PRINCIPALSARANATHAN€¦ · Poems of Earth and Sky Death 52 The Spirit of India India –– An Ode I 52 India –– An Ode II 53 India ––An Ode III 54 India ––An Ode IV

PRINCIPAL SARANATHANMEMORIAL VOLUME

[1949]

P

Published

By

SARANATHAN COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

PANJAPPUR,

Tiruchirappalli - 12.

nts;sj; jida kyh;ePl;lk; khe;jh;jk;cs;sj; jidaJ cah;T

- jpUf;Fws;

From deep pools rise the long-stalked flowers

So rise from depth of soul men’s powers.

- Translated by Principal Saranathan

Reprint ] [June 2010

EDITORIAL BOARD(For the First Edition)

______

S. THOTHADRI IYENGAR, M.A.

Editor-in-Chief

M.S. VENKATARAMAN, M.A.

Secretary

G. VARADACHARIAR, M.A.

P.S. RAMASWAMI, B.A. (Hons)

S. SEETHARAMA IYER, VIDWAN.

Printed at The Trichinopoly United Printers Ltd., Tiruchirapalli.

P

EDITORIAL BOARD(For the Present Edition)

______

S. RAVINDRAN –––– Editor de-jureSecretary,

Saranathan College of Engineering, Tiruchi

Prof. V. NATARAJAN –––– Editor de-factoFormer Principal,National College, Tiruchi

Printed at Sri Kamakoti Printers, Tiruchirapalli.

(For Private Circulation only)

Preface to the Second Edition

Principal Saranathan Memorial Volume, published in 1949 was a

magnum opus - great literary Achievement - of his devoted colleagues. The

Editorial Board was a galaxy of talents, consisting of stalwarts in their

respective fields, most of whom themselves became Principals in course of

time. Hence in the preparation of this Reprint, we dare not take liberties

with the Text, even where there exists, in our opinion, some lapsus lingua.

The only liberty we have taken is to make it less voluminous by making

what we consider to be a judicious selection of the Collected Writings and

Speeches of Saranathan, as suited to the taste and comprehension of the

modern reader, the rest being omitted as being repetitive or too highly

intellectual and beyond our Ken.

The raison detre that prompted this Reprint is Sri Ravindran’s (Present

Secretary of Saranathan College of Engineering) conception of it as fulfilment

of a duty that he owes to his Revered Father and Founder Secretary of the

College and his desire to acquaint the Younger generation, namely students

of the Institution with the kind of Personality that Saranathan was, after

whom the college has been named.

Santhanam was noted for his Guru Bhakti and had done a lot to

perpetuate the memory of his Gurus and Saranathan amongst them in

particular. He had installed a Bust of Saranathan and put up a Saranathan

Block in National College, another Saranathan Block in the old campus

where the NCHSS is functioning, celebrated his Birth Centenary with great

eclat under the Presidentship of no less a person than the then President

of India, His Excellency Shri.R. Venkataraman and incidentally an old Boy

of Saranathan and named his ‘Dream Institution’ as Saranathan College of

Engineering.

i

Nothing would have pleased the soul of Santhanam as much as this

follow - up act of his son and successor, to highlight the life and achievements

of the greatest ever Principal of National College and one of the greatest

intellectuals of his age.

Constructive Suggestions from discerning Readers will be gratefully

noted for future guidance.

We also acknowledge the prompt and swift execution of the work,

within the allotted time, by the Proprietor of SRI KAMAKOTI PRINTERS,

Tiruchi.

Tiruchi

June 2010

V. NATARAJAN

Editor}

ii

Preface to the First Edition

THE Principal Saranathan Memorial Volume which we have now the pleasure

of presenting to the public is divided into two unequal pats. The First Part

contains reminiscences and appreciations of Principal Saranathan and his

life - work by a few of his friends and admirers, some of them distinguished

figures in the field of education and in the wider sphere of public life in our

part of the country. We regret we have not been able to add to this list of

contributions; but one reason for this is that a few intimate friends and

pupils could not trust themselves to put down on paper their memories of

one for whom their love and esteem are profound. For instance, a

distinguished old pupil–– an administrator high in the official hierarchy of

our Province–– wrote to the Editor pleading his “inability to bring to the

point of a cold objective analysis the warmth of my affection and regard for

Saranatha Iyengar.” The sentiment is one that we are bound to respect,

though it has deprived us of a few more articles with which to embellish the

first part of this volume.

The Second Part consists of the collected works of Principal Saranathan

in verse and in prose, in English and in Tamil. The Foreword to that Part

will give the reader some idea of the plan we have followed in editing his

writings. Mr. Saranathan was meticulous in the preparation of his poems

and essays. Even after the printing and publication of some of these efforts

we have noticed a number of alterations in his own handwriting on the

reprints supplied to him by the editors ! That shows that he was a most

conscientious craftsman; he was never fully satisfied with what he had written

but must go on altering and improving the draft even after the need had

passed away! Some of his poems have been modified and rewritten so often

iii

that we have had to choose the third or the fourth draft for inclusion in this

book.

Some have expressed a doubt as to whether Principal Saranathan

really wanted that his poems, essays and articles should be published; and

if he did not, whether we are not doing him a disservice by bringing into the

open his fugitive literary efforts. We have no doubt on this score. From the

very careful way in which every scrap that he ever wrote has been preserved,

and from his tentative arrangement of the subject matter of some of the

themes he has handled, we have come to the conclusion that the thought of

publication must always have been at the back of his mind. We cannot of

course claim to have edited his writing in the way in which he might have

done it himself had he been spared for a few more years. All that we can

say is that we have tried to do our best. To us, the members of the Editorial

Board and a remnant of the Old Guard of Principal Saranathan, it has been

a labour of love, an expression of the homage we wish unobtrusively to pay

to our late chief. How far we have succeeded in our task we must leave it to

the reader to judge.

It remains for us to make a few acknowledgements. We are deeply

grateful to the gentlemen who, in response to our invitation, have sent us

their articles on Principal Saranathan. We wish to thank Sri A. Rama Iyer,

the present Principal of the National College, for the care with which he

read the proofs of the Poetry section of Part Two. To the Principal of the

M.D.T. Hindu College, Tirunelveli we are indebted for the permission he

granted to us to reproduce some of the contributions that had appeared in

the Annual Numbers of that College. Sri K.R. Ramaswami Iyengar, M.A.,

L.T., (I.E.S. retired) and Sri K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, M.A., (Professor of Indian

History, University of Madras, retired) were good enough to give us two

photographs of Sri V. Saranathan, one in his teens and the other in his

twenties. We are much obliged to them for their kind help.

iv

A good number of articles written by Principal Saranathan appeared

first in the pages of the Tamil periodical ‘Cauvery’. Our grateful

acknowledgements are due to the Proprietors of that periodical for the

readiness with which they have consented to the inclusion of those articles

in the present volume.

The authorities of All India Radio have been very kind in permitting

us to print all the scripts of the talks broadcast or recorded by Principal

Saranathan in the course of the last few years. We take this opportunity of

expressing our warm and grateful ackowledgements to the Director-General,

All India Radio and to the Station Directors of Tiruchirapalli and Madras for

the consideration and courtesy they have shown us.

For the smooth and expeditious manner in which such a heavy job of

work as the printing of a Volume of this kind has been done we owe special

thanks to the United Printers Limited, Tiruchirapalli.

Editor

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“ O! Goddess of learning, give meknowledge, give me memory, giveme learning; give me reputation,poesy, and the power to enlightendisciples”.

“Obeisance to that Goddess who isretentive power, knowing power,thinking power, power of imagi-nation and creative power”.

vi

CONTENTS

Sri V. Saranathan (1892 - 1948) 1A Biographical Sketch

PART I

REMINISCENCES OF PRINCIPAL SARANATHAN

Prof. Saranathan : A Tribute 11V. V. Srinivasa Ayyangar, B.A., B.L. (Formerly Judge, High Court, Madras.)

Principal Saranathan 13Prof. K.A. Nilakanda Sastri, M.A., Professor of Indian History (Retd.) University of Madras

Saranathan my friend : A Letter 18P.N. Ramasubramanian, B.A., M.B.B.S. Sucharita, Tallakulam, Madura.

Principal V. Saranathan - An Impressionist Sketch 23Dewan Bahadur K.S. Ramaswami Sastri, B.A., B.L. Retired District & Sessions Judge, Madras

Memories of Saranathan 29S. Ranganathan, O.B.E., I.C.S., (Member, Board of Revenue, Government of Madras)

Reminiscences 30A.V. Ramalinga Ayyar, B.A., B.C.E., (Retired Chief Engineer, P.W.D., Madras)

Memories 31The Rev. A.J. Boyd, M.A., D.D., (Principal, Madras Christian College)

A Tribute 32Prof. K. Swaminathan, B.A., (OXON.) (Principal, Government Muhammadan College, Madras)

Reminiscences 33S.K. Subramania Iyer, M.A., L.T., (Retired Principal, Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam)

Some Recollections 36S. Krishnaswamy (Son of late Sri. G. Sesha Iyengar, Founder)

Principal Mama 38Saraswathi Gowrishankar, B.A., (Old Pupil)

In Memoriam 42K. Guruswamy, B.A., L.T., (Old Boy)

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PAGE

PART II

COLLECTED WRITINGS OF PRINCIPAL SARANATHAN

Foreword 43

Lyrics

Siva 49

Shakti 50

God 51

Poems of Earth and Sky

Death 52

The Spirit of India

India –– An Ode I 52

India –– An Ode II 53

India –– An Ode III 54

India –– An Ode IV 55

India –– An Ode V 56

Rabindranath Tagore 57

Gandhi I 57

Gandhi II 58

Gandhi III 58

Gandhi IV 59

Gandhi V 59

Gandhi VI 60

Occasional Pieces

On The Chaturthi DayThe Tiruchirapalli Rock 61

From the Meghadhuta 61

In Memoriam 63The Late G. Sesha Iyengar

Lines to My Own Memory 63

viii

First Sheaves

Indrajit - A Dramatic Poem 64

1. Indrajit’s Address to the Earth 64

2. The Vanaras before Lanka 65

3. Sulochana, Indrajit’s Wife 67

4. Indrajit to the Spirits at Nikumbhila 68

Miscellaneous

To Abhimanyu 70

Earlier Pieces

God and the Cobbler 71The Story of the Anchorite 72

Literary Criticism

The Poetry of Francis Thompson 73

A Thought on Shakespeare 104

‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ 108A Discourse on ART

Modern Poetry 1918 – 1940 112

The Spirit of Autobiography 128

Satire in the Greek Drama 132

Essays on Culture

Education and the Community 141

Addresses Mainly Educational

The Work of an Indian University 151

Golden Jubilee Address Trichinopoly Teachers’ Guild 168

Welcome to Sri C. Rajagopalachariar at the College Union 172

Welcome Address at the College Diamond Jubilee Celebration 176

Autobiographical

Four Battle-Years 180

“This People’s College” 185

Speech at Public Meeting at the Town Hall 189To Honour the Memory of Sir T. Desikachariar

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193

198

201

205

207

212

217

220

222

230

–– 235

241

242

245

248

256

x

PRINCIPAL SARANATHAN MEMORIAL VOLUME

Sri V. SARANATHAN

(1892 - 1948)

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Sri V. Saranathan was born in Tiruchirai near Kumbakonam on 6-1-1892, of

a family of renowned Pandits, descended from Sri Chaturvedi Tupil Vajpeya

Venkatachariar. His father Sri Venkataseshadrinathachariar was a great Vedic

scholar, credited with the miracle of bringing down the rains on Pudukottah by

performing a Yagnya there. Sri Saranathan’s mother was Raghava, so called by

her parents who, having lost a number of female children, gave this child a male

name in the hope that she at least might survive, - a hope luckily fulfilled. Their

eldest son, Sri Ayanachariar alias Nambi, was a precocious genius who followed

in his father’s footsteps. After an interval of 17 years was born Sri Saranathan,

destined to win laurels in “fresh woods, and pastures new.”

