A UNIVERSAL POET. An English poet is reported to have said, in the first days of Rabindranath’s vogue, under the spell of Gitanjali and the wonder of its perfection of beauty, ‘He is a great poet, greater than any of us.’ Very few English writers would believe this today. Nevertheless, he is a much greater writer than English critical opinion imagines. The first question is, how did Rabindranath, born in the Ganges valley, a Bengali, become the universal poet that he is? For universal he is, if only as a poet who has exquisitely phrased moods of misgiving and wistful trust that have been inarticulate but felt by men and women of many races. Even though his expression of these has frayed with, much repetition, the achievement of Gitanjali remains, and the world will not be so ungrateful as to forget it. Believing, as I do, that this is not his greatest title to remembrance, I yet take my stand on it, as something admitted. The rest must be proved, or, at least, indicated.
VARIETY OF HIS WORK. Even the brief sketch just finished must have shown that there is (an astonishing variety in his work. Drama of every kind, and in every medium, — tragic, symbolical, comic, farcical; in blank verse, rhymed couplet, prose, and prose and lyric mingling, — novels, short stories, poetry reflective, religious, elegiac, purely lyric, — not even Victor Hugo had a wider range of form and mood. I leave out of account his countless essays and lectures, sermons, criticisms, writings on politics and education, even on economics and psychology. Yet he was born a Bengali. The measure of his loneliness and greatness begins to appear, when we remember that even to-day, after forty years of his influence, there is no other remotely like him. This epoch has been Rabindranath’s as emphatically as that of Dante was his, and far more decidedly than Shakspere’s was his. He has had no Ben Jonson.
BENGALI OPINION PROVINCIAL. Babu Ajitkumar Chakrabarti, who often took a very objective view of his country and time, notes how strange it is that he should have become so varied and various, or that he should have cared for life in its fulness and variety at all. He mournfully reflects upon the extreme narrowness of Bengali life, and on the ignorance of Bengalis. This is partly due to the pressure of caste, and to the strict purdah which secludes half the race and shuts their eyes. But it is inherent in wider and deeper circumstances. The race has no great traditions, and when it would talk of history must adopt those of other Indian races. Timidity has tightened bonds which events first fastened, and has further circumscribed a sphere of work already very narrow and petty. They do not go down to the sea in ships, neither do they cross to other lands as soldiers. Their trade is in the hands of foreigners, of Englishmen, Scots, Parsis, Marwaris, Afghans, Armenians. Thought, as well as opportunity, is narrowed. It either becomes provincial, Ajit Babu observes, or else runs to ridiculous excess. On the least excuse it shouts, ‘Great is Diana of the Bengalis!’ and brags that it leads the world, because it has produced a Tagore or a Jagadishchandra Bose. Bengali thought is so provincial that any Englishman who praises Tagore is at once called his ‘disciple,’ since the popular opinion cannot understand that a man may admire intensely and yet keep independence and critical detachment. The Nobel award was commonly understood to mean that the world’s opinion had sent him to the head of the class, with the corollary that his race also now ‘led all the rest.’ Or, if Bengali opinion escapes provincialism, it falls into the slough of uncritical acceptance of everything alien. Bengal’s greatest need, intellectually, is that its people should follow the example of their poet, one of the most independent and fearless spirits alive and yet one who has unhesitatingly taken whatever he found good, from whatever source. The mass of his countrymen, as Ajit says, have never begun to realise how enormous their loss is, from these circumscribed, narrow experiences and lives of theirs. In a hundred passages, Rabindranath chafes against these bonds.
Rabindranath, as we have seen, was brought up in the one family where this disability was at its minimum. The mind is greater than its fetters, and here was pulsing, eager life. Hence, as the boy grew up, and came against restrictions on every hand, in the wider world outside his wonderful family, his early freedom ‘lusted’ against these restrictions, as St. Paul tells us the Spirit lusts against the flesh. Bonds and limits made his eagerness for the universal more clamant. There was much eagerness abroad among his people, eagerness which led to mistakes and consequent reaction into conservatism. Finding these other tides, the tide of his spirit flowed with them, and more strongly than they. As increasing power came to him, he battled for freedom the more fiercely. ‘In his poetry of every period,’ says Ajit Babu, ’is a restless crying for adventure into the world.’ This crying reached its most passionate as he passed into the thirties. Before that, the pageant of life had sufficed, the pride of the eyes had been enough. His aloof manner of living had fostered his critical rather than his sympathetic side. His fastidious perception of values had made him blaze up in passionate revolt against many things in his land. Manasi, as I have indicated, marks the fieriest moments of this revolt. There is the bitter, mocking poem which purports to be a dialogue between a Bengali husband and the little girl whom he has just married. There is The Impossible Hope, in which the chatter, chatter, chatter of the men around him seems to have driven him almost crazy. O that I were a desert Bedouin, he cries, instead of one of these meek Bengalis! To live in the vast spaces, to skim the sands on my horse, to wield a spear, to risk my life, to commune with sun and stars and infinity! To have some claim to call myself a man! Then in other pieces he pours scorn upon the card-playing parties who talk glibly of a life which is for men and not for cattle, who read about Cromwell and with a yawn of admiration turn to games and supper. Anger could hardly be more savage still, yet it is, in Preaching of Religion. A gang of young ‘Aryan’ bloods hear a Salvationist missionary call ‘Victory to Jesus! Banding together, as many as possible, they fan their valiant souls aflame. They must save the credit of their ‘Aryan’ land and name, and wonderful ‘Aryan’ religion. When they see that the missionary is dressed in the garb of one of their own ascetics and wears no shoes, they can hardly credit the evidence of their eyes. A sahib so meek and defenceless! They make quite sure that he will not attempt to defend himself, and then rush on him all together, and knock him down and beat his head with sticks till the blood runs. The missionary is a figure of heroic pathos and dignity throughout. Suddenly the band imagine they see the police coming. They flee in cowardly terror, but revive in the calm of their homes, where they boast of their great triumph for ‘Aryanism’ and beat their wives for not having refreshment ready for such warrior-husbands.
