story of My Heart. In a letter, he expressly said that he understood no dogma save the joy and love which are in the Universe. Incidentally, it may be remarked that this is almost the most tremendous dogma possible. Believing this, convinced of this, a man might well rest happy. But Rabindranath did not rest happy. There was too much of the puritan in his blood. In his household was the austere presence of his father, was the tradition of Rammohan Ray’s courage and stern battle with ignorance and evil. Ajitkumar Chakrabarti’s comments on the change which came to him are interesting. He suggests that the exhaustion which follows on creative activity shows that Art can never take the place of spiritual life. So (he says) Rabindranath passed away from his early mood and effort, because Art did not satisfy him. This is true enough; and to this day the poet’s life shows this conflict, this restlessness. The aesthete is in his blood, and he can never repress his delight in form. But the preacher is there, too. Ajit Babu adds another reason for the writer of Urbasi and the short stories becoming the author of Gitanjali and of the many prose pamphlets and lectures with which he has enlightened those of his countrymen and of the West who felt inclined to listen. This is, that the narrowness of his field of work was brought home to him. There was a very petty side to the zemindari work at Shileida. The rayats were picturesque and patient enough, and had merits which won the poet’s abiding respect and love in a measure which he never gave to his own class. But they also cadged considerably, and probably had some of the obstinacy, as well as the charming stupidity, of the buffaloes which they tended so ably. And the zemindari work meant listening to interminable and foolish stories, meant gathering and remitting rents, meant trying to get crass conservatism to adopt better methods of farming. Perhaps all first-class work has had a background of drudgery, and neither in his character nor in the quality of his artistic achievement has the poet lost by his Shileida years. But it is not strange that he should have wanted a wider field of effort.
BENGALI LIFE VERY NARROW. In his country, at best, all effort is pitifully restricted. A nation without a living tradition of history, in subjection for nearly a millennium, and before that with warring and petty kings — a nation tied hand and foot by restrictions which the needs of the new time imperiously demand should be broken — in such a nation how can a poet become great or universal? It is great part of the reason for Rabindranath having achieved this impossibility, having become both great and universal, that he recognised, as no other did, the sheer necessity of his people finding a larger life, a broader, freer universe of discourse. After Sadhana, it is his incessant effort to find this life for them, to break fetters and shatter narrowness. Even before this, the short stories were, many of them, tracts for the times, embodying truth sometimes obvious and poignant, but sometimes truth which his own generation missed, though a later cannot miss it, for
‘Wise poets, that wrapt Truth in tales, Knew her themselves through all their veils.’
And what he knew, and hid in three measures of allegory or incident, others will know hereafter. Further, Sadhana itself, in its immense scope of interest, had represented a very definite attempt to enlarge his country’s range. While others were talking, he had been trying to build. He now came out into public life more and more. His attitude towards conferences and congresses had been one of contempt. They were mendicant institutions, begging and petitioning. Worst of all, they were imitative, copying the West instead of taking native models. Nevertheless, though he despised congresses and places where men talk, he rapidly made his way to the front as an extraordinarily effective speaker. He lectured and wrote very busily, especially on political and educational matters. At his best he can hold an audience as very few men alive. One long piece, The River, almost exhausts the poetical activity of the two years following the finish of Sadhana. But he delivered a course of lectures on literature, in connection with the newly-formed National Council, lectures republished as Sahitya.
RABINDRANATH’S MIND TURNS BACK TO THE PAST. Characteristically, it was through his imagination that he made his approach to politics. His disillusionment with the present turned his mind to the past. He turned to its heroic stories, to its noble ideals of service and meditation. If he idealised it, that was a natural mistake and one which everyone was making. The stories to which he turned were not Bengali ones, but chiefly Sikh and Mahratta. Rabindranath has been a pioneer in every way, the first among his countrymen in so many fields of thought, that in considering his achievement the most watchful sobriety and critical detachment have to be maintained, lest admiration and amazement lead to over-praise. Sometimes one feels that there never was such a man, for vitality and range. Between 1897 and 1900 he published four important books of verse, Kalpana, Katha, Kahini, Kshanika, This is the time of the ‘Five K’s’: for there was a fifth. Kanika (1899),’ Chips from a Poet’s Workshop. Kshanika is the lightest of all his books in tone. As Ajit Babu observes, everything is tossed on waves of gaiety. It is a most important book. In it, for the first time, he raids the colloquial language seriously. He adopted the hasanta, or power of sharply truncating a word by dropping a last syllable which was a vowel one only, — a shocking innovation, and one which cut the pandits to the heart. Those excellent men have always interested Rabindranath. They make very frequent appearances in his work; and, as when Matthew Arnold introduces bishops,’ one is always delightedly certain that they are going to make fools of themselves. I have letters from him imploring me to grant him one favour, that I will not read his verse with any pandit. His Bengali Gitdnjali I once showed to my old head pandit at the high school, a man of great Sanskrit learning. He ramped about the school like a leopard with an arrow in his side. The Bengali was so shockingly bad! He was seventy-five years of