At two years old, Sri Saranathan had the misforune to lose his father, who

left the family almost destitute, their little patrimony being just enough to cover

his funeral expenses. The family now moved to their ancestral village, Karakurichi

in Tirunelveli Ditrict. Sri Nambi went to Kumbakonam to pursue his studies, soon

winning the respect and admiration of such doyens as Mannargudi Raju

Sastrigal.But ‘those whom the Gods love die young’, and he died, all too soon,

an inheritor of unfulfilled renown. Saranathan always spoke with pride and affection

of his brother, dedicating his First Sheaves to him. Saranathan had his early

schooling at Kumbakonam. We learn that the credit of diverting the boy to New

Learning goes to Sir A. Seshaiah Sastriar, the Dewan of Pudukottai, a personal

friend of Sri Nambi. He was so impressed by the boy’s intelligence that he advised

his brother to send him to an English school instead of training him in the family

tradition. Accordingly, he was sent to the Middle School, Veeravanallur. In spite

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of ill-health which dogged him throughout his life, Saranathan was the show-

boy of the school and knocked off all the prizes, so much so that Sri Parthasarathi

Iyengar, Deputy Inspector of Schools, Ambasamudram Range, loved him as his

own son, and adopted him into his household. From the Veeravanallur Middle

School Saranathan proceeded to the High School, Ambasamudram, whose

Headmaster, Sri T.S. Sadasiva Iyer, developed a paternal affection for him, which

touched a responsive chord in the pupil, who never in his life forgot a friend or

benefactor.

In 1906 he passed the Matriculation Examination in the First class, standing

Fourth in the Presidency and first in his District. Then he sought admission for his

F.A. in the Hindu College, Tirunelveli. The Principal, Mr.Winckler, was so amused

at the diminutive size of his pupil that he suggested sending him to the nursery!

But this enfant terrible even then showed signs of his ardent nationalism when

on the eve of this principal’s retirement, he greeted him with a Bande Mataram,

which drew from the Principal this desperate remark : “You are the most curious

mixture of intelligence and stupidity that I have seen in all my life. If I went on

here, I should make you a really intelligent fellow.”

Ill-health, however, interrupted Saranathan’s studies at College;he completed

his F.A. only in 1909, and at the Presidency College, Madras, passing in the First

Class with the second rank in the Presidency. In March 1912 he took his B.A.

Degree with a First Class in English, being the First in his College, and with a

Second Class in Sanskrit and Mathematics. It may be mentioned that among his

classmates were the late Sri V.K.Aravamuda Iyengar, F.C.S., who made his mark

in the Financial Department but died a premature death in a nursing home in

London, and Sri E.R. Seshu Iyer, now Director-General of Commercial Intelligence.

Both Professors Middlemast and Mark Hunter, especially the latter, were very

favourably impressed by the capacity of Saranathan.

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He was now faced with the problem of earning his livelihood. He was all

alone in the wide world, except for his mother who kept house for him, nursing

him tenderly in all his ailments; and she lived long enough to see her son well

settled in life. He had brilliant academic qualifications, no doubt, but just Rs.19/,

a meagre capital to start life with, as he himself naively confesses in one of his

autobiographical fragments. Sri Sadasiva Iyer, his former Headmaster, offered

him a teacher’s job in his own High School; but this proposal did not find favour

with him. Prof. Mark Hunter gave him a note to another Englishman, the

Accountant-General of Madras, who, however, refused to give him more than

Rs.25 per mensem, the salary then in vogue for a B.A., in spite of the applicant’s

categorical assurance that he would pass his M.A. in two years. A proposal to

make him Tutor, or in his own expressive phraseology, “bear-guardian”, to two

wealthy youths, also fell through.

Eventually, in 1912, Saranathan came to the St. Joseph’s College,

Tiruchirapalli, in the humble capacity of a Tutor, having been recommended to its

Principal, Fr. Bertram, S.J, by his former Professor, Sri K.V. Subbiah Iyer. He was

then a callow youth who “barely knew how to wear the conventional teacher’s

garb, dhoti, coat and turban of that day”. At the St. Joseph’s he worked under

that able scholar, Fr.Quinn, S.J., from 1912 to 1914, and wrote his thesis for the

M.A. on Francis Thompson, “the first literary criticism to be written by any one in

South India”, as he himself declares with a legitimate pride. He passed his M.A. in

1914 in the Second Class, standing second in the list, none taking a First.

The year 1914 marks the beginning of his teaching career, when he joined

the English staff of his alma mater, the Hindu College, Tirunelveli, one of the five

M.A.’s as they were then called, his colleagues being Sri K.A.Nilakanta Sastri,

who retired recently as Professor of South Indian History and Archaeology in

the University of Madras, the late K.C. Viraraghava Iyer of the Madras Educational

Service, Sri K.P. Yegneswara Sarama, the veteran congress worker, and the late

3


Sri N. Sankaran who later became a Bank official, dying early. These young

idealists wanted to model their College on the lines of the Fergusson College,

Poona, and promised the Council of Management that they would be content

with the grade of Rs.100-10-150 provided they were given full power over the

internal administration of the institution. However, they were too far in advance

of their age, and neither the old members of the Staff nor the Governing Council

agreed to their terms. Long and acrimonious was the war that they waged, as is

described by Sri Saranathan in his vivid “Four Battle-Years”, but in the end the

youthful enthusiasts had to confess defeat and resign their jobs, though Sri

S.Kumaraswami Reddiar, the Secretary, kindly offered to keep them on but only

on his terms.

What was the loss of Tirunelveli became ultimately the gain of Tiruchirapalli,

for after a year of Temporary Assistant Professorship at the Pachaiyappa’s

College, Saranathan came over as the Head of the English Department to the

National College at its very inception in 1919. The choice did great credit to the

authorities of the College, the President, Sri T.V.Seshagiri Iyer, the Secretary, Sir

T. Desikachariar, and the Principal, Sri K.Ramanujachariar. Barely two years after,

in 1921, Saranathan became, at the early age of twenty-nine, the Principal on

the retirement of Sri K. Ramanujachariar, filling his high post with distinction for

more than a quarter of a century.

The period of his Principalship synchronized with that of the growth and

consolidation of the college. In 1924 the College was made First Grade, and in

1927 was affiliated to the University in the Intermediate Sciences. Sri Saranathan

so completely identified himself with the college that it came to be called the

Saranathan College. During the lean years when, like all educational institutions,

the National College was on the rocks, he set an inspiring example of self-

sacrifice by cutting down his salary from Rs.400/- to Rs.200/-, thus setting the

pace for his devoted colleagues who, for their part, did not lag behind. The

4


college always occupied the first place in his affections, and he was never tired

of planning for its progress. No sacrifice was too great for him, if the college

required it. For years he gave away an annual sum of about Rs.2000/- by way

of scholarships to deserving students. All the six years he was on the Syndicate,

from 1930 to 1936, he fought strenuously in the interests of the college, as for

all mofussil colleges in general. It was most fortunate for him that in this good

work he was actively helped by Sir T. Desikachariar, the President of the Managing

Committee for most of the time, who had the greatest love and admiration for

him. Not that it was always smooth sailing for Saranathan; he could never be

easy in his Zion. But in the main, he commanded the affection and esteem of

the members of the Governing Council, - while the bank of goodwill he established

with the public was simply inexhaustible. As for the students, they

...........loved him, followed him, honoured him,

Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,

Learnt his great language, caught his clear accents,

Made him (their) pattern to live and to die!

It was a source of great satisfaction to Principal Saranathan that at the

close of his regime the ship of the college had steered clear of the shoals and

rocks of financial depression, and reached the haven of security. The College

which had once but 250 on its rolls was now a thousand strong, and had not

only earned a name for efficiency in the educational world, but enshrined itself

as a People’s College in the hearts of the masses, imbued, to use Saranathan’s

words, with “a zeal for real education, a reverence for the Indian spirit and for

the brotherhood of Learning, a fellow-feeling for all our people, rich and poor

alike, and a solicitude for the freedom and happiness of students in all spheres.”

The Staff, who had, along with their chief, cut their salary to the bone, were now

comparatively well off, and, what was more, had become a compact team of

workers, filled with an abiding love for their institution. The Diamond Jubilee was

5


in the offing, and Saranathan issued a noble appeal to the old pupils in which he

exhorted them to rally round their alma mater, and give of their best of goodwill,

work, and material help, “to clothe with power and vesture a College which I, its

Principal for over twenty-five years, used to think of as a Being mighty in its

rags.” He himself collected about Rs.11,000 from his personal friends for putting

up an Assembly Hall.

It was, however, rather unfortunate that he was obliged to retire, owing to

efflux of time, about a month before the Jubilee came off. There was a proposal

to retain him as Principal at least till the Jubilee celebrations: but he did not wish

to go against the established convention. Accordingly he retired on 2-1-1947,

handing over charge to Sri A. Rama Iyer, the Vice-Principal, who had been his

trusted colleague and co-worker for nearly three decades. Scores of farewell

meetings were got up, at the College and at the Schools, by the students, the

staff, and the authorities of the College to do honour to the retiring Principal. At

a special meeting the Governing Council unanimously passed the following

resolution :

“On the eve of the retirement of Mr. V. Saranathan, the Council places on

record its high appreciation of his services during a period of 27 years and 6

months, the entire life of the institution as a College. His period of Principalship

has been unique in its length, over a quarter of a century, and in its achievements,

and the College owes it present condition to him. He has given the best part of

his life to the service of the institution which he has nurtured with zeal and

affection. His brilliant capacity as a Professor of English, his high and circumspect

administrative efficiency and the illustrious example of self-sacrifice and devotion

to duty set up by himself and cheerfully adopted by his colleagues on the staff

have earned for the college a reputation for efficiency and usefulness.

6


The Management will take appropriate steps to secure permanent association

of his name and the memory of his services with the institution. It is the earnest

and sincere wish of the council that to Mr. Saranathan may be vouchsafed a long

and happy life full of opportunities for service to the cause of education in general

and for help in the progress of this institution in particular.”

In accordance with the wishes of the Governing Council, the Managing

Committee made Sri. Saranathan a life-member of the Council and of the

Committee.

Happily, Sri. Saranathan stayed on at his old residence in Tiruchirapalli, and

was thus able to participate in the celebrations of the Diamond Jubilee, when

everybody sang his praises. It was indeed a proud moment in his life which saw

the fulfilment of his mission. The College was his pet child whom he had reared,

even as Sri. Sesha Iyengar the High School, with a steadfast and devoted affection,

and now she had attained a position of assured stability and eminence in the

educational world, and his life work had found recognition in the tributes that

were paid to him by such discerning elder statesmen and leaders as Sir

C.P.Ramaswami Iyer, Dr. Sir A. Lakshmanaswami Mudaliyar, Sri T.V.Sundaram

Iyengar and others.

In his retirement Saranathan was quite a happy man. The worries of family

life were not for him, (though he was equally a stranger to its compensating

felicity.) Thoughts of his future filled him at times with vague apprehensions; but

left unaffected ‘his genial faith, still rich in genial good’. A good mixer, he threw

himself with gusto into the life of the Union Club, from his cosy corner ‘surveying

mankind from China to Peru’, and holding forth animatedly on every conceivable

topic to his intimate friends. Off and on he had bouts of illness - especially of

rheumatism but he continued to be buoyant, and was looking forward to a

mellow, contented Age to do what a crowded Youth had left undone. He knew,

7


none better, that the long years of administrative routine had almost stifled his

poetic genius, which had flowered so early as 1918 when he had published his

First Sheaves, and had been content for about twenty years with just a few

topical Sonnets. The springs of poetry had not dried up in him; but he now

preferred to express himself in the ‘other harmony,’ in Tamil Prose. It had always

been his fond hope to leave some work behind him, of scholarship, poesy or

research, which succeeding generations might not willingly let die.

