His RELIGIOUS TEACHING LATER THAN HIS PUBLIC ACTIVITY. NO man’s life and work fall into compartments. But it is true that (it was from political and social activity that Rabindranath passed to educational experiment, and from the last to the peace and poise which mark his religious attitude and are his message. today. There never was a period when religion was not a serious matter to him. Nevertheless, in his own words, ‘The day was when I did not keep myself in readiness for thee; and, entering my heart unbidden, even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment of my life.’
YOUTH A PERIOD OF IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES.
At first, as we have seen, his life was one of gathering impressions. Moments of illumination came, notably the one which flooded his mind with happiness in early manhood and produced the most spontaneous of the Morning Songs. ‘The end of Sudder Street, and the trees on the Free School grounds opposite, were visible from our Sudder Street house. One morning, I happened to be standing on the veranda, looking that way. The sun was just rising through the leafy tops of those trees. As I continued to gaze, all of a sudden a covering seemed to fall away from my eyes, and I found the world bathed in a wonderful radiance, with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every side. This radiance pierced in a moment through the folds of sadness and despondency which had accumulated over my heart, and flooded it with this universal light.
‘That very day the poem, The Awakening of the Waterfall, gushed forth and coursed on like a veritable cascade. The poem came to an end, but the curtain did not fall upon the joy-aspect of the Universe. And it came to be so that no person or thing in the world seemed to me trivial or unpleasing.’
Sudder Street is a dingy, dismal spot, to have given him the illumination which the Himalayas had previously denied.
RABINDRANATH AND THE MAHARSHI. From his father he had a noble inheritance. The Maharshi stood out among men by his uprightness and fearlessness, by his stern monotheism and detestation of idolatry, and the fervour of his personal communion with God. His son’s mind has shown wider interests, and has been without the sternness. The detestation of idolatry has not been his, for it has been unnecessary. The Maharshi’s attitude and influence made all question of idolatrous observances for him once for all as dead as they are to any Christian. But the monotheism came to him, with a definiteness that has been overlooked, for all its obviousness.
IN YOUTH, RABINDRANATH OBSERVANT AND CRITICAL. The young poet of Evening Songs and Sharps and Flats was Beauty’s worshipper, The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath.’
But his were the most observant eyes in Bengal, with a generous heart whose feelings their impressions fed. In his own family circle had been a free, happy life. But he quickly awoke to the fact that the mass of his countrymen lived in a tyranny which at some points challenged comparison with any cruelty that Time has known. What horrible wrongs enlightened men can permit to exist without any protest the history of many lands and periods has shown. Let the Westerner who feels entitled to fling a stone at some Indian evils remember England’s penal laws of a century ago, or her representatives, paroxysms of fury in the Indian Mutiny or in Governor Eyre’s Jamaica régime, or the savagery of both sides in Ireland, or America’s lynching record. Yet good men, men earnest for the reform of humanity and for religion, have lived in the same age with these things, apparently untroubled. Rabindranath was not one of such. He is not of those
‘to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.’
Wrong, and cruelty, I think, do not come home to him as with the stab of personal infliction. But he is one of that not less useful company whose sense of abstract justice is extraordinarily keen and awake, and who are tormented with the thought of things that ought not to be, by any law of God or good men. His intelligence revolted at the folly which passed often for patriotism with his noisier fellow-countrymen, and his attitude, during the first thirty-five years of his life, was chiefly critical. As the preceding pages have shown, he had a lash of cutting anger, freely plied.