age, but his voice was tremulous not with age but with anger. The second pandit, a much younger man, said that the poems ‘bhala lage na’ (‘ do not taste well’), and he too complained of the exceeding badness of the diction. My masters were unanimous in the same charge. The headmaster, a sensible man, has frequently assured me that there can be no comparison between Michael Dutt and Rabindranath. The elder poet, he says, is immeasurably the greater, especially in point of style, his style being faultless and superb. Waiting once on a railway station, I began showing the Gitanjali, side by side with the English translation, to some students. Immediately, a crowd gathered, intensely curious, and read poem after poem. There was one mind among them; the thoughts were high, certainly, but the diction was mean and bad. And Gitanjali represents a late stage in the war between Rabindranath and the pandits. That war became acute with the publication of Kshanika. The pandits raised a howl of sorrow. They are howling still. Kshanika definitely represents the turning-point in his tide of popularity. One is puzzled what to say about such an essay as Mr. Yeats’s famous introduction to the English Gitanjali. That introduction is most eloquent and movingly written. But a vein of misconception runs through it, from time to time outcropping to the surface in definite misstatements. Mr. Yeats’s name carries so much authority that the wrong perspective of his essay has done as much as anything, even Mr. Rhys’s book, towards the misunderstanding of Rabindranath in the West. Mr. Yeats had no suspicion of(the sharp division of opinion as to Rabindranath, and of the intense dislike with which his name is regarded by many of his countrymen. He writes,’ If the civilisation 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...’ But this unbroken unity of Eastern minds is become an imaginary thing. In so far as it is not imaginary, it is artificial and superficial, the result of society’s pressure upon the individual. If an agreement so produced existed in England or Ireland, Mr. Yeats would not think it praiseworthy. Praiseworthy or not, it does not exist. As to Rabindranath, ‘my Indians,’ as Mr. Yeats confidingly calls them, the handful of Bengalis domiciled in London, pardonably forgot that they represented only a section of opinion in much that they said. From their statements Mr. Yeats built up the conception of a rejoicing Bengal acclaiming its universal voice. The conception is a majestic one, and it has gone abroad and won such acceptance that it seems hardly worth while trying to show its falsity. Yet false it is. No man ever had such enthusiastic disciples and friends as Rabindranath, but (no man has ploughed his way through such a cloud of detraction.) From the publication of Kshanikay the enthusiasm and the detraction have both been intensified. That book was a watershed, sending men’s opinion definitely streaming to the side of freedom and progress or the side of tradition and stagnation. The title means ‘What is Momentary,’ and it expresses its modesty of scope and purpose. In these poems, he beguiled his heart-ache and misgiving, masking his mourning with laughter. Ajit Babu speaks of a spirit of ‘mockery of his own pain,’ and complains that it is hard to tell when he is serious. The poet’s graver compatriots were deeply offended. He had danced his reputation away. But Hippocleides didn’t care. He had learned to trust his jibandebatay knowing well by now that he was never less in danger of mistakes than when he trusted his instincts. He was looking far ahead, to a time when neither pandits nor popular patriotic dramatists would matter. He never went back, either in style or manner, despite his critics. No man can jest in Sanskrit. But the use of hashanta gave the voice and the rhythm something to break against. ‘Obstructed by the pebbles of hashanta, the tune ripples.’ This is his style today. As to the charge that he was not in earnest, that charge was made by the same men who had found Chitrangada obscene. If (be played for a space, between the two great activities, that of his earlier worship of Beauty and the one, about to begin, of worship of God, it is not because his mind was — shallow. His irony rarely sleeps; and it was the element of sanity here, even when he glorified Ancient India most extravagantly. He had done with his old life, and was depressed with the knowledge that there were no more Urbasis and Chitrangadas for him. But he laughed at his loss. He was disheartened by Modem India, its noise and brag, and so he wandered in distant times and regions of his land, playing in a beautiful country of his imagination. His title asserted that he was entirely satisfied with the passing and momentary —
‘The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly — and lo! the Bird is on the wing.’
But the underlying spirit denied this assertion. Like Matthew Arnold, whom he resembles in so many things, in his constant irony, in his love of moonlight and of river-scenes, in his desire to save religion by making it rational, in his elegiac and reflective strain, most of all in his deep earnestness beneath playfulness and in the puritan who comes hand-in-hand with the poet, he is not least but most passionate when he pretends to abandon a struggle that is too much for him:
‘Let the long contention cease!
Geese are swans, and swans are geese!’
or closes an ironically polite exposition of sheer folly with a hurled permission to continue to keep to it:
‘“That, or nothing, I believe!”
“For God’s sake, believe it then.”
It should be added that Kshanika contains village-pictures of great beauty. Many of its later pieces, especially, are of quiet grace, dealing with his beloved rains and rivers.
FLOW OF VERSE AGAIN (1897-1900). He had now, after temporary hesitation, launched his boat again on a full stream of poesy. Everything followed in natural evolution. — Kalpand — Imagination — expressed in visions of the past of India his sense of loss and his sorrow, in this transition time, before he realised that he had found a main current again. There is the same brooding dreaminess and grief as in Mr. Yeats’s mourning for Deirdre dead and Maeve vanished for evermore. Many of the poems say farewell to his former self.