But the end came, all too suddenly, before his pen could ‘glean his teeming

brain’. In May 1948 he went to Bangalore for a change, and there had an attack

of pneumonia, to which he succumbed after a few days in a Nursing Home, far

from his friends and colleagues. Prof. K.A.Nilakanta Sastri and

Dr.P.N.Ramasubramanian, two of his most intimate companions, rushed to

Bangalore, but it was too late. The news of his death spread like wild fire in

Tiruchi. Attempts were made by Sri. R.Srinivasa Iyer, the Secretary of the College

and his life-long friend, to bring the dead body to Tiruchi, but it could not be. And

everybody mourned for the sudden end of Sri. V.Saranathan, the great scholar

and teacher, the patriot and poet, the friend of the poor, and above all, the

builder of the National College which he remembered in death as well as in life,

bequeathing to it all his property to the tune of Rs. 40,000.

It is perhaps too early to assess the greatness of our departed leader. His

subtle intellect, his recondite learning, his generous sympathies, his high-souled

magnanimity, and his literary eminence are amply illustrated in his own writings

and speeches. In their Reminiscences his friends bear testimony to his essential

kindliness and camaraderie, his courage and vivacity, his humanitarian zeal, his

patriotism and independence. The National College is a living monument to his

capacity for leadership, his flair for organization, his single-minded devotion and

self-sacrifice. He was indeed a princely benefactor :

8


For his bounty,

There was no winter in’t, an autumn ‘twas

That grew the more by reaping.

Bestriding the teachers’ world like a Colossus, he was our natural champion and

leader, ever keen on upholding the honour and dignity of the profession. He was

an intrepid fighter, but his fight was without bitterness or rancour, gaining the

esteem, and sometimes the love, of his opponents. For, like the Happy Warrior,

he was “more brave for this, that he hath much to love.” Above all, he was an

Idealist

Still nursing the unconquerable hope,

Still clutching the inviolable shade.

..................And yet neither his own writings nor the tributes of his friends

can give us any adequate idea of the man Saranathan who was much greater

than his works. The world cannot possibly appreciate the hidden wealth of his

inner mind, _ of his

Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped.

Perhaps the very charm of his rich and many-sided personality lay in its

elusiveness. To a superficial observer who watched him in his myraid moods and

movements, he appeared a paradox, a bundle of inconsistencies, - at the same

time an idealist and a realist, a philosopher and a man of action, a poet and an

administrator, orthodox and heterodox, fiercely aggressive and wisely passive,

egotistic and altruistic, boastful and humble, intellectually an aristocrat and

politically a socialist. No wonder, his critics ran away with conflicting impressions

9


about him, unable to make up their minds about the real Saranathan. But we, to

whom it was given to work in close association with him, knew and lowed well

enough his Spirit.

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

and would long cherish the memory of our Chief, a warm-hearted

comrade withal,

Not too bright or good

For human nature’s daily food

And yet a spirit still, and bright

With something of angelic light.

G.V.

10

PART I

REMINISCENCESOF

PRINCIPAL SARANATHAN


Prof. SARANATHAN

A TRIBUTE

BY

V. V. SRINIVASAAYYANGAR, B.A., B.L.

(Formerly Judge, High Court, Madras.)

The poet sang and said that the child is the father of the man. It strikes me

that the significance of this saying has not received adequate appreciation. It

says that the man is the child of the child. That was what my dear old friend Prof.

Saranathan was. It seems to me that he never outgrew the child in him. In his

impulsive disposition, in his likes and dislikes, in his outlook on life, in his talk, in

his laughter, in his playfulness, he was childlike. It was indeed the main feature of

his attractiveness.

I now forget when and where I met him first, but I confess that I came to

like and love him from the first moment of my meeting. He was and remained a

student all his life. It was his scholarship in and love of English literature that drew

me to him.

About a quarter of a century ago when I was editing Everyman’s Review he

used off and on to contribute to its pages. He loved his studies. He loved his

students. It is difficult to say which he loved more. I could never imagine him

assuming the airs of a solemn professor. To me he was an ideal educationist

living, moving, and having his being as a boy amongst his boys. He had a great

talent for friendship and indulged that rare virtue even where it was not fashionable.

He was a Brahmachari to the end in the true sense of the word. In the latter

years of his life he turned the focus of his active intellect to studies in Sanskrit. It

almost seemed to open a new chapter in his life. But alas! it was cut short. His

end would seem to have come sooner than it was due or expected.

11


But who can question the chosen time? If according to our religion and

philosophy every human being is a veritable incarnation, then it follows that as

soon as the purpose of the incarnation is finished, there comes the recall. Perhaps

it was so in his case. The world to-day is all too much in a hurry. Men seem to

have no time to live. Where indeed is the time for culture?

Our late lamented friend was a devotee of culture. But late he certainly is

not, who still believes in the survival and evolution of human personality, and

lamented he need not be, by those who discern the divine governance of the

Universe. I feel I cannot better conclude this scrappy sketch than by the couplet

I happened to wire the other day to a bereaved friend of mine :

“The dead do also live enshrined

In loving hearts they leave behind.”

12


Principal SARANATHAN*BY

Prof. K.A. NILAKANTA SASTRI, M.A.,

Professor of Indian History (Retd.) University of Madras

Born on 2nd January 1892, V. Saranathan was in his fifty-seventh year

when he passed away rather unexpectedly after a short illness at Bangalore on

the 20th June 1948. He came of a learned and orthodox Vaidik Vaishnava family

of Tuppil and was, as it happened, the last member of the family in the direct

male line. He and I began our High School course together at Ambasamudram in

1904, and I had the good fortune of being counted by him among his closest

friends to the end. A bright, but poor and rather sickly lad, Saranathan was the

favourite pupil of Sri. T.S. Sadasiva Aiyar, the noble Headmaster of the school in

those days; the news of Saranathan’s demise plunged the great Headmaster in

deeper sorrow than the loss, some years ago, of his only son. It was my painful

duty, soon after I returned to Madras from Bangalore, to meet him and give him

such details as I could of the end.

Saranathan, I think, stood first in the Matriculation Examination of 1906,

and together we took our First in Arts course (as it was then known) in the

Hindu College, Tinnevelly. Illness accounted for the loss of one year, and he took

his F.A. Examination in 1909 coming out very high in it as was expected. He did

his B.A. with Mathematics as his optional subject in the Presidency College,

Madras and joined the St. Joseph’s College, Trichinopoly as Tutor in 1912. During

the time he was Tutor, he worked for his M.A. in English Literature and took the

degree in 1914, with Francis Thompson as the subject of his thesis, the M.A.

being in those days taken with a thesis together with a number of papers. Soon

after, he joined the Hindu College Tinnevelly, as Lecturer, and we were colleagues

* Published in the M.D.T. Hindu College Annual, Tirunelveli

13


in the College from 1914 to 1918, years in which we took part in an educational

experiment on the lines of the Fergusson College, Poona. The experiment came

to an untimely, though not unexpected, end. After a year of teaching in

Pachayappa’s College, Madras, he joined the National College, Trichinopoly at its

start as Senior Lecturer in English in 1919. In 1921 he was made Principal of the

College and found his life-work which lasted for twenty-six years till his retirement

on 2 Jan., 1947. He was made life-member of the Managing Committee of the

College and of the Governing Council after his retirement, in recognition of his

signal services to the College.

Sri. K.P. Yagnesvara Sarma M.A., who was one of us on the Staff of the

Hindu College, never sought employment after the fiasco of 1918, and he has

devoted himself entirely to the country’s work as an ardent nationalist and

congressman. Barring him, only Saranathan kept up right to the end the spirit of

self-sacrifice which impelled us at the start of our careers. He remained a bachelor

on purpose, had few family ties, and found in the National College a tie tenderer

and stronger than that of the family. A friend has sent me a calculation showing

that in terms of cash his contribution to that college ranges well over Rs.75,000;

he helped deserving students, cut his pay to half for many years, and bequeathed

to the College all he could call his own. His successor in office, Sri.A.Rama Aiyar,

said in his Report for 1945-’46 : “Sri. V. Saranathan has just retired after a truly

unique Principalship in this College of nearly 26 years, a period almost coextensive

with the life of the College. It is no exaggeration to state that the College, as it is

to-day, has been the creation of Sri. Saranathan, and it bears on every feature

of it the impress of his strong personality.”

That personality, however, was encased in a somewhat sub-normal frame.

A crippling physical ailment in early life not only tests the character but develops

and in some measure changes it. It may embitter a man, or make him not

unwillingly parasitic; it may lead to resignation and seclusion. Saranathan did not

14


allow any of these disasters to overtake him; he developed a strong will to fight

down his disability and an almost fierce determination to live to the limits of his

physical capacity, and at times even essay tasks beyond it. His decision not to

marry reached deliberately against the persuasion of friends and the advice of

medical men, and a certain fiery impetuosity in thought and utterance were the

only marks of his physical condition for the best part of his life; in the last years,

however, he did retire more into himself, talked much less than before even in

intimate company, and shunned publicity, but so far as I know he never slackened

his hold on the basic values of life. His last illness was brought on by his

characteristic desire not to avail himself in any considerable measure of personal

facilities which his friends were always ready to provide him.

Saranathan was a born educationalist. A keen mind, a high moral purpose,

eloquent speech –– what more should the most ambitious teacher need? He

was the darling of generations of students. He remembered them all and all

about them, their relations and friends, even their peccadilloes. Wherever he

met them, he stopped to exchange greetings followed by a few pointed questions

relating to the interval since their last meeting. I have often been charged by my

old pupils and charged rightly, with having forgotten them; such a charge could

never be made against Saranathan. Our friend K.P.Yagnesvara Sarma I remember,

once said of him: ‘He has a woman’s memory!’ He was, I have been told many

a time by those who know at first hand, a great teacher of Shakespeare and

English poetry.

He once visited the Annamalai University when the Rt. Hon’ble Srinivasa

Sastri was its Vice-Chancellor, to deliver an address on ‘The religion of the literary

man.’ Welcoming Saranathan on that occasion, the Rt. Hon’ble Sastri said : “In

welcoming Prof. Saranatha Iyengar, I feel much as I felt when I welcomed Babu

Rajendra Prasad. I welcomed Babu Rajendra Prasad as a personal friend and as

a man of irreproachable character. His politics and mine differ widely _ but that

15


matters very little to me. I know him well. I know him to be a good man and

true; and when he comes anywhere near Annamalainagar it is a matter of pride

to me to welcome him and present him to you as a man to admire and to

follow.

“Very much the same is my feeling to-day. Principal Saranathan never forgot

to remind me that he disagreed from me totally. I say to him: ‘You may differ as

much as you like in politics ; but we are friends all the same’. I am glad to say

that till this moment –– nobody can predict for the next day –– he has cordially

reciprocated that view and that attitude. Prof. Saranatha Iyengar is a good man

and true. I wish his politics were better. Whenever I see him, whenever I think of

him, I am reminded of a great man in Calcutta whom he resembles very much.

I will not mention his name. Let it be an exercise to you in guessing. He is a keen

scientist; also, like Prof. Saranatha Iyengar, a man employed for many years ––

nearly the whole of his working life ––in education. He is a lean, scraggy man but

he is greatly beloved by his students. I should say he is worshipped by them. The

secret is that he loves them beyond everything else. Though for a long time he

drew a fat salary, he took to himself something like Rs.20 or Rs.30 a month and

no more. All the rest he put aside for the benefit of the poor students whom he

loved as his own children. For their sake he remained a bachelor. After his

retirement, he has given his services to the nation. He goes about clad humbly,

taking very little to himself and doing service which would be scorned by most

people. He is a warm-hearted, enthusiastic patriot.

“All these good and great qualities are also to be found in our distinguished

guest. Principal Saranathan is a man whom you might well take as an example.

It is not easy to be like him; but it is quite easy to appreciate him and easy to

admire him; and these are sure steps to loving him in the end and trying to be

like him.”

