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Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, A Great Man
TAGORE is a great poet: he will be remembered as one of the greatest world-poets. But humanity owes him another—perhaps a greater—debt of gratitude: his name has a higher value, a more significant potency for the future. In an age when Reason was considered as the highest light given to man, Tagore pointed to the Vision of the mystics as always the still greater light; when man was elated with un- dreamt-of worldly success; puffed up with incomparable material possessions and powers, Tagore's voice rang clear and emphatic in tune with the cry of the ancients: "What shall I do with all this mass of things, if I am not made immortal by that?" When men, in their individual as well as collective egoism, were scrambling for earthly gains and hoards, he held before them vaster and cleaner horizons, higher and deeper ways of being and living, maintained the sacred sense of human solidarity, the living consciousness of the Divine, one and indivisible. When the Gospel of Power had all but hypnotised men's minds, and Superman or God-man came to be equated with the Titan, Tagore saw through the falsehood and placed in front and above all the old-world eternal verities of love and self-giving, harmony and mutuality, sweetness and light. When pessimism, cynicism, agnosticism struck the major chord of human temperament, and grief and frustration and death and decay were taken as a matter of course to be the inevitable order of earthly life—bhasmantam idam shariram— he continued to sing the song of the Rishis that Ananda and Immortality are the breath of things, the birthright of human beings. When Modernism declared with a certitude never to Page 369 be contested that Matter is Brahman, Tagore said with the voice of one who knows that Spirit is Brahman. Tagore is in direct line with those bards who have sung of the Spirit; who always soared high above the falsehoods and uglinesses of a merely mundane life and lived in the undecaying-delights and beauties of a diviner consciousness. Spiritual reality was the central theme of his poetic creation: only and naturally he viewed it in a special way and endowed it with a special grace. We know of another God-intoxicated man, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who saw things sub specie aeternitatis, under the figure or mode of eternity. Well, Tagore can be said to see things, in their essential spiritual reality, under the figure or mode of beauty. Keats indeed spoke of truth being beauty and beauty truth. But there is a great difference in the outlook and inner experience. A worshipper of beauty, unless he rises to the Upanishadic norm, is prone to become sensuous and pagan. Keats was that, Kalidasa was that, even Shelley was not far different. The spiritual vein in all these poets remains secondary. In the old Indian master, it is part of his intellectual equipment, no doubt, but nothing much more than that. In the other two it comes in as strange flashes from an unknown country, as a sort of irruption or on the peak of the poetic afflatus or enthousiasmos. The world being nothing but Spirit made visible is, according to Tagore, fundamentally a thing of beauty. The scars and spots that are on the surface have to be removed and mankind has to repossess and clothe itself with that mantle of beauty. The world is beautiful, because it is the image of the Beautiful, because it harbours, expresses and embodies the Divine who is Beauty supreme. Now by a strange alchemy, a wonderful effect of polarisation, the very spiritual element in Tagore has made him almost a pagan and even a profane. For what are these glories of Nature and the still more exquisite glories that the human body has captured? They are but vibrations and modulations of beauty—the delightful names and forms of the supreme Lover and Beloved. Socrates is said to have brought down Philosophy from Heaven to live among men upon earth. A similar exploit can be ascribed to Tagore. The Spirit, the bare transcendental Reality contemplated by the orthodox Vedantins, has been Page 370 brought nearer to our planet, close to human consciousness in Tagore's vision, being clothed in earth and flesh and blood, made vivid with the colours and contours of the physical existence. The Spirit, yes and by all means, but not necessarily asceticism and monasticism. So Tagore boldly declared in those famous lines of his: Mine is not the deliverance achieved through mere renunciation. Mine rather the freedom that tastes itself in a thousand associations.1 The spirit of the age demands this new gospel. Mankind needs and awaits a fresh revelation. The world and life are not an illusion or a lesser reality: they are, if taken rightly, as real as the pure Spirit itself. Indeed, Spirit and Flesh, Consciousness and Matter are not antinomies; to consider them as such is itself an illusion. In fact, they are only two poles or modes or aspects of the same reality. To separate or divide them is a one-sided concentration or abstraction on the part of the human mind. The fulfilment of the Spirit is in its expression through Matter; human life too reaches its highest term, its summum bonum, in embodying the spiritual consciousness here on earth and not dissolving itself in the Transcendence. That is the new Dispensation which answers to the deepest aspiration in man and towards which he has been travelling through the ages in the course of the evolution of his consciousness. Many, however, are the prophets and sages who have set this . ideal before humanity and more and more insistently and clearly as we come nearer to the age we live in. But none or . very few have expressed it with such beauty and charm and compelling persuasion. It would be carping criticism to point out—as some, purists one may call them, have done—that in poetising and aesthetising the spiritual truth and reality, in trying to make it human and terrestrial, he has diminished and diluted the original substance, in endeavouring to render the diamond iridescent, he has turned it into a baser alloy. Tagore's is a poetic soul, it must be admitted; and it is not necessary that one should find in his ideas and experiences and utterances the cent per cent accuracy and inevitability of
1Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom Page 371 a Yogic consciousness. Still his major perceptions, those that count, stand and are borne out by the highest spiritual realisation.
