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Art. 9.-A MODERN BENGALI MYSTIC.

Gitanjali (Song Offering). By Rabindranath Tagore. With an Introduction by W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1913.

To travel by the mail train from Northern India into Bengal is to awake in a new world.

After the brief metallic twilight of the plains, when the dust of the day still seems suspended visible in the air, and the dew has not yet fallen to refresh the atmosphere, night closes down, with a sudden chill, upon a view of level fields baked hard and brown by months of unbroken sunshine. Only, here and there, an ancient well has gathered about it a little space of cultivation, or a tiny hill, crowned with blackened rock, rises above the monotony of scrub and scattered stones and rutted bullock-tracks.

But, in the early morning, when you lazily lift up the wooden blinds of your carriage and turn over on your side to see how near you are to your journey's end, what a different landscape meets your eye! Prosperous paddy fields, the crop cut and stooked, or lying in long swathes upon the ground, remind you of the barley-fields of Kent; the luxuriant wood with the little path winding through it, where the rotting timber lies as it has fallen, and the black water stands in the hollows-this, indeed, might be anywhere in England. Only the tall palms and the rustling bananas, and the vivid green of their wide foliage recall the mind to its actual surroundings, while the soft warmth creeps through the pores of the body, and you feel in all your bones that you have left behind the brisk mornings of the north and entered the genial, if enervating, dampness of Bengal.

This physical awakening to a world so strange and yet so subtly familiar may be compared with the spiritual experience when one travels out of contemporary literature at home, and finds oneself not altogether a stranger among the products of another environment, the traditions and values of which are utterly unlike our own. Such an experience was lately the writer's on taking up the Gitanjali, or Song Offering, of the modern Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Of these poems in

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their original Bengali, one cannot, of course, speak until one has learned Bengali in order to read them, but for the Englishman, at least, even they cannot surpass in interest this English prose translation by their author. We are content to read most translations for the value and novelty of the thoughts thus rendered accessible to us, and are thankful if their English dress sits not too clumsily upon them; but in this little book the value and novelty of the manner adds a rare charm to a matter sufficiently remarkable in itself.

It is indeed a memorable achievement for one whose native language is Bengali to attain, as the author has attained, an English style which combines at once the feminine grace of poetry with the virile power of prose. For some generations an education in English literature has been given to the natives of India. The demand for that particular kind of education came, in the first place, from them, and nowhere was the demand more insistent than in Bengal. From time to time such an educational policy has been attacked as both foolish and futile, as too English' for Indian purposes, and as too 'literary' for any purpose; it has been suspected as tending to sedition, and ridiculed as productive of nothing but that amazing hybrid, the Babu, and his astonishing efforts to master the English language. But those who are discouraged by the poor results, as they appear to them, of our English education in India may take some comfort from this book; and those who have trusted that, from the contact of the East and West in matters intellectual, some new thing of worth and beauty would arise may see here some justification of their hope.

For this, indeed, we do not need to trace in these poems thoughts directly inspired by Western literature; that would be a task beyond the powers of anyone unacquainted with the inner intellectual life of the author; an unprofitable task, too, and perhaps impossible of accomplishment, since there are winds of thought that blow about the world and none may tell whence they come, from the East or from the West. But we may, with all modesty, believe that this new art form, in which the translation has been cast, is the outcome of English culture in Bengal; that apart from such preparations of the soil as these years, apparently so fruitless, have

bestowed, this flower of English prose could not have blossomed.

For such, indeed, it is; to find anything like it we must go back to the authorised version of the Bible and the best of Elizabethan English. Nor is it strange that this should be so, for the experience of the race is repeated in the experience of the individual, and the modern Indian, in relation to the English language, stands now where the English nation stood then. It may be observed, if we are content to deal patiently and realise the significance of trivial things, that the Indian student in his efforts to write English is working very much as the Elizabethans worked; but we are so familiar only with the best of their results that we are apt to be contemptuous of his. Language in the making is much the same now as it was then; he, in his individual mind, is groping dimly after full expression, as then the men of London were working out between them an intelligible prose. The Babu's delight in long words and sounding phrases; his preference for a dramatic and exclamatory style; his difficulties with the article and possessive pronouns-all these were anticipated in the lesser Elizabethan writers. And then occasionally in the dreary waste of an interminable essay, full of platitudinous quotations and outworn clichés,' suddenly we come across a phrase of such freshness and fitness that we see, as by a flash, what an extraordinary opportunity there is for the Indian who can come, with some endowment of genius, to the writing of English. He may start free as an Elizabethan from the centuries of traditional styles and conventional forms that crush us; he has not been vulgarised unconsciously, as even the best of us must needs be, by the language of newspapers, magazines, public speeches and all kinds of advertisement; he has round him a continent of similes, metaphors, illustrations and ideas unknown to our exploited island.

