the churning up of the unspeakable filth which has been accumulating for ages in the bottom of this civilisation,—the voice which cries to our soul, that the tower of national selfishness, which goes by the name of patriotism, which has raised its banner of treason against heaven, must totter and fall with a crash, weighed down by its own bulk, its flag kissing the dust, its light extinguished? My brothers, when the red light of conflagration sends up its crackle of laughter to the stars, keep your faith upon those stars and not upon the fire of destruction. For when this conflagration consumes itself and dies down, leaving its memorial in ashes, the eternal light will again shine in the East,—the East which has been the birth-place of the morning sun of man's history. And who knows if that day has not already dawned, and the sun not risen, in the Easternmost horizon of Asia? And I offer, as did my ancestor rishis, my salutation to that sunrise of the East, which is destined once again to illumine the whole world.
I know my voice is too feeble to raise itself above the uproar of this bustling time, and it is easy for any street urchin to fling against me the epithet of 'unpractical.' It will stick to my coat-tail, never to be washed away, effectively excluding me from the consideration of all respectable persons. I know what a risk one runs from the vigorously athletic crowds to be styled an idealist in these days, when thrones have lost their dignity and prophets have become an anachronism, when the sound that drowns all voices is the noise of the market-place. Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills,—with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon, like a god overcome with his own radiance,—the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketsmen robustly contemptuous of all sentiments,—that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies.
LETTERS
Extracts from old letters of Rabindranath Tagore.
(Specially Translated for the Modern Review).
(All rights reserved)
(55)
On the way to Goalundo,
21st June: 1892.
I have been sailing along the whole day. It surprises me that, though I have so often passed this way and enjoyed the peculiar pleasure there is in floating along between the two banks of a river, yet a few days on shore makes it impossible to recall it exactly.
This sitting all by myself and gazing on and on, as an endless variety of pictures of sand banks, fields of crops and villages come into sight on either side, and then pass away; clouds floating in the sky, and the blossoming of colours at the meeting of day and night; boats gliding by, fishermen catching fish, and the liquid, caressing sounds made by the water through the livelong day; in the evening the calming down of the broad expanse of the waters into stillness, like a child lulled to sleep, while all the stars in the boundless open sky keep watch; then, as I sit up on wakeful nights, sleeping banks on both sides, the silence broken only by the occasional cry of a jackal in the woods near some
