Rabindranath Tagore, A Biographical Study

Front matter

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

Preface

PREFACE

“Nature shut her hands and laughingly asked every day, ’What have I got inside?‘ and nothing seemed impossible.”

These words from Rabindranath Tagore’s autobiography, referring to the eager mornings of his early boyhood, may serve as key to the following account, which attempts to relate him both to the old tradition in India and to the new day anticipated in his writings. Such as they are, the chapters that succeed must be left now to answer for themselves; but at the last moment I am tempted to add two or three passages. For since this book was written things have happened which have sadly changed our perspective; and they serve to recall a day, before their faintest shadow had fallen, when this visitor from India, lying ill in London, scanned the omens and read them very uneasily.

It was one of the rare occasions, during his visit, when we were able to talk uninterruptedly about the state of India and our own affairs, and he spoke with alarm of the temper of the great nations and the life of the great cities like Paris and London, whose love of luxury, need of sensation, and craving for excitement were up against every finer instinct he cherished. When he spoke of the forces in the Western world which he thought must become disruptive and lead to trouble, and stretched out his hands, it might have been the moral map of Europe, with its teeming continent and restless atoms, that lay spread out before him. The major energies, as he viewed them, were not constructive; they did not make for the world’s commonwealth, and by their nature they must come into conflict sooner or later.

Now, as I recall that afternoon—not much more than a twelvemonth ago—it is impossible not to see in the present war the grim realisation of those misgivings; and that they were not the passing fancy of a sick man is shown by the frequent allusions in his own pages to the same topic. In one, occurring in Sādhanā he points out that the rival energies of the nations in the West tend to become aggressive. They are employed "in extending man's power over his surroundings, and the peoples are straining every nerve upon the path of conquest; they are ever disciplining themselves to fight Nature and other races; their armaments are getting more and more stupendous every day; their machines, their appliances, their organisations are for ever multiplying.…" The ancient civilisation of India, he goes on to say, 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. 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.

Once Gautama, we are told, saw a man bowing to the Four Quarters of the Heavens, the Nadir and the Zenith. It was an old rite he was performing—"with streaming hair, wet gar and clasped hands"; and Buddha knew he was doing it to avert evil, and told him thereupon that the true way to guard the regions of Heaven and Earth was by showering good deeds all around him. In this new dispensation he might look upon his father and mother as the East, his wife and children as the West, his masters and teachers as the South, his friends and companions as the North, the saints and religious mystics as the Zenith, and his servants and dependents as the Nadir. Could one have a better reading of a Symbol for the law of human fellowship and a love wide as the world?

What, then, will Buddha's enlightened followers say to our latest Gospel? Kant has been in his grave more than a century, and the latest word of the philosophy that succeeds to his, we are told, points to the declaration: "It is not enough to love your country. You must love it in full armour. Everything that is not it must be hated. Hate is sacred." How different the voice of the patriot in Gitanjali, who speaks of a region "where the mind is without fear and the head held high, where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow walls, where the mind is led forward into ever-widening thought and action:

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!

Beside this patriot-prayer you may put his song of "The Woman in Sorrow," who, like the wife of the murdered Burgomaster, was not to be comforted by the shout of conquest:

I seated her upon a car of victory and drove her from end to end of the earth. Conquered hearts bowed down at her feet; shouts of applause rang in the sky. Pride shone in her eyes for a moment; then it was dimmed in tears. "I have no joy in conquest," she cried, the woman in sorrow.

But take another page from Sādhanā—one which is not veiled in parable:

"Whenever some ancient civilisation fell into decay and died, it was owing to causes which produced callousness of heart and led to the cheapening of man's worth; when either the state or some powerful group of men began to look upon the people as a mere instrument of their power; when, by compelling weaker races to slavery and trying to keep them down by every means, man struck at the foundation of his greatness. Civilisation can never sustain itself upon cannibalism of any form."

If it is hard for us now to read a book or listen to poetry without thinking of battle, murder and sudden death, and the mortal hatred of struggling nations, yet we must not leave this messenger of the dawn standing finally in a vista of war. Rather let us turn to his books in the spirit of a letter written to a friend in England about a year ago:

"A great pleasure," he said, "to imagine you cutting the pages of my new book, making discovery of some poem or other that strikes you with some new surprise, though you had read it before in the manuscript. I am sure these poems of mine are not mere literature to you, but convey to your heart the living voice of a friend who has often sat by your side."