Not only in the College and by his influence on the students who came

under his care did Saranathan mould the education of our youth but he took an

16


abiding interest in the general problems of education and in improving the position

of teachers in society. He was Chairman of the Reception Committee in one

Provincial Education Conference and President in another. He was a member of

the Senate and Academic Council of the University of Madras ex-officio and a

member of the Syndicate from 1930 to 1936. To his work on the University

bodies, Dr. Sir. A. Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar, Vice-Chancellor of the University,

paid the following tribute on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee of the College,

a little after Saranathan’s retirement, on Feb.16, 1947 : “I have had the great

privilege of working with Principal Saranathan in the Syndicate of the University

of Madras for many years. This is not the time or the place to recapitulate what

he did when he was there. Suffice it to say, as every one in Trichinopoly will

realize, he was a force to contend with _ working sometimes in your favour and

at all times with a straightness and directness of dealing for which he has come

to be appreciated. I do not mind confessing to you that he and I have had many

duels on the floor of the Syndicate. He has been a soldier all his life. He ably

championed the cause on which he had set his heart and always impressed us

by the affable manner in which he continued his relations even with those who

disagreed with him. There was no one more pleasant to work with, no one who

forgot these little arguments more completely as soon as the meetings were

over. I can say without in any way meaning to praise or to flatter him that we

greatly appreciated his contributions on the Syndicate, on the Academic Council

and on the Senate of the University of Madras.”

For a man of his literary equipment not altogether devoid of literary ambition,

Saranathan did not write much. He composed sonnets and prose poems in his

early days and published the ‘First Sheaves.’ But to my knowledge, it was not

followed up, even in private. An ardent nationalist, he aimed at making Tamil an

adequate medium of modern thought. His and and his

articles in periodicals are fair specimens of his workmanship and style.

Such was Saranathan, ‘a good man and true’, lovable in every way, one of

the really great teachers of the South.

17


(The following contribution is by Sri P.N. Ramasubramanian, M.B.B.S.,

and is written in the form of a letter to

Sri M.S. Venkataraman, Secretary to the Editorial Board.

Ed.)

SUCHARITA

TALLAKULAM : MADURA

Pongal Day 1949.

My Dear Venkataraman,

Today is Pongal Day; you have asked me to write about Saranathan. Nothing

therefore, could be more appropriate than to begin with what he wrote to me

–– in verse –– quite twenty years ago, on the 16th of January 1928, in reply to

my Pongal Greetings to him printed on palm-leaf,

“Thy sweet Pongal greetings come,

O Ramasubrahmanyam,

On leaf of palm engraven, ––

No unpatriotic craven

Thou, imitative! –– yet

Could’ st thou, bright friend, forget

Our own sweet speech adorning

Memory of corn feast and morning

Of many months of bridal,

And golden girls’ soft festival?”

To me who had known him, and known him intimately for the past forty

years, to write about him is no easy task. There is an elusive something in such

long and close companionship that cannot be got on paper. Can one get the

rose’s sweetness by writing poetry on it or the Sun’s brilliance by a high-flown

18


rhapsody about it? And YOU know what his passing has meant to me. Naturally

therefore, whatever I get on to writing must be sketchy and disjointed, and

may not come up to your expectations of what should go into a commemoration

volume. I offer my apologies.

I first met Saranathan in 1907 and from thence onwards my elder brother

and I have looked upon him as yet another brother to us and to my mother he

was at all times the .

A few years later, he and I became room-mates in the Victoria Hostel at

Chepauk. You all know his later reputation as one of the best –– if not the best

–– of Shakespearean exponents in our country. I WAS HIS FIRST STUDENT! Or

was it his successful experiment on me that revealed to him his own latent

powers? He was going up for his M.A. examination and I for my Inter. The

evening previous to my Shakespeare paper he put me through my paces so

that that couple-of-hours’ coaching did far more for me than all the year at the

galleries of the auld College. But then, I was one amongst the back-benchers,

and you know what that means! - on the mat before the Principal every few

days etc.

Then he moved on to Tinnevelly and was one of the Great Five who blazed

a new trail in the firmament of Collegiate education in our distraught land, very

much so as it then was. This gave me frequent opportunities of getting to know

him even closer as, besides, my father was the Secretary of the Hindu College

Board at the time. Incidentally he was the first to share my joy with me when a

family servant brought in a message conveying the news of my success at my

final M.B. exam., as we were strolling on the sands of Thamraparni on a lovely

sunset evening.

He strayed into Trichi and I found myself properly moored in Madura. And

though a hundred miles separated us, we forgathered frequently, and I looked

19


forward to every midsummer when he used to spend a few weeks with me at

Kodi. When the mood was on him he used to go out on long lonely walks with a

volume of Shakepeare again for sole company and he used to tell me what a

solace it gave him from his preoccupations in Trichi.

Of his qualities of head, I need not labour the obvious. He passed every

examination first in the Presidency, scoring record marks often times: but unlike

most first classes, was never a spent force. He seemed to, and did indeed, have

plenty more in him, in reserve. To the last, which unhappily, came suddenly,

unexpectedly too soon, he gave proof of vigorous mental powers, incisive thought

and trenchant expression.

Of the qualities of his heart, my father who was his first doctor, used to tell

me in my medical infancy, that he had an enlarged heart. My father, unfortunately,

did not live to see that what he meant pathologically, eventually proved to be

too true in an entirely different sense, both emotionally and psychologically. For,

Saranathan had a big, very big heart indeed. Of all the DATHAS I have come

across or known, he was the most unassuming and unostentatious, and would

give his shirt off his back, if he had nothing else to give; but give be must. Often

have I seen him look into his for the nonce empty purse or table drawer, and

sigh at his inability to give. He would pat the unlucky indigent kindly on the back

and ask him to come to him early in the next month.

He used to refer to himself as the ‘sick man of Tiruchirapalli _ a broken bird,

one requiring a lot of rest. But any sick bed could always rely on him to nurse or

console the invalid as the case may be.

To me, in particular in my troubles, he was a supreme guide, philosopher

and need I add, friend. He grieved with me in my sorrow and taught me how

tears-- “weeping into one’s pillow” --brought comfort in the end “and courage

to be stronger than circumstance”. I recall with pride his addressing me as his

20


“oldest and dearest friend”, and his words of advice to me in those sorrowful

days of mine were _ “we have to dig up from within”, “cut your losses and be

stouth - earted”, “put some steel into your heart”, “a little religion will do both of

us good”.

Equally so he rejoiced in my happiness. When I gave him one of the happiest

tidings about myself, he wired back : “Yours the best news I have had from any

one for many a day”.

After his serious illness in 1942 here at Sucharita, he wrote from Mysore

where he was convalescing, “the supreme feeling is one of gratitude”, “

”. And was I

not amply repaid when on my escorting him back to HIS College, he told the

boys that crowded in to have darsan of their beloved Principal, that I was his

saviour etc., and did they not give me too a lusty ‘JAI’?

He was a wonderful letter-writter, although he once wrote to me : “I never

did write letters so charming as yours.” I have happily preserved quite a number

of his letters to me, and in my view, they are on a par with Lamb’s in their

tenderness and pathos : the comparison is not fanciful either, I think, for, were

they not both lonely and hungered for affection?

Of the sadly regrettable incident which kept him out of College for a few

months, he exclaimed : “I stand amid the dust of mounded years” and when he

came back to harness, he asked himself “if it was not a trap, but one set by

myself”. And from the soreness of his aching heart he wrote to me of my work

in the Madura College, “but don’t get on to losing your heart to anything, ––

even good works.”

Soon after his retirement, he wrote : “Old animosities and pettiness will

now rest altogether. I have some satisfaction in all this, no doubt; but I have to

build a new life round my very early aspirations. I have the zest for study and

thought. I have no kind of regret that I was not asked to go on a little more

time” as he felt “a growing need to be alone”.

21


A few days later he wrote : “I always think of the soldier’s life; he has to be

at his duty till he drops down in the campaign”; and his last letter to me written

just a few days before he left us was so disjointed, he must have read it over,

for he added a postscript: “The emptiness of this letter is a hint of my being so

thoroughly exhausted mentally.”

True to his –– was it not –– premonition, he passed away soon after he was

relieved of his command, going away on his own to his death in Bangalore, not

unlike the lone bull-elephant discarded by the herd.

Saranathan my friend is gone, leaving behind memories and a trail of glory

–– a fine work unstintingly done in the shape of the National College, for who is

there that doubts that it is his child? I am confident that his hovering spirit will

rejoice in the sure belief that it is fulfilling itself through the hearts of the myriads

of his adoring students.

22


Principal V. SARANATHAN - AN IMPRESSIONISTSKETCH

By DEWAN BAHADUR K.S.RAMASWAMI SASTRI, B.A., B.L.,

Retired District Judge

(That is true action which does not fetter the soul. That is true knowledge

which leads to salvation - All other action is but a burden and all other knowledge

is but mechanical dexterity.)

I

The above motto was one very dear to the heart of Principal V.Saranathan

and was often upon his lips. He lived in the light of the great idea contained in

that verse and turned to it often for guidance whenever he felt that his way was

not clear. He believed in soul-force (Athma Shakti) and had it as his birthright

and developed it resolutely and without pause. He felt that whatever one felt or

spoke or did, must help, and never hinder the growth of such soul-force. That

was why he felt drawn to the life and gospel of Mahatma Gandhi all through his

life and why he sought to comprehend well and express with vigour the Gandhian

way in education as well as in life.

II

I came to know him forty years ago when as a very young man he came

to serve in the Hindu College in Tinnevelly along with his friends and compeers -

Professor K.A.Nilakanta Sastri, Mr. K.C.Veeraraghavan, Mr.N.Sankaran, and

Mr.K.P.Yegneswara Sarma. They desired to serve the College in the spirit in which

Mr.Gokhale and others served the Fergusson College, Poona. I was at that time

the Principal District Munsiff at Tinnevelly and was intimately associated with

them. My father, the late Professor K. Sundararama Iyer, was the Principal of the

23


College in 1909 and was succeeded in the Principalship by Mr. I. Srinivasa Iyer.

Mr. I. Srinivasa Iyer and the abovesaid persons formed a brilliant team and

raised the prestige of the College and the level of the cultural life at Tinnevelly. It

was given to me to be one of their intimate friends and to partake in diverse

cultural activities along with them. Each was brilliant in his own way.

Mr.Saranathan’s special domain was English literature. I found that he was not

only a great scholar but was a genuine poet as well. I was personally very fond

of original poetry in English and could and did appreciate very highly the poetic

achievement of Mr.Saranathan. I hope that all his poems and prose works will be

collected and published soon. He felt and said often that he got extended over

many efforts _ pedagogic and literary _ and was unable to concentrate his

genius fully upon specific and important subjects and produce many original

works of outstanding value and merit. In his Letter to a Young Man published in

Kaveri in Sarvajith, Adi, he says: “

”

III

Principal Saranathan was an equally brilliant writer and speaker of English

prose. I have read many of his contributions and heard many of his speeches in

the Madras University bodies and elsewhere. His English prose style had a fine

literary flavour and showed not only a wide and deep scholarship but a sense of

the picturesque in style. He had also a quaint and charming and innate humour

of his own which enhanced the literary appeal of his speeches and his writings.

He had also a fine debating skill and a rare power of repartee. His calmness and

composure even under circumstances which would irritate and discompose

ordinary men gave him a rare advantage over those who differed from him and

criticised his views sharply and adversely.

24


IV

It was a piece of rare good fortune for India, and also for Principal Saranathan

that his lot was cast in the formative years when India was slowly and strenuously

preparing to achieve the dearest dream of her life, viz the reattainment of her

independence. Principal Saranathan eventually took up the Principalship of the

National College at Trichinopoly. It was given to my noble father and to my

humble self to do our bit in the growth of that remarkable educational institution

which had been founded by the late Mr.Sesha Iyengar and Mr.Sundaresa Sastrigal

who is yet happily alive. Under Principal Saranathan’s fostering care, the institution

which blossomed from a High School into a great College became not only a

seat of modern learning but also a centre of Hindu culture and a seed-bed of

Indian nationalism. Though he has now gone away from us, it was given to him

to train a generation of students in combining ancient culture with modern learning

and flaming patriotism and to live long enough to see what he passionately

longed to see, viz. the attainment of independence by India. His life was one

continuous sacrifice at the altar of India’s reawakened self-knowledge and

reattained independence and he crowned it by a crowning act of self-dedication

by leaving his entire fortune to the National College. He had no family of his own

but the whole of India was his family and he lived for it and for it alone.