THE CONFLICT IN HIS EXPERIENCE. This conflict of experience, between the wide, full life close to him and the narrow, mean world of his race and time, had its constant effect upon his work. That resolved itself, in one aspect of it, into a lifelong attempt to escape from the narrower world, an attempt which took double shape. Sometimes it drove him in upon himself. At other times, it drove him far out of self, into the universal life and the worship of Beauty. First among his countrymen, he lived, in the fullest sense, shrinking from nothing that was life, fearing nothing that was strange or alien. Yet he came home to his own soul, and to God within his soul. That narrow vexing middle world, between himself and the infinite world, he transcended entirely. Or, if he came into it, it was in pursuit of his unresting endeavour to save it from itself, and to make it noble and beautiful. Hence the fulness and variety which mark his poetic effort. His followers claim that he has not only saved his own soul, but also his comrades’ homeward way. He is a pioneer in this, in his constant resolve to taste life to the full. —
(A PIONEER IN POETRY, IN FORM AND MANNER. It must never be forgotten that he had to make roads, for there really were none save byways. All discipline had to come from within, and a poet’s nature is not one that easily submits to any yoke, though it be a self-inflicted one. He found his own path, with none to guide him. His poetry, first to last, has been sincere, as the work of true poets is. Here he has always been true to his innermost self, moments of freak and writing for writing’s sake apart, and therefore his work abounds in contradictions. A large book has been written, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore But he has never had any philosophy, a fact which he acknowledges most rejoicingly. He has had principles and convictions, felt to the roots of his being, but no mosaic of closely-tesselated dogma. He has been poet, not philosopher, and as poet has made a highway through a swamp. He had to find out how far the old Sanskrit poetry was a satisfactory model today, and how far Western models might be followed or naturalised, and had to find new metres. Also, all through his career he has never paused in his effort to enlarge his range. Something of this has been indicated in the biographical sketch, but it calls for closer consideration now.
INFLUENCES: — VAISNAVA LYRISTS; KALIDASA.
First, the question of sources and inspiration arises. It is only in their formative period that great poets have masters. Therefore, though Rabindranath has never ceased to learn, and is as great a thief as any in all literature, it is in the pre-Manasi period that we must look for influences. First, of course, are the Bengali Vaisnava lyrists. The poet’s own authority compels this statement, for did he not in the Bhanu Singh songs carefully catch their very notes? And he has never ceased to praise them, has translated them, and always refers to them as his masters. Be it so, then; one must suppose that they are. Yet I have always been rebellious under the importance he ascribes to them, and I believe he does them too much honour. I will say frankly that I am sure they have not influenced him to anything like the extent he has persuaded himself. He is grateful to them because they put him in the way of finding his gift of pure song, and therefore he is more filial than he need be, mistaking for parents those who are only among his chief teachers. When at length I ventured, foreigner as I am, to drag this conviction to light, I was comforted to find that it was shared, ‘numbering good wits,’ among them Prasanta Mahalanobis and also Baba Ajitkumar Chakrabarti, judging by the little space the latter gives to the Vaisnava singers and his stress on other influences. Rabindranath’s real master has been Kalidasa. He never misses a chance of paying Kalidasa homage, either by explicit panegyric or by the subtler way of paraphrasing or quoting, as Shakspere does Marlowe:
‘ Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might.
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’
Frequently, when the strain is ostensibly a Vaisnava one, and the theme is Krishna and Radha, the real mood is not Vaisnava at all, but, as obviously as possible, is Kalidasa’s. The two poets, the greatest India has ever produced, differ as strikingly as they resemble each other. The one is the poet of mountains, rejoicing in their strength and vastness. The other is the poet of rivers and of quiet places. But the two between them so completely represent Indian landscapes, that any third poet hereafter must seek some other way to fame. Both are passionate lovers of the rains, and have given us picture after picture of them which is perfect in faithfulness and charm. Both, again, love the gentler beauties of Nature and character; and both are at home in symbolism and mingle with easy grace in the affairs of Gods and Immortals.