The same letter gives a winter picture of the writer's quarters at Shanti Niketan: "I am writing to you sitting in my room on the second floor of this house; a swelling sea of foliage is seen through the open doors all around me, quivering at the touch of the early winter's breath and glistening in the sunshine." It is in this familiar guise that one would like best to imagine him, a poet who is able to renew for us the sense of life in its energy and its true orient, as did that older poet who wrote of it in the Upanishads:

"Whenever the sim rises and sets, shouts of Hurrah! arise and all beings come to life, and whoever knows this and thinks of the sim as divine will hear those happy shoutings."

Blake might have imagined that and St. Francis thought it, and it is a message that is welcome whenever it comes. It may come by the saints and it may come by the poets; and if in this book it is with the latter kind that Rabindranath Tagore is ranged, it is because, through his lyric power, he is most likely in the end to prove its messenger.

These pages, finally, owe a great deal to the aid of their Indian and other contributors, and in particular the writer's thanks are due to the Rev. C. F. Andrews and Mr. Kalimohun Ghose of Shanti Niketan, Dr. Seal of Calcutta University, Mr. G. Bose, Mr. Dinesh Chandra Sen, Dr. Coomaraswami, and Mr. R. Ranjan Sen. Also to Mr. William Rothenstein and Mr. W. B. Yeats for biographical and critical memoranda, "G. R." for contributions to various chapters, Mr. E. B. Havell for invaluable help in revising the proofs, Mr. A. H. Fox Strangways for information about Indian music, and the India Society for copies of its publications.

It is hardly necessary to add anything about the honour rendered the poet by the Nobel Prize award, imless to say that it was due to a distinguished Swedish Orientalist who had read the poems in Bengali before they appeared in English. India greatly appreciated the honour; as for the author himself, he was at first over-whelmed by the publicity it brought: "They have taken away my shelter," he wrote.

November 1914.

Chapter I

CHAPTER I

THE UNKNOWN POET

The boughs touched his feet with their tribute of leaf and flower and fruit, and looked as if they welcomed a friend. — Chaitanya Charitamrita.

In talking with the Indian poets you will find, said one of our early Orientalists, that they consider poetry a divine art, practised for untold ages in heaven before it was revealed on earth. Here in the west we have been rather forgetting latterly the old inspirational idea of poetry, though it has been developed anew from time to time by writers like Spenser, Coleridge and Shelley; and it is good for us to hear its reminder from a new quarter, and after a fashion that is better than any prose argument—in inspired verse itself. Such reminders, when they come, are apt to fall naturally without any noise or loud creaking of the press; and just so quietly it was that the first signs were heard of Rabindranath Tagore's poetry in our western world.

At an Indian play, given two autumns ago on a London stage, my next neighbour, a stranger to me and a native of Bengal, asked me if I had read any of the other writings of the playwright? He went on to speak of these writings, verse and prose, with the enthusiasm of a disciple; in a way, indeed, to make one's ears tingle. His account had the effect of the tuning up of the fiddles before the actual music; or it was like that passage in the Vedic Hymn which speaks of the coming of the poet—the long-expected poet who has the gift of the supernal tongue. Within a week or two, one Sunday afternoon, my fellow-playgoer brought, according to promise, a volume of the new poetry in the original Bengali, along with some translations, and read them to us. None of us who listened to the recital could understand the liquid tongue in which the songs were written; but their rhythm was full of melody, and the English versions pointed to an imagination, innocent but rich in figurative life; while the reader's delight in them was infectious. Open belief in a poet is not often seen among us, and there was in this boyish tribute an ingenuous exuberant air which recalled the saying in the Upanishads: "If you were to tell this to a dry stick, branches and leaves would grow out of it."

A few months later, when the poet returned to England, we were able to realise for ourselves something of the spirit in him that affected his followers of the new generation in India, and his readers both there and here.

One of them allows me to quote some of her impressions written at the time: "His is an aspect that fixes itself deeply in that uncertain medium, the retina of the memory. It is easy to call up at any moment a mental picture of that tall and graceful form in the long loose coat of grey-brown; the white sensitive hands, large serenely-lit eyes, noble features, and curling hair and beard, dark and lightly touched with grey. Above all, the stately simplicity of his bearing struck me, for it implied a spiritual quality that diffused itself about his presence. The same thing helped to make him the kindest of hosts and gentlest of guests. Add to these qualities a certain incalculable gaiety; and you will still fail to understand his immense personal influence among his own people." The same writer adds: "You know that when at Calcutta he is announced to speak in a hall or public building, it is surrounded by crowds for whom there is no place within and who listen outside for the sound of his voice. It would be impossible to exaggerate his vogue in his own land; and as for his songs—they are sung, words and music, through the length and breadth of India."