V

In the later years of his life he became an enthusiastic supporter of Tamil

and acquired considerable skill in writing and speaking in Tamil. I shall give only

one example here. He said in an essay on Mahatma Gandhi : “

” (Kaveri, Sarvajith-

Masi). He said again and again that our primary loyalty is to our own regional

25


language and that we must study with devotion Sanskrit and Tamil language and

literature. He condemned in strong terms the neglect of our regional language

by our youth and our inability to express ourselves naturally and effectively in

our mother tongue. “

” (Letter

to a Young Man _ published in Kaveri, Sarvajith, Ani) “

” (Letter to a

Young Man _ published in Kaveri, Sarvajith, Adi)

VI

As Principal Saranathan’s experience of life broadened and deepened, he

was pained by the poverty of India and desired passionately to increase the

habits of productivity and thrift among the Indian people and to raise their

standards of living. He studied the world conditions in capitalistic and communistic

countries and finally stood up for the Gandhian way of life and held that we must

have balanced agriculture and industry and that we must steer our way skilfully

between the Scylla of Capitalism and the Charybdis of Communism and adopt

the way of Evolutionary Democratic State Socialism and use the Indian Democratic

Federal State to achieve economic justice and equity in India, “

” (Kaveri, Vyaya-Panguni)

26


VII

Principal Saranathan was in favour of social reform in some matters, but at

the same time he had a deep faith in Hindu religion and culture. In a Letter to a

Young Man published in Kaveri (Sarvajith, Vygasi), he says about his piety in his

youth : “

” In his Letter to a Young Man published in Kaveri (Sarvajith, Adi) he

gives sound advice to Brahmin youths in regard to their future life.

“

”

VIII

Principal Saranathan was a true patriot to the core of his being. He pined

and passioned for the attainment of independence by India. He felt jubilant and

overjoyed as he lived long enough to see the dawn of India’s independence. In

another part of the Letter above referred to he says, “

” Nay, he goes so far as to advise the young man

to fight for his country’s independence and surrender all that he holds dear for

the sake of the country’s freedom. “

27


”

Such was Principal Saranathan and such were his ideals and his services. He

was a scholar and books were the very breath of his life. And yet he felt the call

of his motherland and yearned to do his best to see her free and in the forefront

of the nations and that was why he was not content to be an educationist,

living isolated in his palace of culture, but became a social servant and a fervent

patriot. I can best sum him up by saying in Shakespeare’s words :

“ His life was gentle, and the elements

So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world “This was a man !”

28


MEMORIES OF SARANATHANBy

S. RANGANATHAN, O.B.E., I.C.S.,

(Member, Board of Revenue, Government of Madras)

I met Saranathan in the Victoria Hostel, Triplicane, 37 years ago. He had

just passed the B.A. Examination in a blaze of glory, with many ‘Firsts’. He

stayed on in the hostel, reading for the M.A. Degree in English Literature, in

iteself, a merit. He spoke with assurance. He was not muscular and not feeble, either.

I met Saranathan again, some years later, travelling to Ootacamund. He

was then working in Tinnevelly. His voice still bespoke confidence in himself. He

viewed the world with an apprising eye. The influence of Aldous Huxley and D.H.

Lawrence could be felt as an undercurrent.

Between 1930 and 1932 I was in Trichinopoly. This was the period when I

met him a good deal. To begin with, he was cold, suspecting “patronage”. His

College was picketed; but he did not want the arm of Authority to push the

picketers away. He thawed quickly, however. We found some common interests.

As my stay in Trichinopoly was ending, I thought that he was beginning to look

inwards. He had become a chronic invalid and looked upon himself as a confirmed

bachelor.

After I left Trichy, till he passed away, was the time when I knew him best.

The old assurance and confidence had given room to the ‘hesitation’ of a seeker.

He spoke less; he was often silent. His love of good literature, however, was

undiminished. He had added Tamil to his intellectual “loves”.

This is the picture that I have in my mind of Saranathan. From the start to

the finish, there was one mark which distinguished him from his fellows. His

indignation flamed when a wrong was done in his presence. It did not slumber at

any time.

29


REMINISCENCESBy

A.V. RAMALINGAAYYAR, B.A., B.C.E.,

(Retired Chief Engineer, P.W.D., Madras)

I knew Principal Saranathan from the days he joined the Hindu College,

Tinnevelly as Lecturer in English. His kind and affable temperament, his forthright

outspokenness, his naive simplicity and genuine enthusiasm endeared him to all

who came into contact with him. His hospitality was ever spontaneous and

disinterested; and he would spare no inconvenience to himself to entertain his

friends.

His health was poor and his heart was weak. Whenever I advised him not

to overstrain himself, he used to say that having lost his aged mother, he had no

deserving dependants to look after and therefore there was no need to be

overcareful of his health, or be afraid of death. In fact it was a wonder to him

how he had lived so long, in spite of his doctors’ warnings.

Just before his ill-fated trip to Bangalore, he made his customary visit to

me _ he had never missed seeing me whenever he came to Madras, and

demanding a cup of sweet buttermilk from my wife, _ and I asked him about his

financial position. His reply was characteristic of him. He said he was not worried

about his future. A few articles he would contribute to the papers and the interest

on his life savings would fairly see him through; and he would try to avoid

making inroads on his capital which he wished to bequeath to the institution he

had fostered and served.

30


MEMORIESBy

THE REV. A.J. BOYD, M.A., D.D.,

(Principal, Madras Christian College)

My acquaintance with V. Saranathan over quite a long period of years has

left me with pleasant memories of a vivid and eager personality. I think I first

met him in the Board of Studies in English, in which we were colleagues for many

years, and in which he could always be depended on to provoke a lively discussion,

and play a lively part in it himself. At a later stage, we were colleagues on the

Syndicate, where again he was a stormy petrel, but a very likeable one. Of the

memorable obiter dicta which he produced in great plenty, I remember one. “If

he’s a D.D., you can be sure he’s too old for any useful work.” I had not then

come under that condemnation, but Saranathan’s words recurred to my mind

years after, when I was added to the list of the exceedingly aged.

Nobody who knew Mr. Saranathan could doubt his devotion to education

or his love of literature. And he was a most engaging companion. When he was

in the mood, and that was nearly always, he could be a very provocative person;

but he had a way of capturing one’s affections, and keeping them. I think the

secret was his genuine devotion to the intellectual quest, and the youthful

enthusiasm which he unfailingly brought to everything that interested him.

31


A TRIBUTEBy

Prof. K. SWAMINATHAN, B.A., (OXON.)

(Principal, Government Muhammadan College)

Love is both blind and dumb. I saw no fault in Saranathan and find no words

with which to praise him in public.

In passing the model of the statue of the late Dr.V.Swaminatha Ayyar, his

friends could never agree among themselves, because each knew or remembered

(and each demanded in the model) only some aspects of this many-sided

personality at some stage of his great career. Of Shakespeare too it has been

well said that he had too many styles to have a style. If these giants were like

the elephant in the story of the six wise men of Hindustan, Saranathan was even

more elusive. He was a flame, a stream, a draught, a phenomenon, a process;

he was not (like so many of us) a vegetable or an institution. A perpetual

succession of flights and flashes, of outbursts and withdrawals, of likes and

dislikes, Saranathan had too many personalities to have an identity.

But at the heart of all this endless agitation that he felt and caused in

others, there was a deep, steady, central attachment to our national culture and

an eager desire to be consumed in its service. It is now for the National College

to decide and declare whether his passionate sacrifice was only the crackling of

thorns in a pot or the lighting of a torch that will burn brightly and warm and

guide our young men for ages to come.

32


REMINISCENCESBy

S.K. SUBRAMANIA IYER, M.A., L.T.,

(Retired Principal, Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam)

In responding to the request of the Secretary to the Principal Saranathan

Memorial Volume Committee, I am glad I have been afforded an opportunity to

pay my tribute of regard and esteem with which the late Professor was held by

his students and friends.

My personal contact with Mr.Saranathan began when he accepted my

invitation to deliver the valedictory address of the Residential Palace Literary

Union, Ernakulam as far as back as 1928 and stayed with me as my guest for

two days. It was at his instance I enlisted myself as a member of the College

Council so that I might be of service to my Alma Mater. My acquaintance ripened

into friendship after my retirement from Cochin service early in 1931 when my

trips to Trichy side were more frequent and when on these occasions we discussed

at length educational problems in general and the expansion of the National

College in particular. During these occasions I always found him very receptive

and ready to work out the avenues of expansion. In doing so he used to work

out the schemes in all their details to make the committee understand fully the

implications thereof. His tenure of office as a member of the Syndicate, Madras

University for two consecutive periods was a great help to him in anticipating the

needs of the university and the method of approach to the university body. It

was gratifying to note that the College activities expanded as outlined in our

talk, and that the college grew from strength to strength, more than doubling in

numerical strength during the period.

33


During the long period of his Principalship, which extended to nearly a quarter

of a century - an opportunity rarely given to educationists - he consecrated the

best part of his life to the service of the college; and when occasion needed, he

was not only not found wanting but he led his colleagues to agree to a self-

imposed cut in the salaries, and under his lead they all worked enthusiastically

for the betterment of the institution for a number of years, content with the

bare maintenance allowance they were able to get. It speaks volumes not only

of the leadership of Mr. Saranathan but also of the goodness of his colleagues.

Such team work as was noticed in this college was a rare phenomenon in the

educational field. The interests of his colleagues were quite safe in his hands.

Even in his best days he used to forego part of his salary towards giving

scholarships to deserving students. Besides, he was entrusted with the award

of Poona Natesa Ayyar’s scholarships of the value of over Rs.1,000 per annum,

and when I had an occasion to go through the papers, I found that, during the

whole period extending over ten years and more, his recommendations were

accepted in toto by Natesa Ayyar, who was greatly impressed with his keen

sense of justice and fairplay. Mr. Natesa Ayyar had in him unbounded confidence

which led him to entrust the management of the Electrical Wiremen’s Course to

Mr. Saranathan and be guided by him completely in all such matters. This would

certainly account for his being appointed as one of the Trustees of Natesa Ayyar’s

Charities in his will.

He was a nationalist to the core and his talks on national topics were

inspiring, and as such, nationalist aspirations among students found a good

sympathiser in him. But he knew the mass student mentality so well that he

would apply the brake when it came to the breaking point. I found to my great

surprise and satisfaction that the disciplinary action resorted to by him as Principal

was submitted to by the students, when such action would have aroused a

volume of protest in other institutions. It was all due to the personal influence

and the transparent sincerity of Mr. Saranathan.

34


My movements with him became more intimate during the last few years

of his life when his relations with some members of the committee became

rather strained. Even in those days, I knew he felt very much for the college and

his love for the college was purely impersonal, and I for one was sorry for the

breach. It seemed to me that in the best interests of the institution which he

had learnt to love and which he had so much at heart he should continue to be

at the helm of affairs to take such steps as might be necessary for the betterment

of the college. We are glad that he acceded to the wishes of his friends who

were anxious that the breach should not be widened, and he preferred to stay

away from the meetings of the committee, while at the same time he used to

put forth strongly his views on paper for the enlightenment of the members.

There were no doubt friends who held a different opinion and would not

spare him for his absence from meetings. Still it should be conceded that he

followed the better of the two courses which was found to be conducive to the

smooth working and growth of the institution and which enabled him to retire

honourably from the institution with the best wishes of all concerned.

I am quite certain that his name will for long be remembered and handed

down to posterity for his selfless and self-sacrificing nature, his strenuous

endeavours for the improvement and expansion of the college, his ardour for

true nationalism, his cosmopolitan outlook and his feeling for the oppressed and

depressed classes, his simple living and high thinking and the bold stand he took

to safeguard the rights, interests and privileges of the teachers as a class during

his whole career.

35


SOME RECOLLECTIONSBy

S. KRISHNASWAMY

(Son of late Sri. G. Sesha Iyengar, Founder)

MEMORIES are said to be short but memories of my close and intimate

contact with the late Saranathan who covered me by his talents, his ideals and

above all by his childlike simplicity can never be short or fade. It is impossible to

forget so long as life is within me the very pleasant and enlightening hours it was

my proud privilege to spend with him.