BENGALI POETRY; SHELLEY. A very important strain in Rabindranath’s work is the influence of folktale and folk-poetry other than Vaisnava. This is responsible for many charming moments, and also for occasional moments of dulness, when it contributes to that cult of the trivial which is the defect of his great quality of interest in the smallest things. The great epics, too, have given him thoughts and incidents that have touched him to fine issues. He is, in spite of the opinion of Calcutta University (on whom be peace!), a very fine Bengali scholar, and there is very little in his own literature which has any value of any sort which has not been taken’ into his genius. But I think we are justified in placing Western (which means, mainly, English) literature third among formative influences, after Kalidasa and the Vaisnava lyrists. He was called, while in his teens, the Bengali Shelley, and (he has translated Shelley, and has acknowledged him as an influence. The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, he says, was like a transcript of his mind in his youth. ‘I felt as if I could have written it.’ Shelley has been the favourite English poet of many Indians, and they find an affinity between his genius and that of their own poets. I remember Loken Palit had a theory that Shelley must have known Sanskrit, because he personified abstractions so in the manner of its poetry. He used to quote, with great emphasis,
‘ Be my bride, and sit by me,
Shadow-vested Misery.’
Sanskrit or not, those two lines might occur anywhere in Evening Songs. Shelley’s mythopoea, his compound adjectives, his personifications, his unhappiness, especially his vague, poetical unhappiness, — these things fill Evening Songs. Both poets show a remarkable readiness to make offers of marriage to any pleasing ghost that comes their way. In Rabindranath, sometimes it is Misery, sometimes it is Evening, sometimes it is his own heart. Often, it is the Poem which he wishes to woo to himself:— ‘As Day comes, very gently with gentle smiles, and with vermilion on her forehead, to die on the funeral pyre of her husband, in the burning flames of the West; as a dying gust rushes in from sojourn in a strange land towards the forest of its own country, its tired limbs refusing to move, and, as soon as it reaches the grove, dies uttering its last words by the side of its flower-bride! Even so I my Poem! My Bride! Come, with tenderness manifest in your sad face, with tears flowing gently in your eyes!’
It would be hard to find elsewhere such a similarity between two poets of different tongues and civilisations, as this passage shows between Rabindranath and Shelley. The similarity was a natural one, and not due to imitation of the latter by the former. But it is not strange that at first the Indian should have adored the Englishman. That phase went. ‘I have long outgrown that admiration,’ he told me.
OTHER ENGLISH POETS; KEATS AND BROWNING. He never walked the great highways of English literature very systematically. He wandered, often in pretty out-of-the-way meadows. He translated; but not from Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, or Browning.
Instead, he translated Christina Rossetti, Mrs. Browning, Hood, Ernest Myers, and (as already related) Shelley; and not these alone, but Philip Marston and Augusta Webster. Among these names, the translated and the untranslated poets, I venture to pick out four. The delicacy and grace of Mrs. Browning and Christina Rossetti attracted him. But real influence I ascribe to Keats and Browning. From Keats’s Odes he learnt, if my guess is right, to build up magnificent stanza-forms in his own tongue, by which he enriched it immensely. His stanzas are very many, and carried Bengali poetry far beyond the metres introduced by Hemchandra Banerji. The following lines will give a notion of the stanza in which Urbasi is written:
‘Like some stemless flower, blooming in thyself,
When didst thou blossom, Urbasi?
That primal Spring, thou didst arise from the yeast of Ocean,
In thy right hand nectar, venom in thy left.
The swelling, mighty Sea, like a serpent tamed with spells,
Drooping his thousand, towering hoods,
Fell at thy feet!
White as the kunda-blossom, a naked beauty, adored by the King of Gods,
Thou Stainless One.’
The Ode on a Grecian Urn is a favourite poem with him; and there is evidence that he admired these compact, masterly stanzas very early in his career, and he has certainly made such stanzas at home in his own tongue. But a stronger influence than Keats was Browning. This influence came as he entered upon maturity. It is very marked in the new psychological interest of many poems in Manasi, it is present in that first group of non-symbolical plays, it is present most strongly and nobly of all in the short dramatic dialogues of the later nineties, Gandharis Prayer, and Kama and Kunti In his novel, The Home and the Worlds he has made a striking adaptation of the scheme of The Ring and the Book, telling the one story through different minds.
But, in the case of a wide and desultory reader like Rabindranath, it is not possible to say where he found the suggestion for this or that idea or phrase. It is enough, that he has ‘taken his own where he found it,’ and has laid under contribution German, and French, and Russian literature, as well as Sanskrit and English.