Never was any poet such an unconscionable time in saying farewell. Kalpana is full of farewelling, of ululation and the waving of hands. In The Season’s End, a very noble poem, he says goodbye both to the tired year and to his own old poetry. The Bengali year usually closes in a brief spell of stormy weather, the period when most of the festivals are held in honour of Rudra, the terrible God. Rabindranath did not forget this. He was now more than ever, if that be possible, drawn to the rains, and to storms. Was increasingly pulled forward, also, to a stronger and more terrible life. Baisakth uses the sombre imagery of the funeral fires and the burning-ground. So far, as Ajit Babu points out, his patriotism had not taken a much more definite form than a general desire that his countrymen should walk in worthy ways. This mingled with a general sadness at parting from his own secluded life. Kalpana is one of his more important books, and of great poetical merit. — Katha — Stories — and Kahini — Tales — are a series of simple narrative poems, mostly of the times of the Buddha and of the Sikh and Mahratta patriotic effort, two periods of self-sacrifice and royal renunciation. The ballad-form used in Katha is new in Bengali literature. Kanika means the chips or sawdust of a carpenter’s shop. The book consists of epigrams, many of them translated in his Stray Birds. These are of all sorts, some trivial or commonplace, some profound or lovely Between 1898 and 1904, he wrote a series of dramatic dialogues, romantic in treatment and very powerful; Sati, Narak Bas — A Sojourn in Hell, — Gandharts Prayer, Kama and Kunti.
PERIOD OF GREAT POLITICAL AND PUBLIC ACTIVITY; EDUCATIONAL EFFORT; RELIGIOUS MYSTICISM (1901-1907). An important year is 1901. It saw the revival of Bangadarshan — The Bengal Review — a monthly, of which he became editor. It launched him on his great period as a novelist It was the year of the foundation of his now world-famous Asram — Retreat — near Bolpur. Two miles out of Bolpur, many years before, the Maharski had been attracted to a small group of trees on an uplifted, bare plain. Here he came to meditate, and round this nucleus he and his son since have planted noble groves. Rabindranath’s Asram has become famous for its school. But the poet thought of more than a school when he founded it. The problem which had so long vexed him was with him as urgently as ever, that of his country’s condition. His country seemed to him so broken and scattered, that the first need was to give it some centre where it might concentrate. This idea is with him today, though now it takes a wider scope, and he would found a World-University at Santiniketan, the ‘Home of Peace’ at Bolpur. The old ideals of Ancient India, with its schools of forest-meditation, were strongly with him, and he was dreaming of renunciation. He wanted to work for the world, yet to be withdrawn from the world. His mind has been a plain of constant conflict, as I have said already.
‘Ah, two desires toss about
The poet’s feverish blood.
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.’
But he began with a school. Disillusioned as to what he might hope to do with his own generation, he thought of the children. India, and Bengal in particular, was afflicted with the worst system of education the British Empire knows, and Rabindranath, who had escaped its talons, was its sworn foe. (He wished to cut out Calcutta University altogether, and to try to found a school in harmony with national tradition, and close to Nature, where the mind might be free to expand into love of Beauty and of God. A noble conception and experiment, of which more in place.
FINDS HIMSELF AS NOVELIST. In this period, between 1901 and 1907, he became a serious novelist. He wrote Gora, the greatest novel in Bengali, a long story with the fulness of detail of the Russian novel. It is a study of the imaginative mind working apart from close touch with fact. He shows the new thought working in Indian society, and shows society at war with itself. Gora is the child of English parents, lost in the Sepoy Mutiny, and brought up as a Bengali. He hates Englishmen, until his supposed mother tells him that he is English. The book is a Bengali Kim. In 1902 he had his saddest year. It began with foreboding on his part that it was to mean separation from his wife. When she fell ill, he knew it was the end. Her death left him particularly desolate, with anxieties crowding in upon his life. He cut himself off from the world, and went to Almora, in the Himalayas. His youngest son was a baby, and one of his daughters was dying of consumption. As Ajit Babu puts it, he was both father and mother to them, in his lonely retreat among the pines. Many of the ballads in Katha were composed for his boy. He wrote Smaran — Remembrance — a series of poems commemorating his wife, poems of extreme pathos and beauty. In 1903 appeared Mohit Babu’s edition of his poetry, in which poems of different periods were grouped according to theme or character. Another novel, The Wreck, followed, in which he shows how Hindu family relationships are based not on human feelings but on conventional respect and worship. In 1904, he issued a collection of his patriotic poems (in Mohit Babu’s Edition), entitled Swadesh Sankalpa — which may be englished as Resolution and Independence. This volume proved very popular. Then, in 1905, came Khea — Crossing — a volume of lyrics. About this time his youngest son died.
THE PARTITION AND PUBLIC EXCITEMENT. In 1905 came events which for the time being put everything else in the shade for Bengali opinion. It was the time of the Partition, and Bengal went mad, Rabindranath flung himself into the battle. In all India there was no voice more powerful than his, no pen more effective. This was the time of his mightiest prose, whose periods march and burn. There is not much political writing in English which can match his best pages of this time.