On one occasion in London, after the reading of the poet's play Chitra, Mr. Montague, the Under Secretary of State for India, described how, when riding through an Indian forest at night, he came upon a clearing where two or three men sat round a fire. Not being certain of his road, he was glad to dismount and rest his tired horse. Shortly after he had joined the group, a poor-looking, ill-clothed lad came out of the forest and sat down also at the fire. First one of the men sang a song and then another. The boy's turn came, and he sang a song more beautiful both in words and music than the rest. When asked who had made the song he said that he did not know; "they were singing these songs everywhere." A while after, Mr. Montague heard the words and music again, this time in a very different place, and when he asked for the name of the maker of the song he heard for the first time the name of Rabindranath Tagore.

Knowing the extraordinary fame that this story suggests—a fame implying the spirit of a religious teacher, moreover, as well as that of a poet—we had been almost afraid of receiving such a guest in our dry unceremonious English fashion. But nothing could exceed the simplicity and unpretentiousness of this visitor from an older world. He was content to take things as he found them, and did not expect one to discourse all day on philosophy or on the doctrines of the Upanishads. He could tell delightful stories, gay or sad; he had the humour that could take pleasure in the incongruities of men; and he could on rarer occasions be prevailed upon to sing his songs to the veritable wild and beautiful Indian melodies out of which they were born. At other times, if the English sun was only good enough to shine, it was pleasure enough for him to sit on the grass in a Hampstead garden and listen to the noises of the town carried over the roofs and tree-tops. His understanding of life, his acceptance of its cares, his delight in its common occurrences, were not those we had hitherto associated with the notion of an Indian ascetic. If there was that in his face and expression which told of a peace won by hard and long probation and a discipline like that of the Yogi who despised the flesh, it only remained now as a quality added to his sympathy.

Those who have read his poems in Gitanjali and The Gardener, and have fathomed the philosophy of life's realisations expressed in the pages of Sādhanā, may wonder what impressions a great city like London would leave on the mind of a poet reared among such different surroundings? After many experiences here and in America, he was left, I fear, with an uneasy sense of the life of our great cities. The spectacle of multitudes of men and women avid for sensation, one and all bent upon getting and gaining advantage over their neighbours, troubled him. It gave an ominous turn to a casual discussion that began one day when he had been ill and was lying in bed convalescent, in a room full of flowers, with a tell-tale glimpse through the windows of an ordinary dull London street on a wet summer's afternoon. He had been reading that powerful romance of an artist at odds with circumstance who has to fight hard for his art in the greedy world of Paris, Jean Christophe; and he was curiously concerned at the picture of a soul in trouble, and at the conditions of life which went to determine that trouble, displayed in the pages of the book. "You people over here," he said, "seem to me to be all in a state of continual strife. It is all struggling, hard striving to live. There is no place for rest, or peace of mind, or that meditative relief which in our country we feel to be needed for the health of our spirits."

In much the same degree in which our noisy activity over here affected him, he was able to affect us in turn by the imperturbable peace of his own bearing. He seemed to have the power to make an ordinary room, a London house, a lecture hall, a company of people, the vehicle of his Indian serenity. He went through many occasions, often very trying ones, without losing his equanimity, although he did lose his powers of work.

There was one occasion in particular which may be recalled because there were elements in it that brought East and West into new relations. The Indian students over here, many of them his disciples, had resolved to hold a festival in his honour, and in doing this were able to take advantage of the presence in London of , a fellow-poet and an eloquent upholder of the ideals of Young India. There is no way to describe the enthusiasm of an occasion that depends for its fervour on the very voice and spirit of the hour. But by the naturalness of his re , Rabindranath was able to cast his spell over the place, and to make that ungainly interior at Piccadilly Circus, with its strangely mixed audience, English and Indian, into a scene such as one might associate with his own life at Bolpur and the quiet of Shanti Niketan. And what was not least impressive was his recognition that it was for his own people first of all that he made his songs,—represented by the crowd of his disciples who stood there listening to him. They formed indeed an extraordinary line of intent faces—"a hedge of eyes"—and it was well his foreign friends should take part in such a function because there we were able to realise something of what he meant to his Indian followers. He was to them not so much a poet, a creator of delightful and living literary forms which could express their own hopes and aspirations; he was a national leader who had already set up in Bengal an ideal college—"a little Academe"—whose pupils and students were to go forth to help in the task of delivering the soul of a new India. It was so that the disciples of Pragapati might have hung upon his words, as we read in the Upanishads.