MONOTONY OF STYLE IN MUCH OF HIS WORK. It seems hard to maintain that he is a poet of wide range, in face of so much superficial evidence to the contrary. It must be admitted that he has written a great deal too much, and that the chief stumblingblock in the way of accepting him among great poets is the inequality of his work. There are frequent outcroppings of stony ground, as in a Bengal upcountry landscape. Also, especially in his earlier books, there is a vast amount of flowery undergrowth which needs a sickle or (better still) a fire, to clear the loftier trees and show them in their strength and nobleness. There is a recurrence of a certain vocabulary, of flowers, south wind, spring, autumn, tears, laughter, separation, tunes, bees, and the rest, which sometimes is positively maddening. This sort of thing is most apparent when he is least inspired, but it is by no means absent from his best work. ‘In Rabindranath,’ said a Bengali to me, ‘flowers are always opening, and the south wind is always blowing.’ Even in much of the noblest work of his later years, his incorrigible playfulness, the way in which, often when most serious, he will fondle and toss with fancies, spoils some splendid things. In his lectures and addresses, he can never resist the temptation of a glittering simile. Often he dazzles the beholder with beauty when he wishes most to convince. When he should run a straight course, he turns aside. Never was such an Atalanta. From all this comes sometimes a sense of monotony, which hides from the reader the richness and versatility of his work. This is the great weakness of his earlier work, that which finishes with Chaitali. One is often surprised, on analysis, to find how much of even his most exquisite work is built upon themes well-worn with him. Never has he expressed more perfectly his wistful sense of loss in the visible world, than in that lovely finish of Urbasi:
‘She will not return, she will not return! That Moon of Glory has set, She has made her home on the Mount of Setting, has Urbasi!
Therefore today, on earth, with the joyous breath of Spring Mingles the long-drawn sigh of some eternal separation!
On the night of full moon, when the world brims with laughter, Memory, from somewhere far away, pipes a flute that brings unrest, —
The tears gush out!
Yet in that weeping of the spirit Hope wakes and lives, Ah, Unfettered One!’
Moon, Springy sigh, eternal, separation, night and hill moon, laughtery, flutey unrest, tears, weeping, Hope, — these are the old performers, none absent. There is many a passage in Rabindranath when you might call the roll, and, if one of these were present, all the rest would click their heels and answer. Here, in the supreme inspiration of Urbasi, they are transfigured into unsurpassable loveliness, which no criticism can touch. Yet, as the flawless Idea which lives in God’s presence suffers loss with the judgment of us mortals for the faulty embodiments of that perfection which we see and have made, so even on the best of the poems of his early period some shadow falls from memory of the many passages which have their accidents without their essential of inspiration.
ABUNDANCE OF NATURAL IMAGERY. Yet this fault really witnesses to a great strength, his wonderful abundance of imagery. In these early years, had he carried a pruning-knife through orchards in blossom, their beauty would have shown to greater advantage. But the beauty is there, in wealth that makes the beholder catch his breath. Most of all, wealth of natural illustration. Here we get very close to the heart of his genius, and can confidently claim for him the title of great poet. No poet that ever lived (I shall use this phrase again) has had a more constant and intimate touch with natural beauty. He can use, at his best, the same images and pictures, the oldest ones in the world, a score of times in as many lines, and each time with freshness and charm. His wealth here is inexhaustible, and it is as manifest in prose as in verse, and today, after his swift advance in mastery of the tongue, is almost as manifest in English as in Bengali. Let this be noted, then, for it is part of the reason why he is not a small poet, and in this book is not going to be admitted to be one. But a much greater and stronger reason remains, in his treatment of the spirit of natural beauty.
VARIETY AND FRESHNESS OF NATURAL IMAGERY. But first, before we pass to consideration of that, two important points demand mention. There is the variety, as well as the freshness and abundance of his natural magic. My Bengali friend, who complained of too much south wind and a glut of flowers, had reason. Only too many suppose that Rabindranath is a poet of softer beauty, evading the sterner. But this was never the case, even in his early work; at any rate, was never the case after Evening Songs. In Manasi, for example, is one of the grandest and most terrible sea-storms in the world’s literature — written, not by an Englishman, but by a Bengali. I quote its opening stanzas:
SEA-WAVES
‘ Destruction swings and rocks on the lap of the shoreless sea,
In dreadful festival!
Clanging its hundred wings, the indomitable Wind Rages and runs!
Sky and Sea revel in mighty union,
Veiling the worlds eyelash in blackness!
The lightning starts and trembles, the waves foam in laughter, —
The sharp, white, dreadful mirth of brute Nature!
Eyeless, earless, homeless, loveless,
The drunken Forces of Evil
Have shattered all bonds and are rushing wildly to ruin!
Mingling all horizons, the darkened Sea With tumult, with crying,
With anger, with terror, with heaving, with shouting and
With mad bellows, — [laughter,
Swells and seethes and crumbles,
Struggling to find its own shores!
It is as if, the earth flung aside, Bdsuki is playing,
Spreading his thousand hoods, swingeing his tail!
As if the Night has melted and shakes the ten directions
A moving mass! — [together,
It tears to tatters the net of its own sleep.
There is no tune, no rhythm! It is the dance of brute Nature,
Meaningless, joyless!
Can it be that vast Death, taking to himself a thousand lives,
Is dancing there?
Water, vapour, thunder, wind have found blind life,
Are exerting aimlessly the nerves of new being.
They know no direction, heed no stay or hindrance,
In terror of self they rush to their ruin!
See, in their midst are eight hundred men and women,
Clinging to each other,
Life clasping life! They stare before them.’
