BY MR. HARIPADA GHOSAL, M.A. un HE Victorian age is an age of unprecedented ideas, and a varied multiplicity of thoughts. Influences which were thought of before made their appearance and began to act upon the genius of the people. They were stirred to their very depths and the nation was ready to receive the impression of new ideas. One special feature of the literature that made such rapid strides in so short a period of internal peace under the fostering care of the British Government, is its note of nationality. The glowing terms in which the late Viceroy expressed his appreciation of the greatest poet of our age, bespeak the official opinion of our rulers regarding him. His designation as "6 the Poet-laureate of Asia" is as much a creditable epithet to him as it redounds to the glory of the Government under whose fostering care his poetic flower has blossomed. Rabindranath's poetry is the off-spring of a heart continually striving to adapt itself to the multifarious aspects of human nature. It expresses an insatiable hankering after the realisation of a final resting place-a destination where the many merges into unity, where heterogenous elements are reduced into a homogenous whole. To realise unity in multiplicity he wanders, as it were, in the great wilderness of the universe. His heart, restless and distressed, is goaded into different paths but, after a fruitless search after the object of his desire, turns back and takes to another. It is like the harmony produced by the combination of various strains with different strings, each and every one of which tend to the production of the grand music and not its particular individual strain. Rabindranath's poetic soul passes from one phase to another and this is nothing but a search after finding out concord in the midst of multifarious jarring notes. The keynote of his poetry is its universality. A superb sense of beauty, the all- engrossing emotion of love, the burning and all consuming feeling of patriotism, the constant throbbing of the heart under the stress of fluctuating sorrows and pleasures incident to our common human nature; all these are like mere isolated objects in the great panorama of his poetic life. Rabindranath is pre-eminently a poet of passion. Neither, truth, nor beauty, nor pleasure is the central point in his system but love. He is abundant, spontaneous and daring in passionate love, whether it be the love of man for woman or the love of the ideal. All poets sing of love. So much has been said of it that it seems hardly possible to say anything new about it. But Rabindranath succeeded in saying something new. Beauty, patriotism, the yearning of the finite for the Infinite; all these feelings are subordinated to the central point in his system. He is "like a child crying in the night, he is like a child and crying for the light", while he half-consciously interprets the physical phenomena of nature by a moral key. EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION. was Born in 1862 in one of the most cultured and enlightened families of India, Rabindranath fortunate in being the son of one of the most intensely virtuous and devoted men of Bengal, Maharshi Devendranath, who was a saintly man. Rabindranath had been sent to school quite at an early age but school life became intolerable to him. His school education was desultory, but he received a most liberal education at home. Being of studious habits, he finished almost all Bengali books available at the time. While he was reading in an English school, his father proposed to take him to the Himalayas. The prospect of a journey in those regions floated before his eyes and opened up before him a new world of sensation and delight. This was the first time when he had an opportunity of meeting face to face with naked nature. It was a strange revelation to his ardent, youthful soul. poetic heart danced with the reawakened sympathies for and joy in inanimate nature, which he regarded as imbued with that same spirit as himself and with which he claimed the consanguity of man. The rough woodland sceneries of the mountains, the high uplands and dales waving with the golden harvest, inaccessible mountain gorges, silvery streams leaping from crag to crag; all these surfeited his eye and imagination. His After his return from the tour his mother died. He was then twelve summers old. The idea of sending him to school was given up. There was no lack of culture at home. His tutor despaired of giving him a systematic and regular education, and translated to him many of the works of Kalidasa and Shakespeare. The late Akshoy Chandra Chowdhury recited to him the most beautiful verses from the works of English poets. The poet Beharilal Chakrabarty who was related to his family, attracted his young mind to poetry. Music was not neglected. He heard many songs and himself composed them. The curriculam given above was not unworthy for the education of a poet. Natural beauty, poetry, and music had contributed each their quota to the making of the poet. When he was sixteen years old, the "Bharati," a monthly magazine, first made its appearance from his family. The publication of his juvenalia in that paper was an incentive to the young poet. At the age of seventeen Rabindranath started for England. On his way he stopped at Ahmedabad and lived with his brother Satyendranath Tagore for sometime. Here he studied many English books, the thoughts of which he tried to incorporate in his writing in Bengali. YOUTHFUL POEMS 1880-1892. Bhagna-Hridaya or the Broken Heart was published after his return from England at the age of eighteen. Sandhya Sangit or the Evening Song came out which just after it. Then came a series of poems are remarkable for their lyric beauty and idyllic grandeur. Próvat Sangit or the Morning Song, Prabritir Parishodh or the Revenge of Nature, Chobi o Gan or the Picture and Song, Kori o Kamal, Chitrangada, Manashi, Raja o Rani were published one after another. That Rabindranath is pre-eminently a lyric poet goes without