I was attracted to him when I heard his Presidential address at the Provincial

Educational Conference at Madura. Till that time I had developed a sort of prejudice

against him as I thought he was flouting society by his way of living. It was at

Madura that I found him to be a genuine nationalist and an ardent patriot. Our

contacts from that time were getting closer and our meetings oftener

Whenever he saw the enlargement of my father he claimed me to be his

brother. Towards the later part of his career in the College he discovered the true

spirit, the noble motives and the import of my father in founding the institution

amidst two powerful first grade Missionary Colleges. He held in high esteem his

memory and fully appreciated his disinterested service to the institution and

wanted as far as it lay in his power to fulfil the real purpose of the Founders in

starting the institution. It was in that spirit he dedicated his services to it.

During the troublous times he had with the management his visits to me

were more frequent. Often he felt like resigning his post. He did not, however,

wish to take any hasty step as he had faith in the beneficial influences of Time.

The College was near to his heart and he expected that Time would right the

wrong done to him.

36


To many he was a problem. He was more misunderstood than understood...

Many of us felt sorry that his term of office was not extended till the

celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of the institution.

He was well acquainted with almost all of his students and he carried with

him the love, affection and regard of the whole college. He had confidence in his

students and this helped him to manage them when any strike was brewing.

It would be presumption on my part to say anything about his greatness of

head and heart. He struck me from the outset as a genius with an intuition into

things.

Many were his plans to spend the retired period of his life. He did not expect

that his end was so near and he has left many of his dear friends in gloom and

sorrow by his sudden disappearance. The Hand of Death was really very cruel.

He has created a void hard to fill.

He was highly catholic, generous, very sympathetic and free in giving. He

feared God and no man. Many deserving students were helped by him. He had a

very tender heart and would not see another suffer.

He was far-sighted enough to associate his name permanently with the

College by collecting a sum of Rs.11,000 from his friends to perpetuate his

Principalship for over twenty-five years by the construction of a Hall to be named

Principal Saranathan Silver Jubilee Memorial Hall.

This great man has passed away leaving a rich legacy behind _ his all in life

-_ to the institution he dearly loved and served with devotion. This legacy will

remain as an unquestionable testimony to his abiding interest in the College. His

Principalship will ever be a memorable landmark in the history of the institution.

Though not in the physical body his spirit lives in the College to guide its

destined course. He lives in his benefactions and in the rich legacy he leaves

behind. Posterity will remember with gratitute the great work he had done and

the unique sacrifice he had made for a National institution in South India.

Long live his memory !

37


“PRINCIPAL MAMA”By

SARASWATHI GOWRISHANKAR, B.A., (Old Pupil)

I lean back in my comfortable chair _ in this quiet garden, all the glory of a

North Indian winter spread about me, gratefully drinking in the fragrance of

newly dug soil _ for the countryside, and we with it, is coming to life now after

the stifling stillness of a desert summer. The unsuspicious mynahs come up

close to my chair and one even peers inquisitively into the book on my lap-and

the thought suddenly comes into my mind, “How much Principal Mama would

have loved all this !”

This is a thought that comes frequently to my mind since he passed away

five months ago, for I think I shall always remember him _ Principal Mama (as

we called Principal Saranathan) _ for his capacity for enjoyment.

As I knew him his was an austere life, almost an ascetic’s and his ramshackle

little apartment that he so proudly named “Manomayi” was the very reverse of

luxurious. An ancient four-poster that served for both bed and couch, a few

rickety chairs, suit-cases crammed beyond capacity with old khadi clothes that

he could not bear to throw away (they had been with him so long !), an

earthernware surai and a lota, a time piece, _ and for the rest, books _ books in

profusion _ in glorious confusio - for he was prodigal of them. I have never

known anyone so careless of personal comfort, so disdainful of the little trivialities

we club together as “good house-keeping.”

Yet, he kept open house and friends gathered round him at all seasons and

times and not many, I daresay, wished never to come again. Nor do I think that

anyone going to him for advice, ever went away unprofited or disheartened: For

38


Mama loved people and made them welcome, and then clung to his numerous

contacts tenaciously. A compliment from one of these was like wine to him _

and improved with frequent recounting !

Perhaps his childhood _ which was not too happy _ had taught him the

useful lesson that happiness is a process of living rather than a destination, as

he put it himself. And this brand of happiness he assiduosly cultivated. He seemed

never to trouble himself long over what the future might bring, but waited for

things to happen to him. In the meantime he seemed to be saying to himself,

there is the morning pot of coffee to be brewed and enjoyed with the news

papers, and if there is a friend to share it, all the better.

Little things, coffee, for instance, he loved, and boasted he could make it

better than any woman; which is quite true _ he could! Or the newspaper; he

used to say that if, when he retired from service, he had an income of only 2 as,

a day, he would spend that on a copy of ‘The Hindu’ ! Or take again his almost

epicurean liking for food _ one hot iddali, on just one juicy jelabi, made with the

finest ghee and syrup, was his ideal of a good tea.

And soon these pass into idiosyncracies _ what is man without them! _ his

dislike and distrust of soap which, like Shaw, he preached so widely (but then,

unlike Shaw, he distrusted cold cream even more!); his habit, while writing a

letter, of always filling up his sheet to the end _ he was never happy unless he

succeeded in that object; or _ does anybody know why, having plastered his

unruly hair so painstakingly at home, he should have snatched the first opportunity

in college, to run his hands through and make the whole a ferocious angry

mass? _ his rare moments of quick rage, when the faithful Nayar dared to touch

any of the mounds of dust-covered volumes? Perhaps he had them piled in a

secret order of his own. Or his more frequent bursts of generosity, when he was

careless of how much money or clothes he gave away to the needy suppliant?

Yes, his moods changed very rapidly.

39


In many ways a modern, and perfectly in accord with my generation _ for

youthfulness was his peculiar attribute _ his roots were set firmly in the past.

Perhaps that was because he loved to recall old associations _ he had numerous

anecdotes to tell of people who are now only half forgotten names and his

boxes were filled with little things that were each a symbol, ties worn on such _

and _ such occasions, a topi used by Gandhiji once as his collection _ box, a ring

bought at the ensuing auction, even bits of paper scribbled over, with no meaning

for anyone except himself. And how greatly he loved to display these treasures

to a choice visitor.

Yet, his seer-like mind, heritage of generations of Sanscrit culture, was

above all pettiness. He used to say half seriously _ he would like to leave an

Upanishad after his name when he ceased to be; then, his characteristic sanity

re-asserting itself, “You know there are a hundred such. Why not just one more?”

Or discussing his absorbing hobby, politics: “The nation’s politics trouble

me.... But do I count?” and that, following his oft-repeated claim to be India’s

best politician! We chuckled to hear him say it. Perhaps he was; we cannot find

out now. Of his giving in, time and again, to “the subtle provocation of politics”

his numerous students can bear witness, but his fiery qualities stopped short of

violence. I think all violence seemed to him vulgar, even when he participated

with seeming gusto !

Sitting around and talking would give a solution to every problem, he used

to say; and, of course, his amazing power over words that illumined his writings

and his lectures, made him a good conversationalist too. He admitted he was

“an incessant talker who loved to talk of himself as much as anything else”; and

I wonder who enjoyed it more, the talker or his audience. I should imagine it

was an exhilarating experience for both.

40


He used to say that his ambition, on retirement, was to cherish his friends

and his “old favourites among the noble and the literary dead.” He had not time

enough for that. But I like to think of him _ in just such a quiet garden as mine,

“in the pose of Ranganatha, in God-like indolence and benevolence”; just as he

would have wished, immersed in a tattered volume of the poets, till the inquisitive

mynah flutters in and his wise, kindly eyes look up at the tiny intruder in amused

appraisal.

41


IN MEMORIAMBy

K. GURUSWAMY, B.A., L.T.,

(Old Boy)

Dead ? - and thou so young, though crowned with grey,

Though six and fifty summers have tripped it by

Scarce touching thy spirit’s ageless virility;

First Sheaves were all : autumn’s full harvest lay

Ungathered, and winter’s garnering denied for aye.

Peerless Professor! I ween thou here didst die

To commune with Shakespeare in those regions high,

And create again his world, great play by play.

Intrepid Thinker! With tongue inspired, free,

Thousands thou ledst on a gleaming quest,

Seeking some Vision, some spiritual Golden Fleece.....

The College, thy earthly Love, all thanks to thee,

Doth live, and, sure, will outlive Time; so rest,

O rare and restless spirit, rest in peace !

42

PART II

COLLECTED WRITINGSOF

PRINCIPAL SARANATHAN

V.S. IN HIS EARLY THIRTIES

1924


FOREWORD

In this Part of the Memorial Volume we present to the public the greater part of

the writings, in verse and in prose, in English and in Tamil, of Principal Saranathan.

The manuscripts of these writings are contained in a series of note - books

carefully preserved by him and also on many loose sheets of paper. We have

studied these manuscripts with diligence and omitted only those portions which

were found redundant or too ephemeral in interest to merit inclusion in a volume

of collected works. We can assure the reader that the best part of Saranathan’s

literary output is here.

And what a rich and varied crop it is ! To attempt anything like a literary

appraisal of the pieces brought together here would be an act of supererogation

on our part. We are, moreover, fully aware that we are not competent for a

task of this kind. But it may be of interest to the reader to be told a few things

that we have been able to discover for ourselves about the deployment over a

period of years of Saranathan’s literary powers. He seems to have been

particularly active in the writing of poetry between the years 1917 and 1920. A

slim volume of prose poems –– First Sheaves –– was published by him in 1918.

Then followed a fairly prolific output of verse in which lyrics take the pride of

place.

When one remembers that during this period Saranathan was a young man

in his twenties one is amazed at the versatility he displayed and the ease with

which his poetic temperament found expression even through a foreign medium.

The most diverse themes are handled by him with a deftness and a charm that

almost take one’s breath away. Paying his meed of praise to our immortal poet

Kalidasa, he sings :

He dreams, of a God’s forehead stilled

In penance for a world,

Whose waters roll upon him, filled

With peace from Heavens hurled,

43


Of vernal hills and Uma’s vow,

And streets of Alaka,

And clinging sweetness and the brow

Like day - break of Sakuntala.

How gracefully do these lines evoke in our minds memories of Kumarasambhava,

Meghaduta and Sakuntala!

Look again at the evocative power of the following lines in his poem, The

Word :

It rises from beds of transient weaving

And story - embroidered dream,

And breaking a Thought of the Soul upheaving,

Opens a cloud and a gleam ......................

Saranathan’s verse could also take on the hue of a lighter mood. We feel

the lilt and the spring of youth in these lines from A Pariah Girl :

I grew to be a maiden bold;

My mouth could fling a smile;

My body brewed a drink to hold

The headiest youth awhile.

And again, in the song of the maidens to Krishna :

Ab, we love thee

Who art like the Sea,

And we as the bee

Wander to thee

Who art a flower!

44


To a son of India the things of the spirit must always have a primacy denied

to every other factor of existence. In his Ode to Shakti or the Power of Nature,

he speaks of her universal sway :

Thou dost on every side fulfil

The burden of all earthly dower, ––

In bosom of maid, wild yet still,

In fruit and wine and human child,

And moonlight born of passions wild.

Witness, again, the delicacy of touch in the following lines on Woman :

And ever let the spiritual Rose

That on thee so magically grows

Warm her soft petals in the blaze

Where Aspiration rides thro’ maze

Of rock and flame and wind and cloud,

And thy Saviour’s face shines velvet - brow’d.

Enough samples have been given of the early poetry of Saranathan to

whet the reader’s appetite for more.

For many years after 1920, Saranathan does not seem to have continued

his poetic efforts. Probably the world of educational administration was too

much with him. The demands made upon his time and energy by the routine

duties of his office as Principal and also by his membership of the Syndicate of

the Madras University might have been too exacting to permit of his persevering

to pay homage to his muse.

From 1938 to 1942, the active phase was renewed in his career as a poet.