THE POET OF BENGALI SEASONS. His very many descriptions of the Rains abound in imaginative touches; the lightning, like a fiery snake, biting the darkness again and again, the clouds appearing on the aerial stage like dancers, shaking their tambourines of thunder, and disappearing. Many and many a page seems to be soaked and sodden with his intense realism. What is perhaps his finest story, Cloud and Sun, opens:
‘It had rained all yesterday. Today, the rain had ceased, and all morning straggling rays of sunlight and dense masses of cloud drew their shadows, like the strokes of a brush, over the autumn fields of ripening paddy. The spreading green canvas would flush beneath the streaks of sunlight, only to fade into dimness again; growing golden, it swiftly exchanged its brightness for cool shadows and quiet colours. Cloud and sun, sole actors in the sky’s vast theatre, played their parts; and their every movement found immediate response on that lower stage, an endless flicker and alternation.’
That is a typical day of the Indian Rains. Such a story as Living or Dead is not less wonderful, in the way in which he can bring a sudden rain-drenched gust sweeping across the pages. There is the wind which blows out the candle, as Jôgmâyâ and her husband are arguing about their uncanny guest; or the utter dampness of that hut on the burning-ghat, where the watchers by the body wait for their companion to bring the wood. But he is not simply a poet of the Rains. He has a thousand pictures, all distinct from each other, and all perfect, of every Indian season. Autumn is a favourite of his, as she deserves to be; and he personifies her as Lakshmi, the gracious goddess. Noon in the summer heats is another favourite; and he can make the page quiver with its tense, blinding quietness. Spring, — and he can make the page fragrant with bakul blossom and musical with bees. Winter he does not care so much about, but has depicted equally well when he chose.
THE JIBANDBBATA DOCTRINE. Secondly, his Nature poetry is closely connected with that characteristic phase, the jibandebata doctrine. This doctrine, like most that is most characteristic in Tagore, is a blend of several threads. In it are Indian teaching as to reincarnations and previous births; the revelation of modern science concerning the way in which the strands of all being reach back to dim, hidden beginnings; the findings of psychology; and, binding all and giving them in their union a personal quality of his own, there is the poet’s own imagination and inspired guessing. Jibandebata means Life-God. The jibandebata is the over soul who binds in sequence the poet’s successive incarnations and phases of activity. He is not God; on this, the poet insists. Yet he is more than the poet himself; or, at any rate, more than any one embodiment of the poet. He is the daemon of Socrates; is the Idea of Plato; is the Quaker’s Inner Lights considered not as God but simply as the revelation of God. The poet does not sanction our saying that he is any one of these things, yet it is certain that he is all of them. The doctrine dawned on Rabindranath only gradually. Even in Evening Songs, the poet is conscious of a voice sounding in his heart which is not just his own voice, yet has affinities with his own voice. In Morning Songs is one poem, The Echo, which is startling, as what is almost a jibandebata poem years before its time. Then in Manasi the doctrine begins to take conscious shape, and in Sonar Tari and Chitra it is the most characteristic thing. It appears strikingly in the dedication-poem of Ckaiiali. Then its sway is practically over, because by its means the poet, when the next stormy and uncertain years are finished, and he has leisure for poetry again, has attained to a peace and knowledge of God which make all else fall to one side.
In such a poem as Swinging, the poet is seeking an understanding with this strange, beautiful, terrible mistress of his life. That makes the poem intelligible, when before it could hardly have been more than an obscure love-poem set in an atmosphere of magnificent storm. In other poems, the poet humbly asks the jibandebata if he is pleased with him (Rabindranath) and with the revelation of himself that has been made in the poet’s work. In yet other poems, he asks, terrified or bewildered, whither the jibandebata is leading him.
It is easy to dismiss all this as poetic fancy, but I can assure the reader that the poet means it seriously. It led to misunderstanding. The poet claimed to an interviewer that at his best he was inspired, for a voice that was not simply his own weakness spoke through him. This claim he would make for all true poets, in so far as they are poets. What is weak and poor in his work is his fault; what is good is the jibandebata’s doing. Dwijendralal Ray accused Rabindranath of setting up as an inspired prophet, the first step towards claiming the honours of avatarhood. The poet replied. D. L. Ray returned to the charge. Rabindranath remained silent. But parties sprang up, those who held with him and those who held with his antagonist. Many will think with Ray. Yet surely the poet’s intuition was not without reason, when it guessed between this individual life and the Infinite Life some medium which is the sum and whole of whatever imperfect phases and expressions the former may have known and be going to know. Nor, even if this life be the first conscious one, is it unreasonable to suppose that this dumb matter which has been built up from the travail of so long a process has some dim memory stirring of its pre-human days. Thus, the poet often turns to the thought of pre-existence and of recollection from such existence. In some of the most imaginative passages he ever wrote, he turns back in memory to the æons when the Earth was molten, or when she was a waste of water, and he feels still the fiery breath of those vapours and the mighty roll of that surge. His mind naturally followed with keenness all that science had to teach of those great ages, and the discoveries of his distinguished fellow-countryman, Sir Jagadishchandra Bose, have had no more eager or understanding student. The Earth has never known a son more filial, or one who has knelt to her in more worshipping wise; and this is because he knows that he is breath of her breath, bone of her bone, in soul and mind and memory no less than in body.
POWER OF IDENTIFYING HIMSELF WITH NATURE. From this comes his greatest and most individual gift No poet that ever lived has shown his power of identification of himself with Nature, of sinking into her life. T. E. Brown would have rejoiced to know his work. What Marvell imagined —
‘Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide’ — what Brown imagined —
‘ All that my life has in me wrought
Of complex essence shall be brought
And wedded to those primal forms
That have their scope in calms and storms’ — he has realised in his best work with absolute completeness.