saying and is a matter of common observation. The crucial test of a lyric is that it is the personal expression of a certain feeling or emotion of the poet. We understand the of the poet-how he feels within himself. purpose In a lyric, therefore the personality of the poet is all in all it is the sine qua non of a lyric. In the poems enumerated above we see where his superiority lay. They are rich in beauty and metrical variety. The flow is natural. unmatched in Bengali poetry. In them the poet is not only an accurate observer of nature, but is also an artist. He dissolves what he writes in "the nector of beauty." As to the subject-matter of these poems, it is the varying mood of the poet, in which we have nothing but an harmony of that deep emotional fervour which is his very being. It is unbroken The poet discovers himself in his Evening Song which was partly written at the beautiful gardenhouse of Chandarnagore, and partly at Calcutta. It is a continual cry of agony of a spirit confined within itself. It is the vain endeavour of a gigantic soul trying to accommodate itself to a world, the magnificence and beauty of which have sunk deep into the frame of his conceptions, but about which he has merely acquired a doubtful knowledge. He has been wandering to "seek strange truths in undiscovered lands." Even in the midst of this vehement struggle is found a faint endeavour to taste that ineffable joy of innocent childhood--to regain his own sweet self which was about to vanish under the strain of violent and thrilling sensations of a newer life. In the Morning Song the poet strikes the keynote of his very existence. The realisation of the unity in diversity is the be-all and end-all of all his endeavours. The disenchantment begins. He brushes off his eyes; the vain delusions disappear; he regains his own self in the joy of universal nature. The Revenge of Nature is a facsimili of his own heart when it was groping in darkness and was languishing in frantic anguish for his separation from nature. The self-centered isolation of a Sanyasi, based on the total abdication of the primal emotion of love and sympathy for man was avenged by the irresistible passion of a girl the humanising effect of whose love for him, turned him back to the way of the world which he relinquished. Loving nothing in this earth, cherishing no hope for the future and rejoicing "neither in human joy, nor mourning with human grief," a man is doomed to moral death. This dramatic poem is the outpouring of his own emotions coloured with the brilliant lines of his imagination and softened by the feeling of finding out his own former self. The poem is replete with the strange charms of its solemn undertone of the joy of a rejuvenated spirit. Alastor meets the terrible catastrophe in his vain endeavour to seek a prototype of his conception. Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assiduities of a man who forcibly destroys that most elemental of passions. Dignified isolation in the Palace of Art shutting the gates of emotions on mankind is disastrous and wrecks our spiritual takes shelter in the cool sequestered bower of the Muse from the heat-from the fret and fever of a vigorous and painful endeavour for union with universal nature. He turned with infinite relief and joy to the enjoyment of beauty. The picturesque scenes, a vivid light of fancy penetrating even into the most obscure points, are a source of delight to many. Again, the work of a higher imagination which makes itself felt now and then has a splendid shaping power which in later life gave to the poet a pre-eminent position among the great masters of art. The poems are luscious with the nectre of beauty. Abstraction is their nature. They are the off-springs of a heart about to bloom and they partake of the nature of their parent before whose mind golden prospects of enjoyment begin to float with a charm of fascination. But they cannot be called sensual on that ground. The fantastic nature of this vehement love of the beautiful is apt to be mistaken as the symptom of a perverted nature. Though the desire of revelling in beauty is natural, yet the two are not indissolubly connected with each other. The insufferable and ineffable light of beauty shines behind the obscure films of sense and appetite. The ecstatic lyre of a true poet is fitted with as many strings as there are human emotions. Every string, when touched by different moods, vibrates and produces the most rapturous song. Life which is "a dome of coloured glass" would appear poor and ungainly manyif it is deprived of any of the prismatic colours of which it is composed. That the sense of ravishment is inherent in the nature of beauty is no reason why the painter of human emotions should not dip his pen into it. Before we blame the poet for this his supposed fault, it is better that we should find fault with the great Artist of the universe who has made the beautiful rainbow, the bright-plumed butterfly and the charming lily. There is no one so foolish who wishes not to see the beauty of the clear shining moon in heaven's azure because it brings into his mind the half-forgotton days of early love. The two poems Kadi o Kamal and Chitrangada are often taken exception to on the ground of their sensuality. Some of the critics have gone so far as to advise the destruction of the latter poem on fire. But to speak the truth it does not advocate sensual revel but is rather its protest. Sensual beauty has been painted in such glowing colours only to bring home to our mind the sad and deluding consequence of its meritricious glamour. The test of a good book or a beautiful poem is the impression left upon the mind of the reader after he has closed it. Its excellence is the measure of the fine thought which the mind carries with it when it has done with it. Now we cannot close the book without feeling the vain and deluding joys that spring up out of the sensual gratification of the desires of our baser nature. The art is fine. The poetry is overmastering. The