This time he did not attempt lyrical themes or experimenting with verse forms.

He seems to have concentrated on sonnets, most of them being political in

character. He became, increasingly, a bird with one note –– the political. His

45


sympathy for the under - dog and a keen realization that in the capitalistic world

this type failed often to receive a square deal swung him definitely to the left, as

his sonnets on Spain, Czechoslovakia and Russia clearly show. The sonnets

entitled “Workers of the World, Unite!” are in similar strain :

But men shall live, hand on the torch of life,

Still drink life’s waters from sage men sprung forth,

From Saviours born of endless agony,

Christs of the plough and smithy !

* * * *

The Prose Section of his writings does not need any elaborate introduction.

It consists largely of essays, addresses and broadcast talks on literary and

educational themes. The first piece in it ––on the Poetry of Francis Thompson –

– was the thesis he wrote in 1913 for his M.A. Degree. Special mention should

also be made of the series of essays on ‘Style in Poetry’, for their literary charm

and for the spirit of reverent love underlying their appreciation of some of the

great English poets. The following passage on Shelley may be taken as an

instance in point :

“In Shelley’s poetry, there is a vision of general loveliness which is, half, the

loveliness of his own spirit, and, half, that of the skiey worlds and shapes it

creates. This is why perhaps we find in Shelley not so constant an achievement

of whole and undying beauty of phrase as in Keats or Milton. There is a wealth

of absolutely original and full imagery, but it is all to use his own words ––

“beautiful as a wreck of Paradise”; it is unformed as his own thought, with an

Ariel - quality like himself. Shelley is perhaps the supreme instance of the lyrical

spirit, unclouded and wearing “no manacles of Space”, in whose rich lightning

career even metaphysical thought becomes charged with a fluid and quick life.

In his poetry, therefore, we hear the “Aeolian Harp”, and style is disembodied;

and we get shadow - gleams and forms less ‘real than living man’ though perhaps

‘nurslings of immortality’ ”.

46


One of the essays in the second sub-section –– The Problem of Popular

Culture in India –– drew forth from a distinguished scholar and Professor of

English in our Presidency the following tribute : “What a piece of prose have they

got out of you!” (It was an address in connection with the Library Movement.)

“It would make Pater green with envy. I never thought words could be so

charged with richness of meaning, with vibrancy of passion. Write more, you

gifted sloth”.

In the later years of his life, he became more and more the “elder statesman”

of the educational world, giving the benefit of his wisdom and experience to

gatherings of teachers and educational administrators. The Presidential Address

he delivered at the XXIV Provincial Educational Conference held at Madura in

1932, and the Welcome Address he gave as Chairman of the Reception

Committee to the XXV Provincial Educational Conference held at Tiruchirapalli in

1933, are printed almost in full in this volume.

Occasionally Saranathan seems to have made an attempt to maintain a

Diary. The results of this are reproduced under the caption, ‘Pages from his

Journal.’

* * * *

As the call of nationalism became more and more strident in the history of

our land, ardent patriots like Saranathan could hardly resist it. One result of this

change in mental climate was that he turned more and more to Tamil as the

vehicle for the expression of his ideas. Not that he loved English less, but that

he loved Tamil more.

A good number of the pieces collected in the Tamil Section were broadcast

from All India Radio, Tiruchirapalli, and one or two from Madras and Delhi. We

are publishing them with the kind permission of AIR, to whom we take this

opportunity of making our grateful acknowledgements.

47


A series of talks on the ingredients of a fully - rounded life, with the intriguing

title has already appeared in book form and is reprinted here.

We have no doubt that it will grip the attention of our readers. The late

Mahamahopadhyaya Dakshinatya Kalanidhi Dr. V. Swaminatha Iyer, acknowledging

receipt of a copy of this book, wrote in a letter to the author : “ ”

The essay on gives a synoptic survey of the

growth of our culture through the ages. Inaugurating the Educational Broadcasts

of AIR, Tiruchirapalli, Saranathan gave a talk on ‘’ which the reader can find

in these pages. Some autobiographical sketches contributed by him to the monthly

‘Cauveri’ and some left in an unfinished state also find a place here. We thank

the Proprietors of the ‘Cauveri’ for their kind permission to include in this Volume

the contributions that originally appeared in that periodical.

* * * *

We have a vivid impression on our mind of the trials and difficulties that

Saranathan encountered in his attempts to combine devotion to letters with the

strenuous life of an educational administrator. The way in which he overcame

these difficulties and managed to leave behind a sizable output of verse and

prose brings to our memory the lines of the poet :

Quench not

The holy fires within you; though temptations

Shower down upon you, clasp your armour on:

Fight well, and thou shalt see, after these wars,

Thy head wear sunbeams, and thy feet tread stars.

The Editor now makes his bow, wishing the reader “Good Reading!”

48


L Y R I C S

SIVA

Upon his head the shy moon gleams

Athwart his matted hair;

In restless fires close-woven, teems

That ashy-tinted lair

Of deep thoughts ravaging a world

Grown grey and mounded high,

Of power and peace then dawning, curled

In Smile of his forehead eye!

Ah that wild forehead flaming far

On many a city’s dome

And sin complete, enkindling war

In field, and sky, and home !

His fiery eye is Thought; His brow

Is bound with little arms

Of child-like faiths so brave. Ah, how

His Serpents wind alarms !

O Siva, Lord of the Flaming Eye,

Symbol of Thought’s Storm-Sky

And constellation of mystery !

My Soul would Thy banner fly !

49


SHAKTI

O thou imperishable Heart

Whose Sway is all a vernal grace !

O soft, divine, heroical part,

O Streaming Angel with no face !

Thy dream is in the laughing sea,

Thy smile doth spray up every tree,

We wake, we hear each morn how rings

Thy call on beast and man, while Skies fill deep thy wings !

From heaven to heaven thy flight is spread ;

Thou break’st the peace of childless skies,

Both star and cloud proclaim thy dread,

They rise, they sink before thine eyes;

Thou art still Woman, gentle, bright.

O Thou dost hold all god’s delight,

His sweet, ungathered, dreaming powers

Thy hand doth ope and softly close eternal bowers !

Mystical, yet a homely Power !


The burden of all earthy dower, _



And moonlight born of passions wild;

Still dost Thou heal, O Saviour fair,

Each flowering dream and beauty in Time’s eyes and hair.

By figure and by mystery,

We speak of Thee whose name is Life !

They love is near, Thy love is free,

Thy majesty of sounding strife !

50


Thy Children move in fierce alarms,

They love, they grow amidst thy harms.

Thou dost surround them in Thy light,

Imperious One, Who lay’st Thy children with Thy sight !

Still our delights are wrapt with Thee

In fold on fold of strong desire,

And the soft soul herself makes free

To pour with both hands streaming fire

An offering to Thy victory !

Our passion clings to Death and Thee !

We tend Thy steps and Thy red mirth

Flows on our foreheads from Thy fierce and shining Earth !

GOD

God moves amongst His magic vessels,

In a starless-green retreat;

The ground He treads, has eyes and cells

Of bright unhappy heat,

He moves, and stirs, and sits, and muses,

And wild desires escape ;

He knows not how his hand refuses

What sweet Compassion would shape.

He plays, and is a plaything still ;

His feet are clothed with light ;

His throne heaves sadly on a hill

Above the water’s might ;

For a great deep swells and o’erflows all round

Where He designing shines ;

His home is a boundless Purpose wound

Round Him, where He sometimes pines.

51


POEMS OF EARTH AND SKY

DEATH

The earth we tread is every step a grave ;

In silent grass or hollow glade or street

Of city bent with steps of men, we meet

Ever a sound of still surrender. Wave

On wave of sea doth bear desire of brave

Ungathered life which breaks on shore. On sweet

Heroic Freedom weeps a cloud, and seat

Of mighty kings in shadow lies. Yet gave

Death his delight, _ to flower and deed and rare

Endeavour of life, _ season high and charm

To live more fair in stillness. He in bare

Yet gracious majesty of spirit, calm,

Treads on adventure wide, forlorn, to snare

In love, a flower still trembling for alarm.

THE SPIRIT OF INDIA

INDIA - AN ODE

Argument

The Ode commencing with an address to the natural powers and sanctities of India and

invoking them in the present hour of decay and fear, proceeds to tell of the happy strength of

Ancient India as called up by memory; how it was broken; how the darkness of time and

variety of change of attainment and fall in the centuries, continued; how in the present time of

her world _ contact, her afflicted children should rise. The Ode concludes with an appeal to

help India to stand again as ‘before God’s eyes.’

52


I

Splendour of mountain - sunsets! And ye Streams,

That from cloud-summits heavy-wooded bear,

Ye bring in foam and flood old hermit-dreams,

And pageants of our Truth! And Stars that wear

Your Deity above us, ye rejoice,

Ye wield dear strength, and glowing armoury !

Ye hills have love, remembering Mercy’s Voice

That rose in Himalaya, when Victory

Became a flower in womb of Uma !

Ye winds that blow on Steeps of Vindhya,

O anchorites., in rage still pure,

And Rivers filled with gentle Awe from Breath

Divine, Ye bless our Faiths demure,

Whom Powers in sunsets deep and hill defend ‘gainst Death!

But no reviving airs on us yet fall,

Like winds and mountain-herbs of old, nor chanta

Funereal cease around us ! Ye appal

Ye slay us, Gods of ambrosial eyes and fame !

O flame-borne Prayer unto each soft Name !

O Truth so dark beset ! Lo in wild haunts

Thou singst alone and keepst thy wind-blown flame !

II

The melodies how softly they awaken !

And Meditation leads us gently round,

Where our Sweet Mother’s storied joys resound,

On song-ways and memorial stones forsaken !

Her Shadows shine where golden fruits allure,

53


Her play and sacred song in Beauty rise,

Her journeys bring home Truth’s white merchandise,

All fadeless faiths and loves in raiment pure !

The forest flowers at Rama’s feet,

From clinging stone doth rise and greet

Ahalya mild ! And Wisdom comes

That royal sages, silver-throned, inspires,

And brightlier dwells in hermits’ homes,

And brings them benediction high for proud desires !

And Man holds sway, companioned of the Gods,

Why heavenly maidens serve in courts of Kings,

And anchorites move with their shining emblem rods

And hermits’ wives lend guidance unto each star,

And Peace as War

‘Gainst her strong battlements flying breaks his wings,

While Vishnu dreams in silent seas afar..

III

Mid thunder of subterranean disease,

And multitude of names and rights and feuds,

Mid altar-smoke enfeebling fortitudes, -

Break all her terraces of might and peace !

And those auroral rites and fiery time,

And fruit of Kingdoms set on mountain snows,

And windward rapture of her cities’ chime, -

In shattered skies on flooding darkness, close !

Her codes, her creeds, her graceful arts,

Her arrows, poems, and cohorts

Of Learning’s lance, and fierce displays -

54


What Kapila and Patanjali wrought -

Scatter afar in violent ways !

Kings, Priests, cows, wives, and holy books are naught !

A natural wave as of a forest moving,

A gentle Gaze o’erflowing Man and Bird,

And pain and death and beauty softly proving,

The Buddha’s silver-footed Love ! Ah, slain !

Nor Sankara’s armoury avails again,

Nor fountain fires by princess-hands yet stirred,

Unsway offended stars that crush her plain !

IV

Stars roll, descend, and heavy-armed arrive,

‘ Tween Earth and Sky inalienably throng !

From fastness bending, _ hearts invaded long _

Deluge sweeps richly honey and the hive !

On changing plains the waters build and break

Thrones, wisdoms, pillars, fantasy and flowers

Of sympathy, elegiac stones, - now wake,

Now cease upon the view, becoming dim hours !

Stories of Kings’ delight and harm,

Of Beauty adventurous in alarm,

Imperial, round with clouds arrayed,

Sound along incantation of the Waves;

Nurjehan’s light; and Padmini’s braid

By tender hands unloosed which pure fire laves,

When dedicated live fly to the dwelling

Of the Sunrise ! Those unconquerable souls yet hear !