POWER OF MERGING HIS FIGURES WITH HIS LANDSCAPE. Again, no poet that ever lived has shown such a power of merging not only himself but his human figures with their landscape. Here he is absolutely great, and absolutely original. Sometimes, the mingling is a matter of subtle and exquisite perception of the intimate inter-relation between mind and matter. ‘But black eyes need no translating; the mind itself throws a shadow upon them. In them thought opens or shuts, shines forth or goes out in darkness, hangs steadfast like the setting moon, or like the swift and restless lightning, illumines all quarters of the sky.’ Sometimes, it attains to such a haunting picture as that of the lonely, dumb girl at noon; ‘in the deep mid-noon, when the boatmen and fisherfolk had gone to their dinner, when the villagers slept, and birds were still, when the ferryboats were idle, when the great busy world paused in its toil, and became a lonely, awful giant, then beneath the vast, impressive heavens there were only dumb Nature and a dumb girl, sitting very silent — one under the spreading sunlight, the other where a small tree cast its shadow.’
THESE GIFTS SHOWN IN HIS SHORT STORIES. This rich, individual gift of his nowhere finds more satisfying expression than in his short stories. Indeed, Ajit Babu goes so far as to say that most of these are ‘written to express single phases’ — or, ‘moods’—’ of Nature.’ This is saying too much. The stories, the best of them, are excellent stories. But Ajit Babu’s remark does suggest the weakness of the few failures among them, which is that the poet has written as poet or philosopher, and not as story-teller. These we can ignore, while noting the outstanding qualities of the best stories, qualities which put him among the world’s greatest short story writers. First among them is their range and variety. This writer or that has surpassed Rabindranath in some quality or other. But where are we to find a writer of stories so different and so good as Hungry Stones, Living or Dead. Subha, Cloud and Sun, The Kingdom of Cards, The Trust Property, The Riddle Solved, and The Elder Sister? Four of these eight are of the deepest tragedy, a very unusual feature in an Indian writer; two are of tragedy of a less mixed and absolute kind, but sufficiently poignant, with irony salting the bitterness and with tender laughter softening the pathos; one deals with a realm of sheer phantasy, two are ghostly; several are masterly psychological studies. It is strange that his stories have received so little fame in the West; they are the most under-rated of all his work.
His IRONY. Irony is almost the differentia of his stories, being always present. By it the poet supplies the place of comment and chorus to his own action. It is present when Subha’s parents sell her, or her disappointed husband goes to get another wife; and present when Krishnagôpâl stands beneath the banian making confession to his son; it is the very woof of The Skeleton; it is terrible in that pregnant summary of a whole history of stupid cruelty, at the finish of Living or Dead, when Kàdambini ‘by dying made proof that she had been alive.’ It gives edge to stories which were tracts for the times, exposing social evils, with a relentlessness and imaginative force which no pamphlet could attain.
SOCIAL QUESTIONS IN HIS STORIES. No question has stirred him more deeply or constantly than the position of women. His stories show an understanding of women, as the work of exceedingly few men does. His youth owed a very great deal to the friendly encouragement and comradeship of his elder brother’s wife, whose death was a poignant grief to him; and many of the letters and poems of his Shileida days were addressed to his niece J Indira (Mrs. Pramathanath Chaudhuri). His fiercest scorn has flashed out at Hindu society for its child-marriage and cruel treatment of girls who are little — more than babies. I remember saying to him that Hindus lost five years of childhood in their girls, just when they were most delightful. He replied, ‘I quite agree with you, and it is the saddest thing in our lives.’ His sympathy and understanding have had their reward. Whatever mistakes his countrymen have made, in following the vogue of this or that third-rate writer, his most intellectual countrywomen have never made any as to where these men stand in letters and where Rabindranath stands. Judging by the many charming and interesting stories by Bengali ladies which have come my way, in book and manuscript, his is the one influence which puts all others into a very cold and deep shade.
THE GLAMOUR OF SOME STORIES. Of the poetical beauty of the stories something has been said. I would add to this their glamour. The authors of The Blessed Damosel and of Christabel would have been glad of the chance of reading Hungry Stones or The Lost Jewels.
His NOVELS. His novels deserve more serious notice than can be given here. Two of them are available in English, and their qualities and shortcomings can be appreciated. They will remain the classic pictures of the Bengal of his time. Especially admirable is their detachment, shown, for example, in the remorseless exposure, in The Home and the Worlds of the meaner side of that great anti-Partition movement in which he took so prominent a share. Very few men could have seen and criticised so clearly, and yet have remained convinced partisans. His greatest novel of all, Gora, is the greatest novel in Bengali (which almost certainly means in Indian) literature. Its fulness and closeness of observation have been followed by the greatest of Rabindranath’ s successors, Saratchandra Chatterji, who has expressed to me his intense admiration for Gora. The qualities of the short stories can be found in the novels, if not in the same concentration of beauty yet on a wider field and in fuller study.
