II

I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for

days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in

restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would

see how much it moved me. These lyrics— which are in the original, my

Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable

delicacies of colour, of metrical invention—display in their thought a

world I have dreamed of all my live long. The work of a supreme

culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the

grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the

same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned

and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the

multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble. If the

civilization of Bengal remains unbroken, if that common mind which—as

one divines—runs through all, is not, as with us, broken into a dozen

minds that know nothing of each other, something even of what is most

subtle in these verses will have come, in a few generations, to the

beggar on the roads. When there was but one mind in England, Chaucer

wrote his _Troilus and Cressida_, and thought he had written to be

read, or to be read out—for our time was coming on apace—he was sung by

minstrels for a while. Rabindranath Tagore, like Chaucer’s forerunners,

writes music for his words, and one understands at every moment that he

is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of

surprise, because he is doing something which has never seemed strange,

unnatural, or in need of defence. These verses will not lie in little

well-printed books upon ladies’ tables, who turn the pages with

indolent hands that they may sigh over a life without meaning, which is

yet all they can know of life, or be carried by students at the

university to be laid aside when the work of life begins, but, as the

generations pass, travellers will hum them on the highway and men

rowing upon the rivers. Lovers, while they await one another, shall

find, in murmuring them, this love of God a magic gulf wherein their

own more bitter passion may bathe and renew its youth. At every moment

the heart of this poet flows outward to these without derogation or

condescension, for it has known that they will understand; and it has

filled itself with the circumstance of their lives. The traveller in

the read-brown clothes that he wears that dust may not show upon him,

the girl searching in her bed for the petals fallen from the wreath of

her royal lover, the servant or the bride awaiting the master’s

home-coming in the empty house, are images of the heart turning to God.

Flowers and rivers, the blowing of conch shells, the heavy rain of the

Indian July, or the moods of that heart in union or in separation; and

a man sitting in a boat upon a river playing lute, like one of those

figures full of mysterious meaning in a Chinese picture, is God

Himself. A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to

us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination; and yet we are

not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own

image, as though we had walked in Rossetti’s willow wood, or heard,

perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream.

Since the Renaissance the writing of European saints—however familiar

their metaphor and the general structure of their thought—has ceased to

hold our attention. We know that we must at last forsake the world, and

we are accustomed in moments of weariness or exaltation to consider a

voluntary forsaking; but how can we, who have read so much poetry, seen

so many paintings, listened to so much music, where the cry of the

flesh and the cry of the soul seems one, forsake it harshly and rudely?

What have we in common with St. Bernard covering his eyes that they may

not dwell upon the beauty of the lakes of Switzerland, or with the

violent rhetoric of the Book of Revelations? We would, if we might,

find, as in this book, words full of courtesy. “I have got my leave.

Bid me farewell, my brothers! I bow to you all and take my departure.

Here I give back the keys of my door—and I give up all claims to my

house. I only ask for last kind words from you. We were neighbours for

long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and

the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am

ready for my journey.” And it is our own mood, when it is furthest from

A Kempis or John of the Cross, that cries, “And because I love this

life, I know I shall love death as well.” Yet it is not only in our

thoughts of the parting that this book fathoms all. We had not known

that we loved God, hardly it may be that we believed in Him; yet

looking backward upon our life we discover, in our exploration of the

pathways of woods, in our delight in the lonely places of hills, in

that mysterious claim that we have made, unavailingly on the woman that

we have loved, the emotion that created this insidious sweetness.

“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.” This is no longer the sanctity of the cell and of the

scourge; being but a lifting up, as it were, into a greater intensity

of the mood of the painter, painting the dust and the sunlight, and we

go for a like voice to St. Francis and to William Blake who have seemed

so alien in our violent history.