Chapter II

CHAPTER II

BOY AND MAN

"Please, sir, tell me still more," said the son. "Be it so, my child," the father replied.

Upanishad.

Rabindeanath Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861, son of the Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, who gave lustre to a name already honoured throughout India. As for the surname, changed familiarly over here into Tagore, it is in the original "Thakur," which means literally a god or a lord.

He lost his mother when he was still a child, and this loss meant a great deal to him. It gave him a peculiar regret for the mother's love, so sharply broken off in his experience; and further, it threw him back upon the consolations to be had in that boyish communion with Nature which helped to fill the solitary days of his childhood. Hear his own account of these years, as given to a friend:

"I was very lonely—that was the chief feature of my childhood. My father I saw very seldom; he was away a great deal, but his presence pervaded the whole house and was one of the deepest influences on my life. Kept in charge of the servants after my mother died, I used to sit, day after day, in front of the window and picture to myself what was going on in the outer world. From the very first time I can remember I was passionately fond of Nature. Ah, it used to make me mad with joy when I saw the clouds come up in the sky one by one. I felt, even in those very childish days, that I was surrounded with a friend, a companionship, very intense and very intimate, though I did not know how to name it. I had such an exceeding love for Nature, I cannot tell how to describe it to you; but Nature was a kind of loving companion always with me, and always revealing to me some fresh beauty."

A passage in his Givansmriti, or "Reminiscences," completes the picture of a child's solitary life.

"In the morning of autumn," he writes, "I would run into the garden the moment I got up from sleep. A scent of leaves and grass, wet with dew, seemed to embrace me, and the dawn, all tender and fresh with the new awakened rays of the sun, held out its face to me to greet me beneath the trembling vesture of palm leaves. Nature shut her hands and laughingly asked every day, 'What have I got inside?' and nothing seemed impossible."

As for the school-days that followed, he told us how cruelly one of his masters used to treat him, ordering him to stand for hours unprotected in the heat of the burning sun if his lessons had not been perfectly learned. In this way education was made to seem forbidding instead of agreeable to the boy's natural desire for knowledge. When his father came to understand how much he was made to suffer by the harsh discipline, he was put under the care of private tutors. In other ways the father gave the boy his head, as we might say, to his immense advantage. For, far from being slow or unwilling to learn, here was one eager for learning. Words and ideas, music and old times and ragas, moved him to the heart; and while still a boy he began to write rhymes, songs, stories—anything that could express his joy of life. It is not surprising that most of his early verse was imitative: he began, we are told, with a study and imitation of the old Vaish poets of Bengal, Chandidas and Vidypati: but his full birth as an original poet began about the age of eighteen. Nature then took stronger hold on him, and the outcome is to be seen in his early songs which are to be found in the two series, Pravata-Sangita and Sandhya-Sangita ("Songs of Sunrise" and "Songs of Sunset"). Their character, highly idealistic and subjective, moody or fanciful, may be gathered from the criticism of Dr. Seal:

"Along with the waxing and waning light, the rising or setting sun," he writes, "come floating to the poet's soul aerial phantasms and drowsy enchantments, memories of days of fancy and fire, ghostly visitings and flashes of Maenad-like inspiration, which the poet seizes in many a page of delicate silver-lined introspection or imaginative verse. In these songs Bengali poetry rises to the height of neoromanticism."

The very titles of the "Evening Songs" unmistakably define their note of foreboding and the young poet's melancholy,—"Despair in Hope," "Suicide of a Star," "Invocation to Sorrow," "The Woman without a Heart," "Heart's Monody." According to the same friendly critic, the intense egoism and subjective feeling of these songs is without a parallel in modern Indian poetry. "The singer indeed appears to be under the influence of a poetic henotheism, that is to say the entire universe assumes the hue of the poet's mood, while it lasts, giving rise to a kind of universal hallucination."

"The Songs of Sunrise," which came later, are in a braver key, and the themes are more auspiciously conceived,—"The Dream of the Universe," "The Eternity of Life," "Reunion with Nature," "Desideria," and "The Fountain awakened from its Dream." The second of these, with its three realms of Song, Love, and Life, is a remarkable poem, which (says Dr. Seal) just misses reaching the height of Goethe's "Three Reverences," or De Quincey's "Three Ladies of Sorrow." A companion poem, "The Eternity of Death," seizes the truth that life itself is realised through a series of changes or deaths, but strains the theme through too vague an emotional medium.