His DRAMAS. It will have been seen that Rabindranath’s creative work cannot be divided up, but that poems and fiction must be taken together. His dramatic work similarly refuses to allow of any clear-cut division into prose and poetry. Some of it is witty prose dialogue, as is Baikuntha’s Manuscript; at the other extreme we have the sheer loveliness of Chitrangada; and between are dramas and dramatic dialogues of every texture between prose and poetry. (His dramas may be classified in three main groups. There are the Sadhana dramas, his best, the best Indian dramas since Sanskrit days. Their beauty, though subtle and variegated, is always clear, and the symbolism does not fog the action. They are vehicles of ideas, powerfully filled with conviction; yet things happen in them, and usually happen rightly and naturally. Sacrifice, especially, has shown that it possesses stage-qualities that can make it a success today.
DRAMATIC DIALOGUES. The second group are the brief dialogues of the late nineties. The way for these was pointed by Chitrangada and The Curse at Farewell. Gandhari s Prayer is statuesque; Lakshmi’s Testing is gracious and mocking; Kama and Kunti is as tense and moving an interview as any literature possesses. The first and last are classical in theme, and establish their relationship with the great literature of Sanskrit by moments as powerful as any of its own. In Gandhari’s Prayer, Durjyadhan, who has won by sharp practice and sent his kinsmen into exile, faces his father and mother. He is a Prussian, extolling strength and success. Passion, as commonly in Rabindranath, enters with the woman, with the mother, who pleads that her husband renounce their son. He refuses, and the Queen is left alone, to voice the wrongs of the uncounted ages. Kama and Kunti shows us Kunti, the Pandava Queen, trying to win Kama, the unacknowledged son of her shame, from the Kaurava host. To-morrow he will die in battle, as he knows well. But when his mother refused to give him his birthright, years before, she set an eternal gulf between the life that is his and the life that should have been his. He remains with the host of his adoption, who trust him. The piece is beyond praise. Lakshmi s Testing gives us a generous queen, a sharp, selfish maidservant, and Lakshmi herself. The Goddess makes the grumbling maidservant a queen. She behaves as might have been expected, and finally spurns the Goddess herself, who comes disguised. There is a quick reversal back to her real estate, as Lakshmi reveals herself, and — Khiri the servant wakes up from her dream, vowing to serve her generous mistress better in future and without complaint for the position which she now sees is the only one she is fit for.
SYMBOLICAL PLAYS. The third group of plays embraces all his later ones. All, including even the playlets which he has written for his Santiniketan boys, sometimes very simply for the youngest boys of all, are symbolical. I find them clouded, with too much ‘sob-stuff’ in them and often a tiresome insistence on the tremendous significance of the trivial. The life has gone from them, for the symbolism has been a vampire, sucking the blood of action away. Yet all the plays have qualities. Several have been acted with success before select (if not selected) audiences in London and Dublin. The Post-Office, especially, is a favourite with all Tagorites (if one may coin a horrible word), both in the West and in India. Phalguni — The Cycle of Spring — is redeemed by its songs; The King of the Dark Chamber by the majesty of the conception which it presents. At least one, Autumn-Festival, is just delightful, an open-air frolic. The English reader should remember that it is translations which he is reading.
His DRAMATIC GIFT NEVER CARRIED TO FULFILMENT. I feel that the poet has never realised his possibilities as dramatist. He is a natural dramatist, when symbolism does not strangle his powers. His earlier dramas reached an achievement which he failed to carry to fulfilment. If today he were to return to drama, fighting against his incorrigible tendency to a tendency which can become a habit and, like all things in excess, very wearing to others, he might lift himself quite out of the rank of great dramatists — in which Sacrifice and Malini and Karna and Kunti undoubtedly placed him securely for all time — into the small class of very great dramatists. The Tagorite will demur, that the symbolism is essential, is veritable Tagore. He need not vex himself. Though the poet should fight his sternest against it, enough of symbolism would inevitably enter, to give his work the right Tagore note.
His SONGS AND LYRICS. His most characteristic and popular work awaits a word. Everyone has heard how his songs have passed into the daily life of Bengal. Here, for once, Mr. Rhys and Mr. Yeats and the others all touch fact. His songs are popular, with a popularity often made boundless by the tunes to which he has set them. ‘There is no doubt,’ as he said to me, ‘that I have conquered my countrymen by my songs. I have heard even drivers of bullock-carts singing my latest and most up-to-date songs.’ His songs are some fifteen hundred in number, and are of all periods. His latest are better than his earlier, which is strange, since the gift of song is a young poet’s gift and leaves — most poets as age clogs the current of their blood. His songs are of a grace and lightness that no translation can convey. In them we have the one altogether adequate portrayal of her manifold moods that Bengal has produced.
‘For every season he has dressings fit, —
Spring, autumn, winter, summer.’
If the reader can take his English books, and find the half-dozen lyrics most perfect in grace and suggestion, and then in imagination multiply that grace and suggestion tenfold, he can guess what these songs are like.
