We write long books where no page perhaps has any quality to make
writing a pleasure, being confident in some general design, just as we
fight and make money and fill our heads with politics—all dull things
in the doing—while Mr. Tagore, like the Indian civilization itself, has
been content to discover the soul and surrender himself to its
spontaneity. He often seems to contrast life with that of those who
have loved more after our fashion, and have more seeming weight in the
world, and always humbly as though he were only sure his way is best
for him: “Men going home glance at me and smile and fill me with shame.
I sit like a beggar maid, drawing my skirt over my face, and when they
ask me, what it is I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.” At
another time, remembering how his life had once a different shape, he
will say, “Many an hour I have spent in the strife of the good and the
evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to
draw my heart on to him; and I know not why this sudden call to what
useless inconsequence.” An innocence, a simplicity that one does not
find elsewhere in literature makes the birds and the leaves seem as
near to him as they are near to children, and the changes of the
seasons great events as before our thoughts had arisen between them and
us. At times I wonder if he has it from the literature of Bengal or
from religion, and at other times, remembering the birds alighting on
his brother’s hands, I find pleasure in thinking it hereditary, a
mystery that was growing through the centuries like the courtesy of a
Tristan or a Pelanore. Indeed, when he is speaking of children, so much
a part of himself this quality seems, one is not certain that he is not
also speaking of the saints, “They build their houses with sand and
they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their
boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their
play on the seashore of worlds. They know not how to swim, they know
not how to cast nets. Pearl fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in
their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They
seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.”