| Gitanjali |
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| Culture |
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INTRODUCTION
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| '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.'
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