An example of his passionate eloquence may be taken from his Speech at the Bijay a-milan — the Festival of Meeting Together in Victory — the great family festival which marks the fourth day of the Durga Puja, the national holiday of Bengal. ‘In the mercy of God today we understand afresh what the Meeting Together in Victory means — understand, after so many years in which we have not made worthy preparation for it. Today we understand that the Meeting Together which will give us blessing, will give us victory, will give us fearlessness, this great Meeting Together is not one in our courtyards but a Meeting Together in our land. In this Meeting Together there is not sweetness alone, there is the heat of blazing flame! It is not satisfaction alone, it gives strength!’ He goes on, ‘It must be borne in mind today that the nationality of our land which has risen before our vision does not depend on any favour or disfavour of a king. Whether a law be passed or not passed, whether the people of England listen to our piteous cries or do not listen, our country is our country eternally, the land of our fathers and of our sons and descendants, the giver of life to us, the giver of strength, the giver of good.’ Thus, the Spirit of Freedom uses different voices in different lands, but the one message. Rabindranath wrote songs which fanned the student-world aflame. He was the pioneer in many movements. As in Shileida days he had tried to introduce better farming and co-operative societies in the villages on the Padma, so now he went round establishing national schools, forming village committees and patriotic associations. Yet all the while an inward change was working. Khea, as its title indicates, symbolised a passing from one bank of the stream of activity to another. It is his farewell, as many of its poems tell, to work, to the life of public endeavour. Ajit Babu notes as characteristic of Rabindranath, from first to last, that he should become absorbed in effort, then should turn from that particular phase for ever. Repeatedly, he says, he has become entangled in bonds and then has burst them. ‘No sooner has the full tune sounded on his lyre than the strings have snapped, and he has become anxious to sound new tunes on new strings.’ Contact with the world of politics gradually dispelled the golden mists of his vision of Bengal struggling to become free. The movement showed itself as stained with sordid selfishness, and as a riot of noisy brag and passion. More than all, the poet was longing ‘! for completer life. It has been his never-pausing endeavour to taste life to the full, of which endeavour his verse is a faithful mirror. But from varied experience he has striven to co-ordinate a whole behind it, seeking, as the Indian mind must, to find the One in the Many. This blare and bluster and intolerance was not Life, any more than the Neo-Hindu puerilities had been.
‘His life was turning, turning,
In mazes of heat and sound, —
But for peace his soul was yearning.”
He changed suddenly. In one day, he resigned his membership of all political committees and bodies, and fled to Santiniketan. Here he gave himself up to educational work, to meditation, to poetry. Great was the clamour of abuse which followed him. It was assumed that he had given one more proof of the instability of the poetic temperament, that he had turned from the conflict to crown his head with roses of poesy and idlesse. But his retirement remained unbroken for several years.
PERIOD OF RETIREMENT, OF EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITY, AND RELIGIOUS MEDITATION AND POETRY (1907-12). He was now a marked man in official circles. Though he was not on the list of political suspects, his movements were watched, and a spy was placed in his school, an honorary worker. Rabindranath discovered the latter move, and gave the gentleman permission to resign.
One might have supposed that his withdrawal to Santiniketan was the result of a natural desire for rest, after the stupendous and unremitting expenditure of nervous power. This was not so. Half-a-dozen years of amazing effort followed. In 1908, a collected edition of his prose was begun. He wrote a series of symbolical dramas. In 1908 came Autumn-Festival, in 1910 Raja (The King of the Dark Chamber), in 1912 The Post-Office. This was the time when his religious poetry was written. Naibedya had come out in 1901, born out of due time. Now came, in 1909, Gitanjali, and seventeen small prose volumes of religious addresses entitled Santiniketan (1909-16). These addresses were delivered in his school. They are full off subtle thought and perfect expression. —
In 1910, he showed signs of restlessness with so long seclusion from the world. He returned to it with suddenness equal to that with which he had quitted it. He came to Calcutta, and threw himself into the work of reorganizing the Adi Brahmo Samaj, his father’s society. He convened a meeting of the three sects into which the Brahmo Samaj had split, and a new society was started. He enlisted notable helpers, among them Pandit Sibanath Sastri, Binayendranath Sen, and Ajitkumar Chakrabarti. He brought Kshitishmohan Sen down from Santiniketan, and made him a regular acharjya of the Adi Samaj. Even before this, he had made Krishnakumar Mitra occupy the Adi Brahmo Samaj bedi. The principal cause of the original schism, nearly fifty years before, had been Keshabchandra Sen’s demand that the bedi should be open to all castes. Now, after so long a period, non-Brahmans again preached from the pulpit of the parent Samaj. But the conservative element beat the poet After some months of intense propaganda, he threw up the useless effort and went back to Santiniketan.
PERIOD OF WORLD-WIDE FAME AND GROWING UNPOPULARITY IN BENGAL. For more than a year, he did not stir out of Bolpur. When he again emerged, it was from more than Bolpur. It was from his reputation in a province to world-wide fame. From time to time strangers had found him out in his asram, thanks to a reputation which could not be altogether confined by a difficult vernacular. The poet made a third visit to England. What ensued is known to the whole world. He brought with him translations of his own later verses, which moved Mr. Yeats in the way in which he has told us, in memorable words. Other English poets were equally enthusiastic. The India Society issued to its members, in a delightful edition, the English Gitanfait, with Mr. Rothenstein’s noble portrait. The same society issued Chitra, a translation of Ckitràngada. Messrs. Macmillans took over the issue of his books, and a splendid success followed. Not since Fitzgerald’s Omar v Khayyam won its vogue has any Eastern poetry had such acceptance. His fame spread over America and Europe. The poet’s character endured some of the severest tests that had come his way. Homage and praise were showered on him. The same enthusiasm followed him on his return to India. ‘It was roses, roses, all the way, With myrtle mixed in my path like mad. (His own countrymen awoke to his greatness. Even Calcutta University became aware of him. A few years previously, when some one had wittily suggested that a suitable way of honouring him was to have him appointed as one of the examiners in Bengali for the Calcutta Matriculation, vernacular papers had protested, on the straightforward ground that he wrote bad Bengali. It had become a not uncommon practice in examinations for passages to be set from his works, with the injunction, ‘Rewrite in chaste Bengali.’ Sir Asutosh Mukherji, the all-powerful Vice-Chancellor of the University, told me that when he proposed, less than half-a-dozen years before the Nobel Prize award, that Rabindranath be made a Doctor of Literature, the Senate objected, for ‘he was not a Bengali scholar.’ However, in 1913, Rabindranath was crowned before the whole world with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Calcutta University sublimely followed, with a Doctorate, which the poet demurely accepted. Recollection of this last and most unexpected honour has cheered him in many dark moments. A knighthood came in 1914. ) But this rush of success embarrassed as much as it cheered. I was his guest when the wire came announcing the Nobel award, and I can testify that its first effect was depression. ‘I shall never have any peace again,’ was his cry. It was a night of wild excitement without, the Santiniketàn boys parading the grounds singing, the masters as excited as they. But within, the poet was troubled with misgiving for the future. We talked of other things, then wandered into the moonlight. Next morning, no trace was visible of his fears, but they remained, and were swiftly realised. Requests poured in for introductions to books, all sorts of books. Speaking from impression only, I should say that the poet refused none of these. This was the first mistake, one which soon made his introductions as well-known and little-heeded as those of certain English men of letters. Begging letters poured in, and requests for autographs. Strangers hunted him. I remember once calling on him in Calcutta just after visitors had represented themselves as the Governor of an American State and his party. Rabindranath had answered a number of remarkably frank questions, when he discovered that he was being ‘interviewed’ for a newspaper. Some of the letters he received were unreasonable, some insulting. One lady wrote that she understood that the English of Gitanjali was by Mr. C. F. Andrews. Would Rabindranath kindly send his own autograph, and give her Mr. Andrews’s address, that she might obtain his autograph also, and thus have the signature of ‘both authors’ in her copy of Gitanjali? As he observed, ‘On the title-page it says, Translated by the Author. — Isn’t that good enough for them?’
His ENGLISH. Since this last doubt is one which gives him especial annoyance, I may as well say something about his English here. About the time of the lady’s tactful request, a very highly-placed English official in India had sneered in public at Gitanjali, expressing a wish to know what Englishman had written it. Now this kind of insult not only questions the poet’s good faith, but it shows the speaker incapable of judging English. Examination of Rabindranath’s English soon shows that it is by no means perfect grammatically. It contains sentences which no educated Englishman would have written, sentences marked by little, subtle errors. There are others who could bear testimony that his English is absolutely his own, but I will speak out of what I know, having seen some hundreds of his translated poems before publication. He writes English of extreme beauty and flexibility, but with mistakes that can be brought under two or three heads. First, he is not quite at home with the articles. Secondly, he does not use prepositions as an Englishman would. Thirdly, he sometimes has an unnecessary word where clauses meet, which makes the rhythm sag, like cloth with a stone in it. Add to this an occasional misuse of idiom, as ‘I took my shelter,’ where English says ‘I took shelter,’ and you have the whole of his slips. These things are but the tacks and nails of language. The beauty and music are all his own. It is one of the most surprising things in the world’s literature that such a mastery over an alien tongue ever came to any man. Conrad conquered our language more completely; but he began to attack it in his teens, whereas Rabindranath was over fifty ‘before I began my courtship of your tongue.’
UNIVERSALLY KNOWN AND MISUNDERSTOOD: HIS TRANSLATIONS. He was now established as a poet recognised universally. A cult of his work sprang up.
His lectures were eagerly heard, he made friendships in England, the Continent was interested. To the Continent his work came necessarily at third-hand, translated from the English translation. But this did not diminish the keenness with which it was read, especially in France, Germany, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries. Perhaps his fame was greatest of all in America. Yet his real reputation began to decline, almost as soon as it reached its height. This is a cause of much bitterness to his Indian friends, who assert that it is one more proof that the materialistic West is not competent to appreciate the spiritual depth and splendour of the East. I venture to challenge this conclusion. Rabindranath’s loss of reputation to me is a distressing thing, yet I think the poet himself and his publishers almost entirely to blame. Very grave mistakes were made. Gitanjali was a selling proposition, as it deserved to be. So book after book was hurried out, almost fortuitously, and flung at the public. After Gitanjali came (Gardener, a selection from his earlier books. This gave pleasure to many. But the word had gone round that he was a ‘mystic.’ Mysticism was the current catchword in the circles that think they make and understand literature, and the most unexpected people were talking of it. ‘We mystics,’ said the journalist and the popular novelist. I remember finding the poet, just after the publication of The Gardener, more vexed than pleased at an enthusiastic letter of praise from a distinguished English lady writer. ‘You know, she insists on seeing mysticism in all I write.’ The Crescent Moon followed, and then the English Sadhana. — His fate was sealed. Let me recur to Mr. Yeats’s essay. His enthusiasm is so nobly expressed that the reader rarely stops to examine what is being said. Only once does he fall below a level of lofty praise, and that is when he writes:
‘These verses will not lie in little well-printed books upon ladies’ tables, who turn the pages with indolent hands that they may sigh over a life without meaning, which is yet all they can know of life.’ One wonders to find so hackneyed a smartness; Bagehot said much the same about Wordsworth, and the prophecy is a stock one with reviewers. That is by the way. What is relevant is, that this fate was exactly the one which overcame the poet’s work. Out in India, the rumour reached us of mobs of ‘worshipping ladies,’ which he had the modesty and sense to avoid. But his work could not avoid them. Such a book as The Crescent Moon exactly hit the taste of those who litter drawing-room tables with ‘pocket R.L.S.’ anthologies, and literary confectionery of all sorts, appropriately ‘bound in yapp,’ side by side with the box of chocolates. Sodhana made wild with joy the kindred type which ‘simply adores whatever is so delightfully Eastern, don’t you know.’ Both poet and publishers continued, unwittingly, let us hope, to draw these adorers. Several books by other writers, of remarkably thin quality, appeared with forewords by him. A man gets the discredit of what he praises, no less than of what he writes. When his short stories appeared, the first volume contained only seven first-class tales out of its fourteen. Chitra slipped out, a slim volume hardly noted. In the next few years, more lectures came, and yet more, mostly delivered in America, some bearing signs of haste and of more care for ornamental metaphor and illustration than deep thought. The poet dug his groove deep, and kept to it. In translating, he more and more felt along one stratum only of his work, the wistful-mystical one. His boldest, strongest poems he avoided, or else watered down to prettiness. There came never a word of explanation, and his readers had not the intelligence to guess that he could not always have been this man, that there must have been change, probably had been progress, may have been retrogression. There came the mystical dramas, dramas which you were assured you could not under stand unless you were very deep. By this time, most of his best readers had turned sorrowful and disappointed away, convinced that he was a bird with one note, and that that note had already been heard once in its fulness and would only be heard in repetition and weakening henceforward. Punch found him very easy to parody. The reaction came. Mr. J. C. Squire wrote of ‘fastidious people’ coming to ‘the hasty conclusion that the Indian writer’s reputation is founded on nothing more than a mystical bag of tricks and what has been described as a blue beard.’ It is unfortunate that Mr. Squire should have selected for special opprobrium the touching poem which Rabindranath wrote for his dying child at Almora. But there is certainly nothing in the English translation to have told him what he was doing, and the passage, as it came to him, justified his assault. Rabindranath’s work had gone abroad without a word of biographical explanation, without a note on jibandebata or on mythological or historical allusions. The reader was left to get what he could, and, if he said ‘Oh, I can’t make head or tail of this, I suppose it must be nonsense or else mysticism too deep for me,’ who could blame him? ‘The only slightly -moist bones of the translations,’ said Mr. Squire, ‘reveal a gentle and sensitive spirit, but very little more.’ Had the poet from the first issued, in full translation, with the necessary minimum of explanation, a selection in chronological order from all his work, the verdict would have been very different. Or, after Gitanjali s first success, if he had given the West Chitrangada, one strong volume of short stories, then the volume containing the dramas Sanyasi, Sacrifice, King and Queen, and Malini, he could have waited, secure of the most careful and respectful attention for whatever he published. And he could have left prefacing other folk’s rubbish alone, though this meant sacrificing his boundless good-nature on the altar of the true Muses. It should be added that his false fame in the West seemed to have infected him also, and made him tend to be like what he was believed to be. He took to inserting in his English ‘translations’ pretty-pretty nonsense that was not in the originals at all.
And his titles, in the ‘Bengali so splendid always, were sugared. The fine and descriptive Kanika appeared in English as Stray Birds. So that the lover of Rabindranath who knows the original text regards the translations as something to be read for their pensive charm as poems by a different writer and with no connection with him who wrote Balaka. — From this condemnation, which must seem sweeping, I except Gitanjali. This in English is, to all purposes, a new work. It is a haunted book, haunted by Rabindranath’s brooding personality. He kept those first translations by him and pondered over them so long that much of himself passed into them, as into no subsequent translations. I would except also, to some extent, Fruit-Gathering and Stray Birds. I am very conscious of the many passages of subtle thought and beautiful phrasing, which occur in every one of his English books. But it is undeniable that a maddening monotony of tone and diction and a sameness of imagery placed him far lower than his true rank as poet. As regards translation, his treatment of his Western public has sometimes amounted to an insult to their intelligence. He has carefully selected such simple, sweet things as he appears to think they can appreciate. Perhaps not one of the greater poems that he has translated is not badly truncated. Lest I seem to have spoken unjustly, I set side by side not a great poem but a very true and beautiful one and his English ‘translation.’ Its title is Happiness.
‘To-day is free from clouds; the happy skies
Laugh like a friend; on breast and face and eyes
A gracious breeze blows soft, as if there fell
On these our bodies the invisible
Skirts of the sleeping Heavenly Bride; my boat,
On the calm Padma’s peaceful breast afloat,
Sways in the liquid plash; in distance gleam
Half-sunken sands, like creatures of the stream
Sprawling at bask; high, crumbled bluffs; and trees
Dark with deep shade, and hidden cottages.
A narrow, winding path its streak has worn
From some far hamlet through the fields of corn,
And dips to the water like a tongue athirst.
The village women, to the throat immersed,
Shrill gossip hold, their garments drifted round;
Their high, sweet laughter makes one rippling sound
(Reaching my ears) with the light waves that run;
With bent head and with back stooped to the sun,
Sits an old fisher, weaving, while his boy
Round the moored boat splashes in naked joy,
Shouting and leaping, laughing in delight;
The buffets of his loving hands that smite
And cuff her, as his playful anger breaks,
The Padma with a mother’s patience takes.
Before my boat both banks are plain in view:
A spreading crystal clearness tinged with blue;
On stream and land and groves, flooded with blaze
Of noon, a streak of varied colour plays;
In the hot breeze comes scent of mango-flowers
Or tired call of birds amid the bowers O’ the shore.