Well, the genius has arisen; the promise of that vision was not altogether illusory. Nor is it too rash to hope that in the prose of Rabindranath Tagore we have not merely the achievement of a solitary genius, but the firstfruits of that new culture which is to combine the artistic qualities of India with those of our own land.

It is not surprising that a new expression of mysticism

should come from Bengal. It has hardly flourished in our northern climate; the great mystics of the world have been the children of the sun and the warm winds of the south. St Francis and St Teresa strike a more passionate note than our own Lady Julian of Norwich. The poems of Donne and Crashaw, of Vaughan and Herbert, for all their beauty, pale beside the Psalms and the Song of Solomon. A monk of Much Wenlock wrote down a wonderful vision of Hell before Dante composed the 'Inferno'; yet he remains practically unknown, while Dante is famous for all time. Our theology has been obsessed with the idea of sin and judgment and the need of redemption; we have pictured God chiefly as a great King or a terrible, if merciful, Judge; the mass of us have never had very much delight in religion, nor that perpetual hunger and thirst after the presence of God which is the mark of the mystic all the world over. We are accustomed to think of the East as the home of impersonal religions and vast philosophies that leave in their speculations but little room for the beating of the human heart. It is the Nemesis of our ignorance that we must turn to the East for the highest expression of man's belief in God that has been made in our timestimes when we ourselves, as a people, seem to be losing that belief altogether. Take, for example, a book published about the same date as this translation of Tagore. Sir Francis Younghusband writes:

'Whatever that Something is which we feel must be at the back of things, it cannot be an external Omnipotent Being who created us and who guides and controls us. That is the conclusion at which we have arrived, and other lines of thought than that just pursued have led other men to the same conclusion. We are realising nowadays that the old guardian God of our childhood never existed. He was our own creation. He did not make us. We made Him.'

To the question What is to take His place?' he replies, 'It is on our own selves that we should put our trust-on our individual selves and on one another.' Now let us listen to the voice of the East in Tagore's poems:

'O Fool, to try to carry thyself upon thy own shoulders! O beggar, to come to beg at thy own door! Leave all thy

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burdens on his hands who can bear all, and never look behind in regret.' .. Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forget that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest. Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one in the play of the many' (p. 37).

The contrast is sufficiently obvious, but one more passage must be added for the sheer beauty of it. 'In the early morning thou wouldest call me from my sleep like my own comrade and lead me running from glade to glade. On those days I never cared to know the meaning of songs thou sangest to me. Only my voice took up the tunes, and my heart danced in their cadence. Now, when the playtime is over, what is this sudden sight that is come upon me? The world with eyes bent upon thy feet stands in awe with all its silent stars' (p. 56).

That is the true language of mysticism. The man of affairs, absorbed in those affairs, may never feel the need of that divine playmate. But that ideal spectator of our struggles and our fortunes, of our few successes and our pitiful failures-He, to the lonely man and the mystic and the man with the heart of a child, is the supreme necessity. Surely if this very day it were made certain to us by reasoning or proof more cogent than has yet been adduced that there is not, nor ever was, a God, surely we should still be constrained to continue in the belief of His existence. For there is no object of desire that is for itself alone desirable; neither in the effort, nor in the end accomplished, do we find a lasting satisfaction. Only to show our work to one we love do we find pleasure in our working and hope for the days that lie before us; only the admiration of others, in however small a measure, can enable us to look without loathing upon our own achievements. Moralists reason of duty and righteousness, utility and pleasure; these are but symbols of something that lies beyond all unmasking of

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