drapery and artistic form are in harmony with the nature of the thought in it. The metrical structure itself is a fascination, The imaginative power is unparalleled. The self conscious art of the poet and a certain "Doric delicacy " in them make them worthy of a great poet. Rabindranath might say with Milton: "Not with so much labour, as the fables have it, is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Presirpine, as I am wont day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things. I am pluming my wings and meditating flight." So he was preparing for soaring to a loftier height. With Love it was also the same. In the love poems in Manashi there is a profound expression of the emotion of love. But still in them we feel that love is not all in all. Whenever the poet finds that Beauty and Love become all-engrossing, when they begin to exercise their tyrranic claim upon him, when they circumscribe and limit the growth of other faculties of his nature, there is a revolt- -a vehement desire to break through the bondage-a struggle to snap as under their adamantine chain. Once he went so far as to think of building a bower to the Muse among some beautiful prospects of nature, to revel in lettered ease, to drink the mellifluous honey of Beauty, but the retired isolation of a calm life disgusted him-the even tenor of an unfruitful and selfish life brought a sad satiety. He drank to the chalice the deep fountain of beauty. But a time arrived when the magnificence and beauty of the internal world could no longer captivate his imagination, with their intoxicating charms. His dreaminess vanished. His mind was suddenly awakened and thirsted for an intercourse with mankind. He sought for corresponding sympathies in other human beings. The terrible catastrophe of selfcentred and sensual love in Raja O Rani is a sufficient testimony of man's endeavour to break away from tyrranic love. LIFE AT SHILAIDAHA, 1892-1898. After Rabindranath's return from Gazzipore, his father sent him to supervise the Zamindary at Shilaidaha. At first the poet hesitated, but at last he consented. He was then thirty years of He among the scenery of village life at Shilaidaha. These three of which Chaitali was the last, and finished in 1899 represent the poetic activity of these years. Rabindranath's poetic life reached the fullest maturity in them. Sonar Tori and Chitra "represent Nature and Man and Art as they appear to a man filled with an imaginative joy and an imaginative sadness." In them is present a desire for connecting or harmonising Man with Nature which has been chosen as the ground work for each poem. Mortal love and beauty are mysterious, because they are mortal and temporary. It is because death beautifies love that it is enshrined among our holiest emotions. Love, as we find it in actual life, has a kinship to holiness. It cannot be realised in the immaterial world of fancy. Some poems are a protest among other things. They are a protest against the spirit of retirement from the world of men and animals to a life of utter self-abnegation and self-torture which is bred in the bones of our countrymen who look upon the life of brooding calm as the key to the realisation of the Summum bonum of human existence-the total annihilation of our pains for ever. The pleasure of Elysium sua generis-is not of the earth. There is unmixed happiness in heaven, but in unmixed pleasure there is no life on earth. Our profoundest sorrows have a deep undertone of happiness. They reach down to a great underlying mystery, and this is holiness itself. Our love and joy on earth is very intense, very mysterious to the poet, because of their mutability. The poems, as I have said, are a protest, but they are more than a protest, as they have in them a philosophy of cure. Love this earth, love all the shifting scenes of life, struggle and play the man. Do not leave the world to its fate, do not fly to the woods to bury yourself in religious meditation; do not think that all is illusion. Find out the Under the burden truth; it is behind the veil, of life man may rise on "the wings of rapture" into higher ranges of spiritual being. age. The place was nice. It was a land of pasture, of green fields and golden corn. passed half a dozen years among the beautiful scenery of this place, amid men untainted by corrupting influences, among those in whom "our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity." For the first time in his life he was face to face with the low and rustic life in Bengal. The manners of rural life, its passions and feelings, its industry and frugul simplicity, its inborn solid religious education, its absence of artificial cultivation; all these produced a favourable result in his life. They brought him to the touch of the real, the actual, instead of the visionary abstract idealism which is at once a defect and a merit of his poetry. So long he was "flapping his wings in the void", he now curbed his flight and clipped his wings. His imagination was coloured with the environments with which he was surrounded. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth and brought up in the lap of luxury, he did not hitherto know the joys and sorrows of those sober, patient, hard-working men-the hewers of wood and drawers of water--who form the back-bone of every country and who employ all their efforts to enrich and embellish their fatherland. For some time his writings were based on truths drawn from life. The Sadhana was born in 1892. The short stories which were published in the Magazine are so many prose idylls, not less in beauty, imaginative force, keen observation into the ways of men and nature, in psychological analysis of character, and above all, in their realistic treatment, than the most finished, most successful of the productions of his poetical inspiration. They are a landmark in the art of writing short stories in which many at the present have tried their hands, but none so successfully like Babu Provat Kumar Mukerji, Each of these stories is an