Today in peaceful current flows
The river of my life; my mind now knows
Happiness as a very simple thing,
As simple as the opened buds of Spring,
Or as the laughter of an infant’s face, —
Widespread and generous, filling every place.
Its eager lips their kiss of nectar thrust
Into each face, with childhood’s silent trust,
Each day, each night! Its strains like music rise
From the World-Harp, flooding the tranquil skies.
Ah, in what rhythmic pattern shall I weave
That music? How, that others may receive?
And in what laughing language make it bloom,
And cause it what fair shape and face assume,
A gift for those most dear? With what love make
It spread through life? This easy joy how take,
How bring into the homes of men with ease
A boon so soft, so gracious?
If we seize With eager zeal, it breaks within our hands!
We see it run! We chase through distant lands,
But nevermore have word of it.
Today I have rendered success impossible by tying my words in chains of rhyme, which necessitate an occasional (very slight) diffuseness which is not in the poet’s finished picture. But the poet himself used prose, in which he has often shown us that almost perfect success is attainable — certainly in such prose as his best However, let us see what he has thought fit to give to his poor pensioners of the West. It is number 51, in Lover s Gift:
‘The early autumn day is cloudless. The river is full to the brim, washing the naked roots of the tottering tree by the ford. The long narrow path, like the thirsty tongue of the village, dips down into the stream.
‘ My heart is full, as I look around me and see the silent sky and the flowing water, and feel that happiness is spread abroad, as simply as a smile on a child’s face.’
That is all. But it is too much. The picture might have had value of its own — there are elements of value in it, niggardly précis though it is — had he taken any trouble to polish it. As it is, it is a handful of careless words thrown at a public that he seems to have come to despise. He has kept the perfect simile of the path like a thirsty tongue dipping down to the stream; but has ruined it by that touch of cleverness, a red dab of paint from rhetoric’s brush, a dab which did not disfigure the original, which makes the path the thirsty tongue of the village. This conceit is good in itself, but had no business to intrude here, where nothing else has any suspicion of cleverness. Then ‘the naked roots of the tottering tree’ is a ‘gag.’ I suppose he thought the roots would look picturesque to his simple Western readers; so he brought them out of the ‘bag of tricks’ that goes with his ‘blue beard.’ And, of course, he had to add a ford. All Western readers expect a ford to go with a river, even if the river is the mighty Ganges herself, about to unite in divine marriage with the Son of Brahma and branch into a thousand waterways, the least of their children a greater than Thames.
GROWING UNPOPULARITY IN INDIA; MENTAL STRAIN; FOURTH FOREION TOUR. Returning from England, he ran the gauntlet of homage, and fled to Santiniketan, as I have said. Here the honours already mentioned fell to him. And others also. Amobof five hundred, Europeans and Indians, in a special train, descended on him. He received them in a way which set every bar-library in Bengal buzzing angrily for weeks. I remember asking him a few days later what he had done to make them so vexed. He flushed with memory of the annoyance, and then laughed. ‘I told them I did not want this sort of thing. Some of you are my friends, and I value your kindness. But others of you are my enemies, you have always opposed whatever I stood for, and I can’t accept your homage.’ The hero-worshippers returned, and envy of his success and anger at his refusal to let it be exploited for purposes of empty national brag added a new venom to the detraction which worked more busily than ever; But the poet gained a measure of peace. He wrote” the wonderful Balaka, — A Flight of Wild Cranes’ — greatest of all his books (written 1914). The vigour and freedom of these lyrics is amazing. The old man — for he insisted on regarding himself as an old man, though only fifty-three — brandished a fiercer torch than ever before the pandits, the owls and obscurantists and sticklers for old bad ways. Those gentry had had their beards too painfully singed to care to meet him openly, but they grumbled and worked secretly. He found himself, while his fame was world-wide, less and less of a popular poet in Bengal. The English Gitanjali ran into several editions before the Bengali - emerged from its first. In this present year of grace (1921) I doubt if his royalties from all his Bengali books, fiction and patriotic prose as well as verse, amount to three hundred rupees a month. I know a Bengali novelist whose royalties last year were nineteen thousand rupees. But the poet had great consolations. Every mind that could think was with him, and, though his following might be small and growing smaller, they were the very brain and soul of his land. He worked on at his school. Its days of poverty were over, and never again would he have to sell his own library to find funds for it. He was an honoured guest at Government House whenever he cared to go there, which was as little as he could without being downright rude. In the beginning of 1916, he published Phalguni — The Cycle of Spring. I was one of the audience at the unforgettable first night when it was staged at the Jorasanko house by the Santiniketan boys, and the scenery and the small boys’ appearance — as Spirits of the South Wind, and the Bamboo, and other distinguished personages — and their singing were too ravishing for words. It was a complete musical and scenic success. The songs have lived. Greatest of all was the poet’s acting as Baul, the Blind Bard. But the drama was not a literary success, and its reception by the critics preyed on the poet’s mind. He was overburdened in many ways. He had been passing through one of his greatest periods of song-production, when there were times when the house was never silent from his humming, and he had written his fine novel, The Home and the World. About the same time, he made one of his most unfortunate; excursions into politics, in connection with the assault of certain Presidency College students on Mr. Oaten. The poet came down heavily and excitedly on the wrong side of the fence, writing passionately and unfairly in both English and Bengali. In any case, the whole affair was so trumpery that his commorisense in normal conditions would have kept him from getting mixed up in it. The strain upon him mentally and emotionally, from all these causes, brought him near breaking-point. There was estrangement between him and friends, there were misunderstandings, there was illness and practical breakdown. In the summer, he