(GRADUAL GROWTH OF HIS NATIONALISM; THEN, Loss OF FAITH IN NATIONALISM. But the evils which he saw and hated came gradually closely home to him. The land which was cursed by them was his mother. As he looked at them, he seemed, like so many Indian patriots, to find their cause in her helpless condition. If only she were strong and free, she would expel these foul birds from her altars, where they had nested so long, poisoning the deepest life of her children. He looked at the West, which seemed so powerful, so organised. As he looked, the secret of her effectiveness seemed to come to him. It was her nationalism. Therefore, he, too, would be a nationalist. Let India become a nation, and she would be as strong as these nations overseas. So he entered public life. When a Viceroy, whose many gifts to India were obscured by his habit of giving offence in speech and manner, said publicly that the Bengalis were liars, Rabindranath replied with all his artillery of sarcasm, even analysing those notoriously truthful things, official communications, and quoting their obsequious conclusion, ‘Your obedient servant’ A debating score, and one which does not touch the essential question at issue! But he took up more serious challenges. He unmasked the hollowness and falsity of the Delhi Durbar, a painted shell hiding the poverty of India. He was the heart and soul of the campaign against the Partition. The years of battle brought disillusion. He grew weary — of nationalism, which made so much noise and carried with it so few incentives to honesty and unselfishness. What he came to think of it, as a means of salvation, he has shown, in that disillusioned book, The Home and the World, and in his book of lectures, Nationalism The latter book is remarkably one-sided and unfair, yet it puts, more powerfully than it has been put elsewhere, the Indian indictment of British rule in his land. The Englishman asks, Is not our rule efficient? Is it not immeasurably juster and honester than the rules which went before it? To which the reply is, Yes. It is just and efficient beyond any comparison with the rule of Mogul or native prince. What is wrong, then? the Englishman asks, bewildered. Rabindranath’s Nationalism gives him his answer. His rule is impersonal, a matter of machinery. Through the very cracks left by their abounding inefficiency, personality percolated, in the days of the old bad rules. Whereas this foreign rule goes its strong, impersonal way, like an instrument of torture, ‘exempt itself From aught that it inflicts.’
It has given them an Emperor seven thousand miles away, and a Parliament which has no time or wish to attend to their affairs.
His IDEAS TO-DAY AS TO NATIONALISM. His leading ideas are simple and clear enough, though they are expressed with an inexhaustible wealth of picturesque illustration and an angry energy that often defeat their ends, by distracting attention from his theme to its ornaments and accidents. (The Western nations to him are robber-nations, organisations for exploitation of the weak. Their government of dependencies is callous and stupid. The Moguls lived in India, whereas the British pass through it for a few years. The Moguls and other former rulers enriched India by art and literature and architecture. The British have given India railways and bridges and bank buildings. The Moguls left the Taj behind them, this epoch will leave the gigantic railway-stations. Its civilisation, he says, is a matter of machinery. ‘When this engine of organisation begins to attain a vast size, and those who are mechanics are made into parts of the machine, then the personal man is eliminated to a phantom, everything becomes a revolution of policy carried out by the human parts of the machine, with no twinge of pity or moral responsibility.’ The Nation, as the West has evolved it, ‘this abstract being,’ rules India. ‘We have seen in our country some brands of tinned food advertised as entirely made and packed without being touched by hand. This description applies to the governing of India, which is as little touched by the human hand as possible. The governors need not know our language, need not come into personal touch with us except as officials; they can aid or hinder our aspirations from a disdainful distance, they can lead us on a certain path of policy and then pull us back again with the manipulation of office red-tape; the newspapers of England, in whose columns London street-accidents are recorded with some decency of pathos, need take but the scantiest notice of calamities which happen in India over areas of land sometimes larger than the British Isles.’ More than any other man, he created the national feeling which is today the most obvious fact in Bengal (and, therefore, throughout India). Yet to him nationalism, in his own land and everywhere, is now the enemy, which obstructs all progress and freedom of thought and life. This has been made startlingly clear by his attitude towards the non-co-operation movement, which has been ravaging Bengal student-life; and some of the leaders of that movement have attacked him with almost incredible insolence. He condemns its sterility and negative teaching. His mission in life, he says, is to strive for reconciliation of East and West in mutual helpfulness.