emotional expression of some particular phase of nature. The little incidents in rural life, the small pictures of lonely life in the country which he heard or saw inspired the poet to compose those most precious gems in our literature. They are so simple and fine that they are a source of delight to the young and the old. Before the days of the Sadhana Rabindranath wrote prose but what is called power we do not find there. They were not above the common place whether in literary merit or thought. Life at Shilaidaha was very fruitful in poetry. Sonar Tori, Chitra and Chaitali were produced The doctrine of the poet is that human souls are not fragments struck off from the universal soul, though their separateness and sense of individuality are temporary and physical. When the sense of individuality is annihilated, personal into the univer self-consciousness merges sal and the soul discovers its kindred with all the seemingly different things of the universe. This the poet calls his "Life-God." From the vantage ground of this new life, "the eternal landscape of the past" can be surveyed. This may appear mysticism, but it is not so. But what the poet means is a continued life from the beginning of time to be pursued even beyond the grave. Man has reached his present state through all the cycles of animal births through the ages of the past. So the forgotton memory of the multitudinous existences in the past must be present in us in some shape or other. This is the reason why I feel joy in the things and animals of the universe. The joy in the life of beasts and birds-in plants and trees-in all the cycles and forms of lifecannot but awaken in me the same consciousness of inward pleasure. The "Life-God" of the poet is his "Ego" or the "I" in him. The personal ascends to the universal. This is looked upon as mysticism by many. It is for this reason that many of the poems of Rabindranath become apparently unintelligible. The "Ego" It or the "I" of the poet is not a new thing. The idea is as old as the oldest hills. The human soul that runs through him permeates all the objects of nature from the time when the whole universe was in a nascent embryonic stage of evolution through all the grades and alterations of the cells which, though they have undergone many vicissitudes and transformations through the long ages, have retained their pristine virtues even in the most developed and complex organism, man. is nothing but the poetic representation of the cardinal truths of that philosophy which recognises only One soul among the Many and eliminates the varied forms of physical manifestation in the universe. It is most abstract, indeed. His is a poetic interpretation of that truth which found expression through the lips of the great sages of ancient India, long, long ago in their academies of philosophic study and meditation. POEMS FROM 1898-1901. He Kalpana, Katha, Kahini, Khanika were written during this period. The poet is a different man altogether. He sings in a different strain. could not keep his ardent spirit within the narrow bounds of art and idealism. He is seeking for expansion-for a wider world of action. He rises from the sedate calm peacefulness of pensive meditation in search of a higher, ampler, and fuller manhood. He found no rest. He is struggling for the ideal. This is the case everywhere. In science, in art and literature there is a continual striving-a continual inward march and no stoppage. The Ideal is never attained or if ever reached, it ceases to be the Ideal from that time. The beauty of noble art and high thought could hold him no longer. Now he tried to realise his new Ideal through patriotism by entering into. the historical ground. He entered upon that period of Indian history in the Middle Ages when the noblest examples of self-sacrifice were shown to the world and greatest sacrifices made by heroes who cared a straw for their lives in the service of the fatherland. The poet viewed individual personages in the light of universal history. Happily the time was ripe for it. That the idea of a country was not chimerical, that the Indians had a country of their own, stirred the enthusiasm of men of younger generation. Popu lar movements began. There was a re-action of western civilization which had reached the farthest strata of the society. Khanika is a turning point in the literary life of Rabindranath. It is in this book that he first used the ordinary language of men, which he has followed to the present day. It has a great advantage over what is called a strictly literary language in expressing humour or wit with a touching effect. In these poems the poet strikes the note of drowning the heart-tossings of a spirit so long groping through shifting moods and appearances to find the joy of his life. He was taking leave of one course of life and was plunging into another. He was beginning to view the world with new eyes. He is now free, easy, and happy. As we proceed towards the end, we come across poems whose beauty grows deeper and deeper. Now he leaves nature and rises to the God of Nature. Here ends the life of variety. The different strings of harmony unite to produce one soul-absorbing and heart-stirring note. The sparkling humour and beauty of the latter poems in the book form the grave of the life of Art. His poems stand now in naked beauty. Their embroidery and ornamentations fall off and they shine in the white light of majestic truth. bids a good bye to the life of a poet-an artist, and enters upon metaphysics. He found his ideal in the ancient Indian mind. POEMS BETWEEN 1902-1908. He The year 1902 is an eventful year in the life of Rabindranath. Naibedya which began a new chapter in his poetic life appeared. He also took upon himself the task of editing the Banga Darshan, The same year witnessed the foundation of the Bolpur Asram, The desire of seeing his country as a whole rose in his mind. Her glorious past and degenerated present, her weakness and depravity, her hope and despair; all this appeared before his mind's |