went to Japan. On the voyage, he translated his Kanika as Stray Birds. — In Japan, he lectured on Nationalism. From Japan, he went to the United States, where he lectured on the same subject and on Personality. — His tour was a stupendous success, but proved more than he wanted or could bear. He abandoned it, and returned to India. This was in 1917. Heavy sorrow came. His daughter died, in 1918, after long illness. Those who saw him going through the protracted anticipation will never forget his patience and courage. His brainstorm had passed, but his mind was still distressed. The European War was an agony to him, and he wrote incessantly about it. It dazed and bewildered him. He never did anything like justice to the nobler side of the tragedy. To him, it was nothing but a volcano shattering itself with fearful convulsions, the robber-civilisation of Europe flaming to well-deserved ruin. There is hardly a word in all his fiery denunciation that suggests that he knew that countless men as gentle and peace-loving as any Indian who ever lived had ‘set their faces steadfastly to go up to Jerusalem,’ knowing well that nothing but death awaited them, death when life was most holy and sweet. These men went not to kill but to be killed, and the world is immeasurably poorer today not only by these who died but by many of those who survived. Humanity in her throes did not receive from a great poet the help she had a right to expect. In this matter, at any rate, ‘we shall march prospering, not through his presence.’ His dislike of England and things Western) seemed intensified; yet he could not praise everything he found in his own people, and his real sense revived, bringing increased unpopularity on his head. He made an elaborate attempt to spread knowledge among his people by University Extension lectures and a Bengali Home University Library. But he soon abandoned his schemes. In 1918, he issued Palataka, — The Runaway — his last collection of verse. It showed no falling off. The same period saw the creation of many of his best songs.
THE PUNJAB TROUBLES. In 1919 came the Amritsar tragedy, land the Punjab disorders and repression. Tagore became the national voice, once again finding a theme worthy of his greatness. No man in all India spoke with anything approaching his loftiness of protest. His burning indignation reached classic utterance, in his letter to Lord Chelmsford, renouncing his knighthood,) the letter of a very great and representative man to an unfortunate man who had been confronted with a situation too much for his powers. ‘The accounts of insults and sufferings, undergone by our brothers in the Punjab, have trickled through the gagged silence, reaching every corner of India, and the universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers — possibly congratulating themselves for imparting what they imagine a salutary lesson.
‘The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I, for my part, wish to stand shorn of all special distinction by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.’
His renunciation of his knighthood was declined, but he insisted on it, and has ceased to use the title. With its disappearance, his friends felt a relief that a false situation was ended. Knighthoods are not for poets.
FIFTH FOREIGN TOUR. He continued to speak on the Punjab happenings, while refusing to countenance any measures of reprisal, such as a boycott or the nonco-operation movement which soon sprang into being.
He was dreaming of making the Santiniketan a kind of World University, a place where all lands might meet and exchange their best. So much scheming, and so much public work, drained him. I remember asking him in April, 1920, if he had ever known a period of deadness in poetry. He answered, ‘I am passing through it now.’ In that year, he went to England, where he met with disappointment, finding people less interested in his message. As this has been resented by many of his disciples, I think it only fair that we should remember several things. First of all, values have changed immensely in England. If Shakespere and Aeschylus and Kalidasa were all to come together to this post-War England, they would hardly be feted as in the old days when men had forgotten how stern life could be. Despite the apparent selfishness and frivolity of life, under the surface there is more hard thinking than ever before; and there is, with many of the best men and women, a renunciation like that which so many of their noblest made when the call came to the trenches, a renunciation of Beauty, that those who come after may have Life, with Art and all good things added. Secondly, the poet’s reputation has fallen into the hands, generally speaking, of those whom a wise man avoids, the lovers of whatever is dim and dreamy and only vaguely intelligible. Hence, a distinguished English man of letters spoke for many beside himself, when he wrote to me, ‘Rabindranath is at Oxford, but I did not go to hear him. His poetical fame has suffered a slump.’ Probably fifty years will hardly undo the harm his absurdly inadequate presentation of his genius to the West has done. After a brief stay in England, he visited France, and then America, in 1921 going to Denmark and Sweden and Germany. In all these places, he found friends, and made the impression which his noble personality and appearance never fail to make. At Copenhagen, there was a torchlight procession of students; in France and Berlin crowded lecture-rooms. He received the greatest possible homage. The Continent previously had never taken him up as enthusiastically as England did at first and therefore had not passed through the phase of disappointment. Even now, strict revision and a presentation of his work de novo, eschewing the old jumbling up of work of all periods (but of one sort only) in the same volume, might prevent this phase ever coming at all. But this is too much to hope.
NEW EXPERIMENTS IN FORM. On the eve of this last visit to the West, he published in the Sabuj-patra — The Green Leaf — and other periodicals a series of remarkable experiments in a new form, which may be called either vers-libre or prose poetry. These pieces are at once prose as intricate and beautiful as he has ever written, and poetry that ranks with his best.
He has returned with his mind eager as ever for new effort, and to fresh activity. All his periods of active participation in public life have been followed by creative periods. He is now sixty years of age, and his experience is Dryden’s at ten years older. Thoughts come so fast upon him that his only doubt is whether to run them into verse or ‘the other harmony of prose.’ Both mediums are at his choice and absolute command; and he has become almost as great a master of English prose as of Bengali, so that his craft can sail on many seas at will.