Gitanjali | Page 2

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.'
I 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