The genius as critic

ONE of the ironies in the life of a genius is that often one aspect of his contribution pushes out from the reader's ken, other important aspects. That has happened to Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Volumes containing more than a 100 essays by this great poet rarely move out of the shelves of the libraries. Their use as textbooks or by research scholars is a different matter.

Yet, Tagore's essays constitute an absorbing genre of reflective, creatively controversial, humorous and philosophical prose. Several of them do not fall into conventional category of essays, but are dialogues, reveries, and views on issues topical. But they are highly readable, without exception.

"It must be clearly understood," says Sisir Kumar Das in his introduction, "that Rabindranath did not have any rigorous formal training in either philosophy or the history of the arts... He had a natural impatience towards all formalism: he did not formulate his methods of literary analysis in precise terms, nor did he identify his critical tools with any objectivity."

That is true, and what emerges from this selection of Tagore's essays on literature and language is a vision intended to liberate the orthodox from the bondage imposed by formulae. A classic example of his revolt against the reviewer's unwillingness or inability to look beyond the bed of Procrustes of a certain critical convention was his forceful defence of Tennyson's "De Profundis". The British literary world did not react kindly to its publication in 1881 and the formidable Punch even came out with a parody of the poem under the title "De Rotundis".

The poem, written to celebrate the birth of a child, was in fact a celebration of something far more sublime, the mystery of life. Tagore was blunt in his rejoinder to the critics of this remarkable poem. "One reason why Tennyson's "De Profundis" has not found favour is that its subject is grave and serious. Another reason is that it contains ideas and feelings which the English do not ordinarily understand; we are the right people to understand them properly."

Tagore obviously believed that the appeal made by good poetry transcended its milieu and to pronounce judgment on it was not the monopoly of the critics belonging to the poet's homeland. He deplored the habit of the Indian critics to blindly follow the English critical idiom. "If what the English critic says is valid in the English way, what the critic of our country says will be valid in ours... If a rose, because its neighbouring leaves turn green in the sunlight, thinks it too should be green, that to turn green is the ultimate aim of its life, the society of flowers will surely question its sanity," he pointed out.

He disliked most the culture of caricature and parody. "They find it amusing to satirise a well-known poem of noble theme. Some of them think it is a matter of pride for the poet if we mutilate a well-known and estimable poem, paint its face like a clown's and stand it by the roadside for a clutch of idle frivolous passers- by to grin at. This shows up the sadly mutilated state of an aspect of the English psyche."

Tagore wrote this when he was barely 20. Later he grew more liberal in his outlook even towards those with whom he differed. But he never compromised on the ideal of freedom from taboos and the need for adventures in ideas.

There is a series of seven pieces which are a kind of belles- letters in the form of dialogues among the five elements constituting our person and they are a rich harvest of thoughts and wit. The range of the rest is wide, from the "Baul Songs" of Bengal to "World Literature". A small piece, "The Theatre", significantly informs us about the poet's ideas - which he put into practice as a director - of what the stage should be. "The imaginative viewer has a stage inside his heart, where there is no lack of room... No artificial stage or scene can serve a poet's imagination."

If sometimes the translation appears literal, it is probably because that was thought to be the best way to present the spirit of the original writing. Produced tastefully, the compilation has the added merit of containing, in black and white, a number of paintings by Tagore.

MANOJ DAS

Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Writings on Literature and Language, edited by Sisir Kumar Das and Sukana Chaudhuri, Oxford University Press, Rs. 595.

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