His HONESTY AND EARNESTNESS. There is this difference between Rabindranath’s indictments and much of the wild criticism which has flooded the path of the British Government in India during recent years. He is sometimes unfair, often one-sided; but he is never either liar or fool. His criticism deserves the closest attention, because no man has a stronger sense of fairness. If he says a thing, it is because he is convinced it is true. Prove it false, and he would withdraw it. In the passages I have quoted there is only too much truth, as many an Englishman in India would admit. Those in the Services who are most sympathetic to India know how few there are today in their ranks who have the close knowledge of the people and things Indian which marked many an administrator and soldier in former days. They know, too, how miserably low the standard of knowledge of the vernaculars has become. Anyone can pass the official tests, whether ‘Proficiency’ or ‘Higher Proficiency.’ If a man goes further than this, and actually takes an interest in a vernacular literature, he is repaid by an amount of reputation which ten times the labour and knowledge in any subject could not bring in England. The halfdozen Englishmen who are interested in Bengali literature today are known by name to many whom they have never met, and their attainments are considered much greater than they are.
His ATTITUDE TO THE BRITISH PEOPLE. Rabindranath makes a distinction between the British Nation and the British People. ‘I have a deep love and a great respect for the British race as human beings. It has produced great-hearted men, thinkers of great thoughts, doers of great deeds. It has given rise to a great literature. I know that these people love justice and freedom, and hate lies. They are clean in their minds, frank in their manners, true in their friendships; in their behaviour, they are honest and reliable. The personal experience which I have had of their literary men has roused my admiration not merely for their power of thought or expression, but for their chivalrous humanity. We have felt the greatness of this people, as we feel the sun; but as for the Nation, it is for us a thick mist of a stifling nature covering the sun itself.’
His GENERALISATIONS AND SWEEPING INDICTMENTS. It is pardonable for the Englishman occasionally to feel a momentary annoyance at the decision with which Rabindranath sets him and his civilisation and religion to rights. Westerners have in the past been good enough to give the East the benefit of their generalisations on many things. Bolder than Burke, they have not shrunk from indicting a nation. The East has learnt the trick from them; and not Rabindranath only, but many a round-mouthed little lawyer or student will speak with readiness and clearness and fulness about their most complex questions, questions which have puzzled those whose whole lives, and those of their ancestors before them, have been lived close to them. As the West began the game, it must put up with it. Rabindranath, at any rate, might have let fall some word of natural pity for the appalling sorrow and ineffable heroism of these last dreadful years. Fault has been committed, and blame abundant is due. But many of those who suffered were innocent. The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children’s teeth have been set on edge. Could the poet have carried his memory back to his own mind of twenty years younger, he would have seen the nobler side of all that he hated so, and might, even, have asked himself if his own civilisation, for all the virtues he finds in it, could have shown one-tenth such patience under pain, such willingness to face agony. Nevertheless, he is right in his insistence that the War was a necessary outcome of the horrible state of things in which the whole West had acquiesced. Is right, too, in his indictment of modern civilisation as material and hard. Here there is a leaven working for better things, and there are many in the West who feel as strongly and deeply as he does. Unfortunately, the curse of modern industrialism, from which the toiling masses of Europe are wrestling to get free, is gripping his India every day more firmly.” Not hundred miles from his beloved Santiniketan, the land is foul with it, the skies are wreathed with factory-smoke, the wayside is piled with slag-mountains. If East and West could combine, each giving where the other is poor!
His VIEWS ON SOCIAL QUESTIONS. In domestic politics, he has been consistent. Woman is different from man, and therefore to him the modern outcries to make her equal with man are meaningless. He would have her — remain woman a centre of love and inspiration without which the world is poverty-stricken. But he has never ceased to attack the injustice and cruelty which regard woman as inferior, as unfitted for education or the arts. The desolation of so many women’s lives by the way in which Hindu society treats widows, the shameful marriage-market of Bengal, the sending away of little girls, — these things he has striven against with all his powers. On another Indian institution, caste, he has said, in words often quoted, ‘The regeneration of the Indian people, to my mind, directly and perhaps solely depends upon the removal of this condition.’ He says this, while recognising the essential services which the institution of caste rendered in ancient days.