Of the place these lyrics hold in the neoromantic movement in India it is impossible for us over here to judge. They gained their effect by the sheer power, it seems, of an individual style in poetry which used elementary feelings and images to effect the required transfiguration; and they appear to have brought about something like a revolution in the diction and the freer cadence of Bengali verse. Here, too, should be mentioned Rabindranath's work in another mode, his highly imaginative reconstruction, under the name of Vanu Sinha, of the loves of Radhika and Krishna on the banks of the Jumna, which has been likened to the reproduction of medieval Italian romance by Keats. Those who have followed the prose and verse of the movement from which it sprang, and know what Neo-Hinduism meant for the young poets of thirty years ago, can alone relate it for us to its period. But Navina Chandra Sen's Raivataka, which is the epic of the Hindu religious revival, is still a closed book to us in England. As for the Valmikir Jaya, or "The Three Forces" (physical, intellectual, and moral), of Haraprasada Shastri—"the most glorious phantasmagoria" in Indian literature, touched with the sublimity of the Himalayas,—it is to us only a name, remote as their heights. With the literary enthusiasms and romantic ideas that these works of his contemporaries recall ends the first, or Calcutta period, of his career.

The second period was spent away from cities, and began with his marriage at the age of twenty-three. Then came the question of facing real life. His father, the Maharshi, had designed he should go to the country to manage the family estate at Shilaida on the banks of the Ganges. Much against his first inclination, he went to his task there; but it proved of direct service to him in the way of human experience. For there he came into touch with the real life of the people, and wrote down, hot from the life, tales and parables dealing with their everyday affairs. There, too, he wrote some of his greater plays, among them "Chitvargada," "Visayan," and "Raja-o-Rani."

His familiar surroundings, and the kind of existence they helped to colour at this time, may be found reflected in pages of The Gardener, and in some of the stories outlined or retold in a succeeding chapter, "The Tale-Teller." This Shilaida period lasted in all some seventeen years.

Then came a break—what he learnt to look upon as his Varsha Shesha, or "fall of the year." It was indeed the end of his mid-summer. Death came and looked him in the face: he lost first his beloved wife; then, within a very few months, from consumption, the daughter who took her place; and then his youngest son. He was on the verge, too, of his fortieth year—a time when a man needs to gather his own folk about him. A premonition of trouble had come to him not many months before, when he had given up his stewardship at Shilaida.

"He seemed," says his biographer, "to anticipate some vast sorrow and change, for which these quiet unbroken years in the country had been a solemn preparation."

The outcome of the restlessness that seized upon him was a determination to do something, while his energies still held good, for the new generation. Hence the idea of the small republic at Shanti Niketan. In the midst of the work needed to initiate the project, his troubles came fast upon him; the book that expresses them and their dire effect is Gitanjali, the book by which we first learnt to know him in England. One set of lyrics in especial—Nos. 83 to 93—marks the probation that seemed to teach him the second deliverance of which the Upanishads speak.

"This death-time," he said, "was a blessing to me. I had through it all, day after day, such a sense of fulfilment, of completion, as if nothing were lost. I felt that if even a single atom in the universe seemed lost, it would not really be lost.… I knew now what Death was. It was perfection—nothing lost!"

With Gitanjali we are within reach of his second visit to the west. He has recognised that his setting sail on this later voyage to England and America was to make a change in his outlook. "As I crossed the Atlantic and spent on board ship the beginning of the new year," he wrote in a letter at the time, "I realised that a new stage in my life had come, the stage of a voyager." And this voyage again was associated inevitably with constructive social ideas and the work at Shanti Niketan, designed to aid in the building up of a Golden Bengal and the hope of the new Indies.

With most of us, at such a pause in our lives, the search for reality ends in our adjusting ourselves more or less comfortably to the work-a-day world. We test our relative effect by money, position, and the good opinion of the community; and at middle-age settle into our hole, and accept paper-solutions of the problems of our time. It is different with those who can renew their youth, and gain a fresh access of power at the very barriers of middle age. Such was the reinforcement that occurred to this poet who came out of his grief to find, as Srimanta did, the lotus-flowers blooming in the sea-waste that had threatened him.