I
Wherever man meets man in a living relationship, the meeting finds its
natural expression in works of art, the signatures of beauty, in which
the mingling of the personal touch leaves its memorial.
On the other hand, a relationship of pure utility humiliates man--it
ignores the rights and needs of his deeper nature; it feels no
compunction in maltreating and killing things of beauty that can never
be restored.
Some years ago, when I set out from Calcutta on my voyage to Japan,
the first thing that shocked me, with a sense of personal injury, was
the ruthless intrusion of the factories for making gunny-bags on both
banks of the Ganges. The blow it gave to me was owing to the precious
memory of the days of my boyhood, when the scenery of this river was
the only great thing near my birthplace reminding me of the existence
of a world which had its direct communication with our innermost
spirit.
Calcutta is an upstart town with no depth of sentiment in her face and
in her manners. It may truly be said about her genesis:--In the
beginning there was the spirit of the Shop, which uttered through its
megaphone, "Let there be the Office!" and there was Calcutta. She
brought with her no dower of distinction, no majesty of noble or
romantic origin; she never gathered around her any great historical
associations, any annals of brave sufferings, or memory of mighty
deeds. The only thing which gave her the sacred baptism of beauty was
the river. I was fortunate enough to be born before the smoke-belching
iron dragon had devoured the greater part of the life of its banks;
when the landing-stairs descending into its waters, caressed by its
tides, appeared to me like the loving arms of the villages clinging to
it; when Calcutta, with her up-tilted nose and stony stare, had not
completely disowned her foster-mother, rural Bengal, and had not
surrendered body and soul to her wealthy paramour, the spirit of the
ledger, bound in dead leather.
But as an instance of the contrast of the different ideal of a
different age, incarnated in the form of a town, the memory of my last
visit to Benares comes to my mind. What impressed me most deeply,
while I was there, was the mother-call of the river Ganges, ever
filling the atmosphere with an "unheard melody," attracting the whole
population to its bosom every hour of the day. I am proud of the fact
that India has felt a most profound love for this river, which
nourishes civilisation on its banks, guiding its course from the
silence of the hills to the sea with its myriad voices of solitude.
The love of this river, which has become one with the love of the best
in man, has given rise to this town as an expression of reverence.
This is to show that there are sentiments in us which are creative,
which do not clamour for gain, but overflow in gifts, in spontaneous
generosity of self-sacrifice.
But our minds will nevermore cease to be haunted by the perturbed
spirit of the question, "What about gunny-bags?" I admit they are
indispensable, and am willing to allow them a place in society, if my
opponent will only admit that even gunny-bags should have their
limits, and will acknowledge the importance of leisure to man, with
space for joy and worship, and a home of wholesale privacy, with
associations of chaste love and mutual service. If this concession to
humanity be denied or curtailed, and if profit and production are
allowed to run amuck, they will play havoc with our love of beauty, of
truth, of justice, and also with our love for our fellow-beings. So it
comes about that the peasant cultivators of jute, who live on the
brink of everlasting famine, are combined against, and driven to lower
the price of their labours to the point of blank despair, by those who
earn more than cent per cent profit and wallow in the infamy of their
wealth. The facts that man is brave and kind, that he is social and
generous and self-sacrificing, have some aspect of the complete in
them; but the fact that he is a manufacturer of gunny-bags is too
ridiculously small to claim the right of reducing his higher nature to
insignificance. The fragmentariness of utility should never forget its
subordinate position in human affairs. It must not be permitted to
occupy more than its legitimate place and power in society, nor to
have the liberty to desecrate the poetry of life, to deaden our
sensitiveness to ideals, bragging of its own coarseness as a sign of
virility. The pity is that when in the centre of our activities we
acknowledge, by some proud name, the supremacy of wanton
destructiveness, or production not less wanton, we shut out all the
lights of our souls, and in that darkness our conscience and our
consciousness of shame are hidden, and our love of freedom is killed.
I do not for a moment mean to imply that in any particular period of
history men were free from the disturbance of their lower passions.
Selfishness ever had its share in government and trade. Yet there was
a struggle to maintain a balance of forces in society; and our
passions cherished no delusions about their own rank and value. They
contrived no clever devices to hoodwink our moral nature. For in those
days our intellect was not tempted to put its weight into the balance
on the side of over-greed.
But in recent centuries a devastating change has come over our
mentality with regard to the acquisition of money. Whereas in former
ages men treated it with condescension, even with disrespect, now they
bend their knees to it. That it should be allowed a sufficiently large
place in society, there can be no question; but it becomes an outrage
when it occupies those seats which are specially reserved for the
immortals, by bribing us, tampering with our moral pride, recruiting
the best strength of society in a traitor's campaign against human
ideals, thus disguising, with the help of pomp and pageantry, its true
insignificance. Such a state of things has come to pass because, with
the help of science, the possibilities of profit have suddenly become
immoderate. The whole of the human world, throughout its length and
breadth, has felt the gravitational pull of a giant planet of greed,
with concentric rings of innumerable satellites, causing in our
society a marked deviation from the moral orbit. In former times the
intellectual and spiritual powers of this earth upheld their dignity
of independence and were not giddily rocked on the tides of the money
market. But, as in the last fatal stages of disease, this fatal
influence of money has got into our brain and affected our heart. Like
a usurper, it has occupied the throne of high social ideals, using
every means, by menace and threat, to seize upon the right, and,
tempted by opportunity, presuming to judge it. It has not only science
for its ally, but other forces also that have some semblance of
religion, such as nation-worship and the idealising of organised
selfishness. Its methods are far-reaching and sure. Like the claws of
a tiger's paw, they are softly sheathed. Its massacres are invisible,
because they are fundamental, attacking the very roots of life. Its
plunder is ruthless behind a scientific system of screens, which have
the formal appearance of being open and responsible to inquiries. By
whitewashing its stains it keeps its respectability unblemished. It
makes a liberal use of falsehood in diplomacy, only feeling
embarrassed when its evidence is disclosed by others of the trade. An
unscrupulous system of propaganda paves the way for widespread
misrepresentation. It works up the crowd psychology through regulated
hypnotic doses at repeated intervals, administered in bottles with
moral labels upon them of soothing colours. In fact, man has been able
to make his pursuit of power easier to-day by his art of mitigating
the obstructive forces that come from the higher region of his
humanity. With his cult of power and his idolatry of money he has, in
a great measure, reverted to his primitive barbarism, a barbarism
whose path is lit up by the lurid light of intellect. For barbarism is
the simplicity of a superficial life. It may be bewildering in its
surface adornments and complexities, but it lacks the ideal to impart
to it the depth of moral responsibility.