A few days ago I said to a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine, “I
know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I
would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would
tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But
though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred
my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his
life, and of the movements of thought that have made them possible, if
some Indian traveller will not tell me.” It seemed to him natural that
I should be moved, for he said, “I read Rabindranath every day, to read
one line of his is to forget all the troubles of the world.” I said,
“An Englishman living in London in the reign of Richard the Second had
he been shown translations from Petrarch or from Dante, would have
found no books to answer his questions, but would have questioned some
Florentine banker or Lombard merchant as I question you. For all I
know, so abundant and simple is this poetry, the new renaissance has
been born in your country and I shall never know of it except by
hearsay.” He answered, “We have other poets, but none that are his
equal; we call this the epoch of Rabindranath. No poet seems to me as
famous in Europe as he is among us. He is as great in music as in
poetry, and his songs are sung from the west of India into Burma
wherever Bengali is spoken. He was already famous at nineteen when he
wrote his first novel; and plays when he was but little older, are
still played in Calcutta. I so much admire the completeness of his
life; when he was very young he wrote much of natural objects, he would
sit all day in his garden; from his twenty-fifth year or so to his
thirty-fifth perhaps, when he had a great sorrow, he wrote the most
beautiful love poetry in our language,” and then he said with deep
emotion, “words can never express what I owed at seventeen to his love
poetry. After that his art grew deeper, it became religious and
philosophical; all the inspiration of mankind are in his hymns. He is
the first among our saints who has not refused to live, but has spoken
out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.” I may have
changed his well-chosen words in my memory but not his thought. “A
little while ago he was to read divine service in one of our
churches—we of the Brahma Samaj use your word ‘church’ in English—it
was the largest in Calcutta and not only was it crowded, but the
streets were all but impassable because of the people.”
Other Indians came to see me and their reverence for this man sounded
strange in our world, where we hide great and little things under the
same veil of obvious comedy and half-serious depreciation. When we were
making the cathedrals had we a like reverence for our great men? “Every
morning at three—I know, for I have seen it”—one said to me, “he sits
immovable in contemplation, and for two hours does not awake from his
reverie upon the nature of God. His father, the Maha Rishi, would
sometimes sit there all through the next day; once, upon a river, he
fell into contemplation because of the beauty of the landscape, and the
rowers waited for eight hours before they could continue their
journey.” He then told me of Mr. Tagore’s family and how for
generations great men have come out of its cradles. “Today,” he said,
“there are Gogonendranath and Abanindranath Tagore, who are artists;
and Dwijendranath, Rabindranath’s brother, who is a great philosopher.
The squirrels come from the boughs and climb on to his knees and the
birds alight upon his hands.” I notice in these men’s thought a sense
of visible beauty and meaning as though they held that doctrine of
Nietzsche that we must not believe in the moral or intellectual beauty
which does not sooner or later impress itself upon physical things. I
said, “In the East you know how to keep a family illustrious. The other
day the curator of a museum pointed out to me a little dark-skinned man
who was arranging their Chinese prints and said, “That is the
hereditary connoisseur of the Mikado, he is the fourteenth of his
family to hold the post.’” He answered, “When Rabindranath was a boy he
had all round him in his home literature and music.” I thought of the
abundance, of the simplicity of the poems, and said, “In your country
is there much propagandist writing, much criticism? We have to do so
much, especially in my own country, that our minds gradually cease to
be creative, and yet we cannot help it. If our life was not a continual
warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we
would not find hearers and readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent
in the quarrel with bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds
of others.” “I understand,” he replied, “we too have our propagandist
writing. In the villages they recite long mythological poems adapted
from the Sanskrit in the Middle Ages, and they often insert passages
telling the people that they must do their duties.”