INTRODUCTION
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 sons 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.'
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.
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.'
W. B. YEATS September 1912