EDUCATIONAL REFORMER; SANTINIKETAN. Out of his political activities came his educational ones. The disillusionment and disappointment which resulted from the one were the direct road to the other. He himself tells us, ‘I seemed choked for breath in the hideous nightmare of our present time, meaningless in its petty ambitions of poverty, and felt in me the struggle of my motherland for awakening in spiritual emancipation. Our endeavours after political agitation seemed to me unreal to the core, and pitifully feeble in their utter helplessness. I felt that it is a blessing of providence that begging should be an unprofitable profession, and that only to him that hath shall be given. I said to myself that we must seek for our own inheritance and with it buy our true place in the world.’ These words describe his feeling in his days by Padma, but they are certainly not less true of it in the days of his political energy. Accordingly, (in 1901, he founded the Santiniketan, beginning with five students only. But his original idea was wider than that of a school, as has been already said. He wanted a home for the spirit of India, distracted and torn in the conflicting winds of the present age. Today, he seeks a home for the spirit of all nations, for his mind is so universal in its sympathies that it can never rest content with a part. That is why he will never be a non-co-operator; he feels too much the need of every part for each. But he began with a school, formed on the model of the old forest-schools of India. The school is now world-famous. Among its teachers have been artists of reputation such as Nandalal Bose and Asitkumar Haidar, writers such as Ajitkumar Chakrabarti and Satischandra Ray, philosophers such as the poet’s eldest brother, Dwijendranath Tagore, and Englishmen such as C. F.
Andrews and ‘Willie’ Pearson. The chief teachers, on whom the poet has placed his main reliance, have been the open spaces around the groves, the trees, dawn and evening and moonlight, the winds and great rains. He believes in the education of Nature, by which
‘beauty born of murmuring sound’
can pass into character. His own broken and not extensive memory of school-life in childhood was unhappy. Therefore, all through his Santiniketan experiment, he has insisted on one thing, first and second, and all along the line, — on freedom, more freedom, always freedom. The place is hallowed by memory of the Maharski, who found three trees — still extant, and marked by a tablet, — in the midst of a bare, uplifted plain, two miles out of Bolpur, and came here to meditate. There are now noble groves, with abundance of the sweet-flowering shrubs and creepers that India loves. Outside the groves, the great plain stretches away, and here the boys sit on mats on moonlight nights while their own teachers or visitors address them. It is a very notable experience to visit Santiniketan. The air seems charged with solemn, happy thoughts, and purer than elsewhere; and the whole place is filled with joyous faces and voices. The boys play games energetically and well, they discipline themselves by means of their own courts, they have their school-song (written by the poet), their place of worship (a church of perfect simplicity, open to the breezes), their organisations for tending the sick among them and for visiting villages and conducting night-schools giving elementary education. A very prominent feature of school-life is their dramatic performances, chiefly of the poet’s own plays. The boys are very perfect mimics. Classes take place in the open-air whenever possible, and a boy sits where he will, — up a tree, if he chooses. The one or two criticisms that occurred to me in my casual acquaintance with the school are too trivial to set down here. What is certain is, that the place is the only school in Bengal which has an idea and a personality behind it.
DIFFICULTY OF MAINTAINING THE SCHOOL. For long enough, the school was run at a loss, and the poet was put to all sorts of shifts to find money for it. Officialdom frowned on it; and ordinary parents fought shy of a school which did not tread the orthodox road to the University examinations, but led its rejoicing students through Bypath Meadow. It was a most effective blow at the school when it was allowed to be understood that its pupils would have no chance of Government service. This was years ago. These difficulties no longer exist.