ESSENTIALLY A LYRIST; DEVELOPMENT OF LYRICAL FORM AND RANGE. The basis of his work is essentially lyrical. Evening Songs showed, long ago, that a new lyrist had arisen. Their characteristics have been excellently given in Dr. Brajendranath Seal’s famous praise — over-praise, as Dr. Seal would admit today, but genuine discernment. Indulgence is due to the enthusiasm of a man who recognises first a new star, of a different kind, in brightness and magnitude, from any already visible in the heavens. He speaks of ‘aerial fascinations and somnolescences, dissolving phantasms and sleepy enchantments, twilight memories of days of fancy and fire, ghostly visitings of radiant effulgences, or the lightning-flashes of a Maenad-like inspiration,’ which float under the grey skies of evening and are ‘transfixed and crystallised for us in many a page of delicate, silver-lined analysis, of subtly-woven, variegated imaginative synthesis.’
Rabindranath has used an immense number of stanza-forms, and has experimented endlessly with metre, is experimenting today. His greatest book, Balaka, over thirty years later, shows the lyric freedom of Evening Songs carried many degrees further, till the metres stream over the page, hither and thither, in the swiftest and most perfect obedience to the poet’s dancing mood. And the greatest thing of all is that this freedom goes with the strongest thought that the poet had ever shown. Baldkd is a great book intellectually, with a never-pausing flow and eddy of abstract ideas. Its imaginative power surpasses that of any earlier book, and moves to admiration continually. In diction, the book completes the merry defiance of convention which Kskanikd had begun.
RELIGIOUS LYRICS. The beauty of his religious lyrics is adequately presented by the English Gitanjali, in such perfect pieces as this:
‘Day after day, O lord of my life, shall I stand before thee face to face? With folded hands, O lord of all worlds, shall I stand before thee face to face?
Under the great sky in solitude and silence, with humble heart shall I stand before thee face to face?
In this laborious world of thine, tumultuous with toil and with struggle, among hurrying crowds shall I stand before thee face to face?
And when my work shall be done in this world, O King of kings, alone and speechless shall I stand before thee face to face?
Or in such a sublime turn of imagination as:
‘Thou didst not turn in contempt from my childish play among dust, and the steps that I heard in my playroom are the same that are echoing from star to star.’
PATRIOTIC POETRY. Even his patriotic poetry has very many passages of the truest feeling and noblest expression. Here is the poem whose Bengali title is Asha — Hope, — which we may call The Poet’s Dream:
‘Mother, my sun had set. ‘Come, child,’ you said;
You drew me to your heart, and on my head
With kisses set an everlasting light.
About my breast, of thorns and blossoms plight,
A garland hung, Song’s guerdon, — in my heart
Its pangs burnt deep; your own hand plucked apart
The barbs, and cleansed of dust, and did bedeck
With that rekindled loveliness my neck:
You welcomed me, your son to endless years.
Rising, I lift my heavy lids of tears;
I wake — I see — and all a dream appears.
GREATNESS AS A LYRIST; URBASI. TO show his greatness as lyrist, and as poet, extensive quotation would be necessary. But space is exhausted, so I finish with three stanzas from Urbasi, part of which has been quoted already. Urbasi is the heavenly dancer of Indra’s court, the type of Eternal Beauty, who in the beginning rose from the sea when it was churned by the Gods to recover the lost nectar of immortality.
‘Wast thou never bud, never maiden of tender years, O eternally youthful Urbasi?
Sitting alone, under whose dark roof Didst thou know childhood’s play, toying with gems and pearls?
At whose side, in some chamber lit with the flashing of gems, Lulled by the chant of the sea-waves, didst thou sleep on coral bed, A smile on thy pure face?
That moment when thou awakedst into the universe, thou wast framed of youth, In full-blown beauty!
From age to age thou hast been the worlds beloved, O unsurpassed in loveliness, Urbasi!
Breaking their meditation, sages lay at thy feet the fruits of their penance; Smitten with thy glance, the three worlds grow restless with youth; The blinded winds blow thine intoxicating fragrance around; Like the black bee, honey-drunken, the infatuated poet wanders, with greedy heart, Lifting chants of wild jubilation!
While thou... thou goest, with jingling anklets and waving skirts, Restless as lightning!
In the assembly of Gods, when thou dancest in ecstasy of joy, O swaying Wave, Urbasi!
The companies of billows in mid-ocean swell and dance, beat on beat; In the crests of the corn the skirts of Earth tremble; From thy necklace stars fall off in the sky; Suddenly in the breast of man the heart forgets itself, The blood dances!
Suddenly in the horizon thy zone bursts asunder; Ah, Wild in Abandonment!’
The Western reader can gain little notion of this glorious poem’s wealth of allusion, in which Indian mythology mingles with European legends of mermaids and with recollection of the ‘perilous goddess’ who was born of the ocean-foam. Neither can he remotely guess at the melody of the splendid, swaying lines, knit into their superb stanzas, or the flashing felicity of diction in such a line as that one:
‘In the crests of the corn the skirts of Earth tremble.’
But something of its unflagging glory of imagination should touch him with gladness, something of its wonderful succession of pictures should unfold before his vision, — enough, surely, to make him see that (the man who wrote Urbasi produced a world-masterpiece, and not merely the most accomplished lyric of — India, and won for himself the right to be included among the world’s lyric poets.
IV