RABINDRANATH TAGORE.*
Mn. Ririe is himself a poet, acquainted with the joys and perils of poetical composition, easily aroused to enthusiasm by a charming and attractive personality. Rabindranath Tagore not only is but looks a poet. He in not only master of naubtle and suggestive style in two languages, but is, its his short stories show, a humorist with a keen sense of fun. He is, in fact, a Bengali of genius who inherits an instinctive sense of form and proportion in manners as well as in literary expression. It is the more to be regretted that Mr. Rhys has allowed his excusable enthusiasm for his subject to carry him a little beyond the limits of sober criticism. For example, he says
"Since this book was written things have happened which have
sadly changed stir perspective; and they serve to recall is day, before their faintest shadow bed fallen, when this visitor from India, lying ill in London, scanned the omens and read them very uneasily."
If this only meant that Rabindranath Tagore, a shrewd observer of men like most of his countrymen, foresaw the coming of war, there would be nothing more to say. But are we to draw a distressing comparison between Christians at war and Bengalis philosophizing and poetizing at peace, became Bengal is not
as Belgium Are we, looking at desolated Europe, to admit that "the ancient civilization of India had another ideal, which was that of the perfect comprehension of all, the inclusion of every element in the universe, and not the shutting out of any atom of God's creatures " ? Are we to admit with corn. punction that, in contrast to Christian beliefs," man's freedom and his fulfilment were not to be gained, in that eastern belief, through war and the argument of the strong hand, but by love"? Tagore, once more, is a humorist ; he knows his Mahabbanda and his Ramayana, and we are very much mistaken if he will not be amused at reading his European disciple's description of him as a pacificiat of the Western type. Again are we bidden to think of Blake and St. Francis and other mystics of the West, partly, perhaps, because during his stay in London he adapted himself with the easy politeness of an Indian gentleman to the literary atmo- sphere in which he found himself. But we have honest doubts whether Mr. Rhys and Mr. Yeats and the other Celtic poets who lionized the Bengali man of letters have grasped the inner significance of the garden-house at Bolpur, or realize whither the Neo-Hinduism of Bengal is drifting.
That is not to say that Mr. Rhya's sketch is not pretty and pleasing, and calculated to give a delightful impres- sion of one side of the Bengali poet's activities of intellect and character. Mr. Rhys even attempts a slight and rapid account of Bengali literature at large, obviously the only sound means of estimating Tagore's achievement as a writer. Much of this is necessarily compiled from materials collected at second hand, and can only be regarded as pre- liminary to a critical estimate by some scholar who has mastered the considerable and daily growing bulk of Tagore's writings in the original. Most of us know that there are serious problems ahead, serious but not insurmountable, in the administration of India. Men of letters are, con- sciously or unconsciously, moulding the minds of young India, giving them a bent to this or that view of the difficulties that await us and them. Let us at least be glad that, if Mr. Rhys has ventured into the still unexplored field of Bengali litera. tare, he lias kept clear of Indian politics We doubt whether Tagore, in spite of his serene suavity of manner, will taste the somewhat sentimental adulation (something in the vein of "Pierre Loti " when he talks of Turks and Japanese) with which Mr. Rhys treats his subject. For Tagore, once more, • Ilichiactranalh Togo.: a Biographical Study. By Enos( Eby., Load= Macmillan and Co. L5a. nat.]
is a man of humour, at times of a somewhat grim humour. Alr. Rbya admits that he does not read Tagore in the original. The latest number of that very remarkable and interesting magazine, Sabin Patra, is wholly from Tagore's pen. Its first pages are printed on brilliantly yellow paper, symbolizing the spring sunshine of hope. May we roughly render a few lines from the preface to his spring verses ?—
" Once upon a time the poet Invited certain of his friends to a feast at an inn—on the first of April. The entertainment was like all such gatherings, but when at its conclusion the time came for the payment of the bill the poet was nowhere to be found! That was the April folly of that occasion. The joke of this April is much the same; let the reader bear that in mind. The feast celebrated by plucking the green leaves, the mbus patra, of this spring shall have the poet's assistance till the end, the awful end of paying up, but when the assembled guests shall call for the cash of the meaning, then, oh poet, 'others shall be talking, talking, but thou shalt be speechless.'"
It may be that when a poet is also a humorist there is a spice of mystification in his mysticism, and the sentimentally enthusiastic biographer should be on his watch against this feature in the poet's multiplex temperament.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Mr. Rhys's little book is his account of Tagore's school at Bolpur. Here are being trained many young fellows filled with the new self- consciousness and self-confidence of modern Bengal. Some go on to Oxford and Cambridge, to Paris and Berlin. One or two, we believe, are now detained in, we trust, not uncomfort- able captivity in Germany. The Santi Niketan may yet be a greater force in India than the verses of which Mr. Ithys writes with just and generous enthusiasm. The future of Bengal and of India at large will provide many anxious problems before long. It is not impossible that sentimental amateurs of translated Indian mysticism may, in Mr. Rhys's phrase, "change their perspective." Meanwhile it is open to us all to study Tagore's deft and delicate versions of his own work. We heartily echo Mr. Rhys's regret that the short stories (by some compared to Guy de Maupassant's work in that kind) have been hitherto only partially and inadequately translated. In them is visible a gay good humour, a shrewd sense of human nature in all classes, which ought to be more congenial to the Western tempera- ment than the mystical verses which are, as it were, "common form" in the East, a mere convention, common to Sufi and Hindu, a literary parallel to the "conceits" of English poets in the seventeenth century.
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