RELIGIOUS ATMOSPHERE OF SANTINIKBTAN. The day begins and ends at Santiniketan with prayer. Boys go round the groves, chanting. This is the morning prayer:
‘Thou art our Father. Do Thou help us to know Thee as Father. We bow down to Thee. Do Thou never afflict us, O Father, by causing a separation between Thee and us. O Thou self-revealing One, O Thou Parent of the Universe, purge away the multitude of our sins, and send unto us whatever is good and noble. To Thee, from Whom spring joy and goodness, nay, Who art all goodness thyself, to Thee we bow down now and for ever.’
This is the evening prayer:
‘The Deity Who is in fire and water, nay, Who pervades the universe through and through, and makes His abode in tiny plants and towering forests — to such a Deity we bow down for ever and ever.’
RABINDRANATH AS RELIGIOUS TEACHER. We come to the matter of our final consideration, Rabindranath as religious teacher and man. This is a question on which no wise man would care to speak at great length or with great positiveness; and, the nearer he has been privileged to come to this noble spirit, the less he cares to give definite expression to what he has come to think. Yet no account of Rabindranath, however brief, can pass it entirely by. I have said that he has no reasoned philosophy. His mind is too mobile and sensitive, too glancing and universal. —
Is GITANJALI CHRISTIAN IN TONE AND TEACHING? Some things are obvious. Since I have been criticised for saying that it was ‘nonsense’ to say that the Gitânjali represented the teaching of ordinary Hinduism, let me repeat and slightly expand my reply. First of all, it is as plain as can be that his work has none of the outward dress of Hinduism. This is seen to be inevitable, directly one knows the background of his life. At Santiniketan, even the stones cry out, inscribed with texts of austere monotheism. The pillars at the gate prohibit the bringing of idols within or the slaughter of beasts for food or sacrifice. For Gitdnjali, that exquisite chapbook of mysticism, Indian mythology is exactly what Greek is to a Western poet — a storehouse of illustrations, nothing more. ‘The divine bird of Vishnu, perfectly poised in the angry, red light of the sunset,’ might be the eagle which carried off Ganymede. He uses the popular Indian story of Love in a human form, sporting with mortal girls, uses it repeatedly, — in his earlier poems for the sake of its background of rain-soaked or flowery forest, in his later for its allegory. Yet in his later verse how changed it is from the form in which popular Hinduism knows it! It has become ‘jam pro conscientia Christianas’; losing its Hindu differentiae, it is one with the Divine Eros of all ages and religions, and the Christian mysticism of any century can parallel even its boldness. But neither idolatry nor mythology forms the battleground. Hinduism and Christianity are at grips in their doctrines of karma, life after death, of the nature and character of God. It is hard to see how karma can stand without the doctrine of transmigration as its expression and ratification. Yet surely in karma we have Hinduism’s most characteristic doctrine. Neither the Hindu karma nor the Hindu doctrine of transmigration can be found in Rabindranath. The idea of many incarnations is found in his poetry, and it is hard to say with exactly what intensity of belief it is held in each place. Many poets, and not poets only, have played with the thought, or seriously considered the possibility. Reincarnation, for the Christian as for Rabindranath, is an open question. It may happen. We do not know. But, as for the ordinary Hindu doctrine of transmigration, Rabindranath’s words, when asked if the common report was true, that his father in his old age inclined to accept it, are explicit: ‘My father never believed in that fairy-tale.’ Transmigration is losing its hold on modern Hindu thought. I turn to the question of the life after death, which both Christian and Hindu admit, in their different ways. Many Indian minds crave personal immortality. Ramprasad (eighteenth century) asks, in a passionate lyric, ‘What is the use of salvation if it means absorption? I like eating sugar, but I have no wish to become sugar.’ Rabindranath’s thought on this question varies. That Christian is unusually fortunate whose belief in survival of death has never known periods of doubt and clouding over. There are passages in Rabindranath’s verse which look forward eagerly to what must be a fuller, and, in a real sense, a personal life, if the longing and its strong expression are to have any meaning. He has told me that he believes that Buddha’s mind has been misinterpreted, and that men went wrong in thinking that he taught extinction of personality. But, as to what Rabindranath himself thinks today, the evidence before me is too conflicting for me to care to pronounce opinion. He is a poet, and a poet has moods. He is a man, and a man must struggle.
RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF GITANJALI OVERASSESSED. Before touching on the third point, of the poet’s teaching as to the nature and character of God, I wish to digress briefly. The West has formed its impression of his religion chiefly from Gitanjali. But one element in the poet’s loss of reputation was that men came to see that the religious ideas (as distinct from the warmth of personal emotion) of Gitanjali had been overassessed. The book’s leading thought was of life as lila, a thought which was fresh to the West but commonplace in India. Lila is sport, in its highest meaning rising into drama of tragic and heroic significance, in its lowest sinking into mere play and laughter. Now all life is lila, as Hinduism rightly and nobly insists. But too prevalently in Gitatijali lila seems to bear its least worthy meaning. God is the great playfellow who creates flowers of beauty for His children, and death is a momentary interruption of the lila. Such a conception of life might produce a lovable and interesting personality, but hardly a strong one. And, indeed, the weakness of Gitanjali, on its religious side, and of much of Rabindranath’s work, especially his poetry, is its minor tone, its Wistfulness, almost its wailing. His father’s message had something more robust about it.
CHRISTIAN INFLUENCE IN HIS WORK AND LIFE. When Gitanjali was published, people found so much in it that resembled the best thought in Christianity, that many concluded that the poet had been greatly influenced by Christianity. Some said, he is really a Christian. But this is equal nonsense with saying that his attitude represented ordinary Hinduism. In my judgment, the direct influence of Christianity on his thought has been very little. His father was the least Christian of all the Brahmo leaders. The poet repelled the suggestion that he had been influenced by Christian thought in writing Gitanjali by saying that he had never read the Bible — a confession which helps to explain the remarkable thinness of his essays on Christ. A Christian who wrote on Buddha from casual hearsay and general knowledge would not produce anything very creditable to himself. Further, I am sure that the sterner side of Christian doctrine has made no appeal to Rabindranath. Many Hindus, while remaining Hindus, have felt to the depths of their souls the conflict between good and evil which caused St. Paul to cry out, ‘O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this sinful body of death? ‘They have understood, even while not sharing its attitude, why Christian thought has turned so much to the death of Jesus. Rabindranath had his one moment of fleeting sympathy, when that poor Salvationist was beaten and filled up in his body what was lacking of the sufferings of Christ. Then he never felt it again, this sympathy with the side of Christianity which faces suffering and evil-doing. Nevertheless, Christianity is in the air of India, and Rabindranath has not escaped its influence. What is best in Gitanjali is an anthology from the ages of Indian thought and brooding; but it is the sun of Christian influence that has brought these buds into flower. Those who felt, when it appeared, that it was the most hopeful thing that had happened for fifty years, were right. The man who henceforward must rank among the great religious poets of the world did not call himself Christian, and only sheer ignorance of him and of Christianity could claim him as Christian; but in him was given a glimpse of what the Christianity of India will be like, and we see that it will be something better than the Christianity which came to it. The Christianity of India, when it has sloughed its present apathy and mendicancy and poverty of manliness, will help Western Christianity, which has made so many mistakes, to know God and Christ better. The Gospels teach a simplicity of life and of access to God which Western Christianity has overlaid. European Christians who live in India do not live uninfluenced by the broad, free spaces, the generous sun, the flooded moonlight. God in Nature becomes a reality, as to Christ amid the Galilean lilies. We can see, and, seeing, rejoice, that Indian Christianity will have at least a Vedantist tinge. Rejoice, because we know that once again man will share in the joy which is overflowing the worlds, and that the beasts of the field will be at peace with us. What Western Christianity is charged to carry to India is Christ; and what the ancient religion of India has to gain from Christianity is Christ — not a teacher only, but the Word made flesh, God entering our lives, our poverty and agonies, living as a working man in Eastern bazaars, dying the shameful death of a criminal slave.