Tagore is no inventor or innovator when he posits Spirit as
Beauty, the spiritual consciousness as the ardent rhythm of
ecstasy. This experience is the very core of Vaishnavism and
for which Tagore is sometimes called a Neo-Vaishnava. The
Vaishnava sees the world pulsating in glamorous beauty as
the Lila (Play) of the Lord, and the Lord, God himself, is
nothing but Love and Beauty. Still Tagore is not all Vaishnava
or merely a Vaishnava; he is in addition a modern (the carping A modern idealist of the type of a reformer would not be satisfied with that role. If he is merely a moralist reformer, he will revolt against the "witness business", calling it a laissez- faire mentality of bygone days. A spiritual reformer would ask for more—a dynamic union with the Divine Will and Consciousness, not merely a passive enjoyment in the Bliss, so that he may be a luminous power or agent for the expression of divine values in things mundane. Not the acceptance of the world as it is, not even a joyous acceptance, viewing it as an inexplicable and mysterious and magic play of God, but the aspiration and endeavour to Page 372 change it, mould it in the pattern of its inner divine realities—for there are such realities which seek expression and embodiment in earthly life—that is the great mission and labour of humanity and that is all the meaning of man's existence here below. And Tagore is one of the great prophets and labourers who had the vision of the shape of things to come and worked for it. Only it must be noted, as I have already said, that un-like mere moral reformists or scientific planners, Tagore grounded himself upon the eternal ancient truths that "age cannot wither nor custom stale"—the divine truths of the Spirit.
Tagore was a poet; this poetic power of his he put in the
service of the great cause for the divine uplift of humanity.
Naturally, it goes without saying, his poetry did not preach
or propagandize the truths for which he stood—he had a fine
and powerful weapon in his prose to do the work, even then in
a poetic way—but to sing them. And he sang them not in
their philosophical bareness, like a Lucretius, or in their sheer
transcendental austerity like some of the Upanishadic Rishis, Thus, on the one hand, the Eternity, the Infinity, the Spirit
1 Tagore the poet reminds one often and anon of Kalidasa. He was so much in love, had such kinship with the great old master that many of his poems, many passages and lines are reminiscences, echoes, modulations or a paraphrase of the original classic. Tagore himself refers in his memoirs to one Kalidasian line that haunted his juvenile brain beacuse of its exquisite music and enchanting imagery:
Mandakini nirjhar asikar an am vodha muhuh-kampita-deva-daruh
Winds carrying spray from the falls of Mandakini, making deodars all astir.
Both the poets were worshippers, idolaters, of beauty, especially of natural physical beauty, of beauty heaped on beauty, of beauty gathered, like honey from all places and stored and ranged and stalled with the utmost decorative skill. Yet the difference between the two is not less pronounced. A philosopher is reminded of Bergson, the great exponent of movement as reality, in connection with certain aspects of Tagore. Indeed, Beauty in Tagore is something moving, flowing, danc- ing, rippling; it is especially the beauty which music embodies and expresses. A Kalidasian beauty, on the contrary, is statuesque and plastic, it is to be appreciated in situ. This is, however, by the way. Page 373 is brought nearer home to us in its embodied symbols and living vehicles and vivid formulations, it becomes easily available to mortals, even like the father to his son, to use a Vedic phrase; on the other hand, earthly things, mere humanities are uplifted and suffused with a "light that never was, on sea or land." Another great poet of the spirit says also, almost like Tagore:
Cold are the rivers of peace and their banks are leafless and lonely.1
and sends up this prayer:
Earth-souls needing the touch of the heaven's peace
Heaven needing earth's passion to .quiver its peace
Marry, 0 lightning eternal, the passion of a moment-
Out of thy greatness draw close to the breast of our
This also is Tagore's soul-prayer, his deepest aspiration.
1 Sri Aurobindo: "Ahana", Collected Poems & Plays, Vol. 2 Page 374 |