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD’S FATHERHOOD. One Christian doctrine has profoundly influenced Rabindranath, and that is the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. If the reader will turn back to the Santiniketan morning and evening hymns, he will see that, while the latter is Indian in wording and inspiration, the former is Christian, Christian in every phrase. And, whenever Rabindranath mentions Christ, it is this aspect of His teaching which he emphasises. Upon His declaration, ‘I and My Father are one,’ he builds an interpretation which all Christian exegesis would reject, but he is happy because Christ said the words. In his more buoyant moods, the Divine Lover or Sojourner of so many wistful images — the traveller who comes at night and vanishes before morning, the boatman who is out in the wildest storm, the player whose flute sounds through the heavy rain and the darkened forest, — becomes his Father, between Whom and His child’s spirit there should not fall the least shadow of separation.
RABINDRANATH AND THE VEDAS AND UPANISHADS AND BUDDHA. The Christian influence is there, then. But the main ground of Rabindranath’s religious teaching and belief is Indian, and (still more) individual. It is Indian. It will be remembered that in his earlier phase as poet, he believed in two dogmas, the love and joy of the Universe. He has believed in these to the end. The latter is characteristically Indian. Despite the lesson of that frank, joyous Life lived under the Syrian skies, in the loveliest land of all lands, among the dancing flower-seas of mountain pasture, upon the sun-kissed, shimmering waters of a lake, the West has never taken this joy into its belief. A Wordsworth may declare that ‘’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.’
But who believes with him? Not bishop, not Baptist, not Methodist. Perchance a Francis of Assisi holds to this truth, but such an one comes not twice in a thousand years. But to the Indian Joy is as essential to the Universe as all-creating, all-upholding Love itself. So from the Upanishads Rabindranath wholeheartedly embraced this doctrine, from the Rig-Veda he took the freshness of those early Aryan dawns, and, because Christianity’s doctrine of the Fatherhood of God chimed with these and with the feelings of his own soul also, he found a place for that; and he has lived by this faith. He believes, too, that all is Love, except man’s hasty perversions of God’s purposes in Time. From the Upanishads he learnt that life should be lived as closely to Nature as possible. Hence, his days have been cool with the breezes that make their way under boughs and through blossoms and his nights have been gentle with moonlight. It was said of Lord de Tabley that he never missed a sunset. Rabindranath cannot have missed much moonlight. These things have become the very warp and texture of his spirit. To them he has added the teaching of Buddha, for whom he has a boundless reverence. Buddha’s compassion for all living things, and the wonder of his renunciation, have cast a golden splendour about man’s history; and in Rabindranath’s thought they have shone again, making his speech glow. He is almost more Buddhist than Hindu. Certainly, he is far more Buddhist than he is in sympathy with many forms of Hinduism that are most popular in his native Bengal.
RABINDRANATH AS A BRAHMO. In all this, I have been thinking of his attitude, so far as it could be expressed by any dogma or religion. A word should be added on his connection with the Brahmo Samaj, the church so closely linked with his family and in whose teachings he was brought up. —
Nominally, and by inheritance, Rabindranath is a member of the parent body, the Adi Brahmo Samaj. He is a most acceptable preacher, who pours out his whole soul. I shall never forget hearing him in early 1916, when the Brahmos were celebrating their centenary. He seemed almost tranced in adoration and meditation, as his voice went quietly and tensely through his prayer and address. The Jorasanko courtyard was crammed up to the galleries all round it, and everyone was watching that still, absorbed figure. After such services, he is exhausted, and empty of all nervous energy.
Today he rarely attends a service, unless he is himself the preacher. His failure to break down the conservatism of the Adi Samaj, in a matter on which he feels so strongly as he does on caste, — an episode referred to at some length in the second chapter of this book, — may have chilled his attitude towards a body which seemed cold and unprogressive. His sympathies are now rather with the Sadharan Samaj, which is the most vigorous branch of the Brahmo Samaj, numbering in its members a remarkable proportion of influential and well-known men. The Sâdhâran Samaj has this year elected him an honorary member.
He has told me that he does not like missionaries, whether Christian or Brahmo, as he regards them as narrow-minded. He objects to dogmatism and propagandist work. Yet, if pressed, he would not deny that a man who cares greatly about truth that he has found is morally bound to try to bring it to others — which is the sufficient justification for all missionary work, whether Christian or Brahmo, Buddhist or Moslem. A man who is a missionary for such a reason has no place in his mind or attitude for arrogance or patronage, but should be humble and anxious to serve, willing to learn, respecting all men everywhere. So Rabindranath has found some of his best friends among both Christian and Brahmo missionaries, and admits the unselfish usefulness of the best among these. And, though he prefers to be regarded as a theist in the broad sense and shrinks from labels which suggest any sort of separatism, he would not deny that the Brahmo Samaj has been very important among the formative influences of his life. He belongs to the Hindu civilisation; but he is unmistakably Brahmo, in his strong, clear theism, and his insistence on personal relationship with God as the thing that matters. The teaching and attitude of Gitanjali would never have surprised the West as they did, if the hymns of the Brahmo Samaj had been known. These hymns have not received the notice they deserve, as influences in his religious poetry. He himself has written some hundreds of hymns. It is mainly through the Brahmo channel that the abundant Christian influence in his life and thought has been mediated.
His RELIGION: PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, NOT A THEOLOGY. But, when all is said, and said haltingly and uncertainly, the essential thing remains to be said. What matters in him is not what he may set before his audiences or readers as his doctrines, but his personal experience of God. Of the depth and sincerity of this no one who has read Gitanjali can doubt. God is strangely close to his thought He is often more theistic than any Western theist. This has always struck me as the least-noted and yet the most remarkable thing in his religion, this way in which God becomes more personalised for him, the Indian, in the most intimate, individual fashion, than He does for the ordinary Christian. This is not Vedic, not Vedantist. I can only assume that he found it so in personal experience, that neither flesh nor blood revealed it to him but our Father in Heaven. ‘My cup has been emptied,’ he cries, in a letter to me, ‘and I must run for dear life to the one living stream I know that flows in the depth of solitude.’ He is a poet, and his mind is restless, and passes through moods of the darkest depression. All his life has been a conflict. Hence the troubled under tone of his religious work. It is the crying of the poet within him, of the eternal child. The world has wounded him, effort has drained, results have disappointed. While life remains, this note will never be silent Yet beneath all he has a calm and a poise of spirit, which knows many seasons of uninterrupted restfulness.
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS; His SIGNIFICANCE FOR OUR TIME. I suppose a word should be said as to personal characteristics. He is the most interesting of companions, witty and alive to every thought that rises. His gentleness and courage, his consideration, the dignity and nobility of his features, all combine to make up a personality whose fascination posterity will not be able to guess. This man, remarkable in himself, is still more remarkable as a prophecy of what is to be. After the farce of education and the tragedy of character, let us take hope, all of us who aspire to be counted among men of good will, patriotic Indian and sympathetic Englishman alike. Through him, we can believe that the end of this mingling of East and West will be good and not evil. Of that intermixture, and its results, men have seen enough that was hideous and depressing. But in Gitanjali came a result which was only lovely, a book that will stir men as long as the English language is read. We may feel that in such books and such a man we have the earnest that the enmity of East and West will be reconciled, that the mysterious destiny which has thrown a handful of northern islanders upon these ancient peoples will be justified. Both may believe that some better thing has been provided for them than aught either has yet experienced, that apart from the other neither could be made perfect. Neither he nor we have entered into the greatness of our heritage. Yet, in the words of F. W. H. Myers, ‘we may trust and claim that we are living now among the scattered forerunners of such types of beauty and of goodness as Athens never knew.’