The flood hath passed to sound of stars revelling;

55


While towers and headlands, art and time remain !

But still are heard those tramplings on her plain,

Still bound with planetary travailings of one Fear,

Whirl hopes and renunciations, holy, slain !

V

O wild unceasing Terror of our days,

O Power of deep importunate skies and seas,

O Voices, what may your dread hour appease, _

Tears, pain or innocence of lonely ways,

Or calm unprofitable disdain of time,

And building of the minarets of Rhyme

And seeking the shadow-land of aim,

Where the Moon holds her silver life and clime !

The Sea has come from far to mingle,

And our world-streams and stones do tingle

With leavings of ancient floods and hills ;

Our Soul dissembles, our hands fail, we die,

O Brothers, uncompanioned Wills !

While stranger sails from western oceans lie

Sheltering our ills ! O Western suns inspire !

O clothe ye with soft healing and array.

These puissances ! Around the ancient fire,

We stood in kindred under oblivious skies,

And swept in early light the World ! Arise,

O gatherers of midnight fruit astray,

Children of India, wake, here are God’s Eyes !

56


RABINDRANATH TAGORE

When light in evening holds a tryst with Time

In deepening sky and far-adventuring Sea,

And men do raise their hearts and eyes in free

Yet ancient reverence lovely, for high aim

And passion moulding heaven bright, in rhyme

Of sunset hymns, then we of thy country

In thought behold thy deep austerity,

And tender-seeing truth, and valiance prime

‘ Gainst foes of land and right and blessedness

Of man, and thee whose Love is homely nurse

Of mortal ills, yet silent crowned a star

Awake and glad, and thy sweet shining verse

In fantasy like morning’s sacredness,

Whose wonder strikes, as moonlight on Dawn’s car.

GANDHI

I

Come, blessed voice, from the country of No Fear,

Come, with clear hope and conquering gentleness !

Pronounce, in stormy, rushing untruth’s stress,

The soul’s still perfect mastery to ear

Of Man, lost, wild, his life’s springs dry ! yet hear,

O world: “Ne’er Hunger’s Waters of wrath shall press

In surging fountains forth on heaven’s realm, mess

All that dear work of God and Man, besmear

Divinity of both.” His word doth fill

The hungry, waken the heart, the hand make strong

Of mild men welded in his fire, who till

57


The ground of undefeated hope, to gong

Of no slave-driver listen, but conscience, will,

And reason dewing o’er with mercy’s song.

10-4-39

II

Thy well of suffering shone upon by God,

Thy single hest, ‘ Ye pure, cast off all arms,

Yet stand ye at Thermopylae,’ thy forms,

Vows, courtesies to the Holiest, the rod

Thou wield’st gay untruth fears, yet kisses, - how awed

We stand at these (but how thy quaintness charms)

O Splendid watchman of the soul’s alarms !

How thou perpetually wak’st the human clod !

But how poor, weak, their faith who take thy name,

Who fain would walk behind thee to the tryst

Heroic love still bids us to, the same

Way that Siddhartha went, his feet sweet kissed

By kings and women, yea, by all poor game

In life’s drear forest where great serpents hissed.

16-4-39

III

The world will not obey aught but the brute,

Hitler or Mussolini, or worldling base, -

Chamberlain’s tradesman’s unction, precise phrase,

Hold England bound, her conscience all but mute -

But Gandhi the whirlwind rides, directs, the lute

And symphony of faiths attending, lays

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Him down among the lowliest in the hard ways,

Highroads of armies, of pity destitute.

The armies march about him, drunk with creeds,

Not loth to slay this new-born unity,

Our dream-tost, gentle race, made one, - that pleads,

“Tis ours to beat the swords of history

Still into ploughshares, make melodious deeds

To flower on Gandhi’s spinning-wheels that ply.”

19-4-39

IV

From agony to agony he goes,

Self-chosen, to explore how man may dare,

May through the valley of defeat upbear

Truth’s banner, while his peaceful heart still glows,

A fire of pity hungry to burn. How rose

The Flame? How fed? By holy things and fair,

Innocent hands at toil, and women’s prayer,

And a heavenly wind that silently inflows -

This, his Satyagraha! Not from the proud

Shall sacrificial gifts the altar crown,

Not from the gay, immodest, shiftless crowd

That lives, but thinks no thoughts which are its own,

But from poor men, birds shut up where the cloud

Now bursts, _ sweet Freedom with her showers poured down.

7-5-39

V

What have ye done to lift the mountainous cloud,

The centuries’ dread and chaos of your being,

Who woke the intellectual stars to seeing,

59


When the Upanishads took birth? Dream that proud

Dream still, but navigate truth’s streams, new, loud

With hundred engines of time’s prophesying,

While within you the lover-soul for fleeing

Urvasi waits not wilder’d, and heaven is bow’d,

O’er wisdom’s birth. We answer, “Hunger slays

These poor companions, countless minds once dear

To Beauty’s self and tenants of sun-lit days ;

Ourselves strain after her music with deaf ear ;

And wisdom, a collective farm, repays

No solitary ploughers in lands of fear.”

1941

VI

But one man, Gandhi, ploughs, unsmitt’n with fear,

These six hundred thousand villages alone ;

Farmer and weaver, poet of one tone,

Diver for one embedded pearl, God’s tear,

At world’s heart, for man let blood with his own spear.

He ploughs for wisdom and two meals for one

For dwellers in the mud huts, turns to stone

His heart, to “plough the rock until it bear.”

And the end? Still he weaves his single web,

Waxes and wanes like yon persistent moon

Who yet communicates one candidness.

The poor behind him walk, ask for no boon

Save that his pilgrim smile a moment bless

Their gaze, while tides of old thought rise and ebb.

1941

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O C C A S I O N A L P I E C E S

ON THE CHATURTHI DAY

The Tiruchirapalli Rock

Pilgrims pass up the sun-burnt steps in fire

Of August’s light, when Air as element

Of hungry heat earth-borne seems fiercely bent

To scourge our bravery of devotion; lyre

And lamp and adoration and attire

Of loves all weak, and worldly commandment ;

While in dark kingdoms strives our sires’ lament !

Lofty shrine excellently reared ! Desire

Of stars in strange nights hovers o’er thy white

Immovable destiny, while all round hard

Untamed inflammable rock, lies old rite

Of passionate builders great, in wall and ward,

And fountain’s hoary steps - mid Time’s despite,

Unnatural twilight wars and emblems marred.

29-8-19

FROM THE MEGHADHUTA

Thy body in dark creepers; and thy glance in look

Of frightened deer ; and in the moon, thy countenance ;

Thy hair, on peacock’s heads in feathery burden shook ;

And in the slender wave of streams, thy dalliance

61


Of brows ; these, these in several chance oft whiles I find !

Ah, where, sole image thine (to jealousy inclined)?

While as with coloured stones I paint thee on the rock

As in love’s idle angry mood, and at thy feet

Me figure, fallen for sweet grace ; then in Fancy’s shock

The instant tears which there collect, my sight defeat,

And labour all, efface. Ah! cruel Fate suspends

What joy of love and union that hour’s fancy lends !

When scarce of dreams observed, still deeming thou art won,

Out in the air my arms I send in phantasy

Of a furious and fond embrace, then from many a one

Of those o’er woodlands ruling, Spirits beholding Me,

Fall natural tears so free, as pearl-drops whole and round,

On tender leaves, all open-my soul’s witness found !

How shall thrice-partitioned Night, of hours so lone and long,

Like to a moment wear away all shrunk, and Day,

Of every season, in his mode and change of wrong

Inflicted, softer grow and his fierce heat allay, _

Thus, O despairing-eyed, my heart by thriftless prayer,

Holds ever during pang and passion of despair!

62


IN MEMORIAM

THE LATE G. SESHA IYENGAR

“Ask not the world’s cold alms for Learning. Deep

Within, thy constant spirit shall find gold

To build a house yet made with hands. Uphold

What strife high sacrifice embalms ; let sleep

Forget not life’s one dream,” Thou saidst, “And keep,

Unspotted from the world, thyself.” So roll’d

Year on year hope fulfill’d! so grew thy bold

Intention, breath’d on stone and brick! Oh, weep

Not, brothers, now he goes with love yet strong

For us, his heirs, by homely, struggling might

Enrich’d; he plough’d alone, mid proud men’s wrong,

This hard earth, ours who teach, and sought no light

Save God’s; with simple hands he builded long,

With heart-beat tuneful in the starless night.

August, 1937

LINES TO MY OWN MEMORY

He lived in Thought awake, and knew the Voice

Of Immortality whose smile did fall

On flowing hair of his dark dream; and choice

Of fame, declined, for glamour of Death’s call.

14-4-1919

63


FIRST SHEAVES

INDRAJIT

A DRAMATIC POEM

Some Sketches

[INDRAJIT, son of Ravana, King of Lanka, is one of the finest of the heroic

characters in the Ramayana. Called Thunderer (Meghanada) at birth, he, as a

boy, took captive Indra, the Ruler of Heaven, and was thence known as Indrajit

(Conqueror of Indra). A magician and a warrior, he distinguishes himself in the

war in Lanka by striking the whole army of Rama lifeless with the Nagastra

(serpents) and later with the apparition of Maya Sita, a creation of his magic,

beheaded by him in the sight of Rama’s hosts. He makes preparations for a

great sacrifice at a place called Nikumbhila, by which he should be rendered

invisible and invincible in battle. His plans are betrayed to Rama by his uncle

Vibhishana, who is Rama’s ally; and the sacrifice is frustrated, and he is himself

killed in a long and furious combat with Lakshmana, Rama’s brother. So the

hope of Lanka dies, and Ravana fights his last battle and dies; and Lanka is

subdued by Rama

The writer conceives Indrajit as a poet, magician, warrior, a hero fired by

patriotism and the finest spirit of chivalry.]

1. Indrajit’s Address to the Earth

In the heart of the Earth is a lone bird singing the song of the life of flower

and rain.

In that garden of Night, the light of her wings doth tremble as the gleam of

a melting cloud.

64


Out of the depths of shadowed silences, comes a breath of the phantasy

that thrills the heart of that lonely bird.

Mother of mystery, whose dream is the birth of the laughing sea and the

sun-kissed slumberer in the glades of Death.

Her cry takes wing and fills the sky with a still song of agony, and her heart

grows cold in pale births dolorous at the death of her Love.

2. The Vanaras before Lanka

Behold! the foes are flying like sea-birds in the wrath of the wind : their

shoulders are falling as trees upturned, and crowned heads tumble as violent

stars.

In the path of the foemen is the might of their city fallen like Worlds thunder-

riven. In the hearts of the foemen is a burnt fire leaving desolation.

From the might of these arms are flying the blasts that rend their towers

and their hosts. From the arrows of the heroes are speeding the fates that seal

Ravana’s doom.

From the ranks of our hosts, the bright car of Victory rises with banners

unfurling Death. From the heart of the city rises a wail that answers the wail of

the Sea.

Behold this sea and this city ravished by our fury, opening their womb! And

the air is full of the horror that meets the flame of our valour in rage immortal

for that mortal queen.

Oh that miracle of woman ! treasure of Earth’s Heaven, heart of Rama

enshrined !

The light of her spirit doth flash on the waters of this strife and the soul of

the warrior takes wing enraptured and kisses the eyes of Destiny.

65


(Suddenly a golden form appears in the air)

Behold! the wonder of our hearts hath taken a body and beckoneth from

the sky, the golden dream of our nights doth hang in the air in luminous ecstasy.

Is it phantom or corporeal grace of the sunset sky or magic of wizard

winds in cloudland and fire?

Oh it is Sita, queen of our devotion, heart of Rama enshrined !

Ah what a mist rolls over her, soul of our valour, song of our agony !

Her hair weeps around her face and a fateful wind plays about her limbs,

and her eyes are large and full of dolour.

Her arms are stretched towards the sky impenetrable, and the flash of a

red sword grows vivid round her head.

(Enter Indrajit careering in the sky)

Indrajit

I have come from the woodlands of the sky and on the wilds of war I shine.

With fierce hands I seized the glory of the setting sun and fashioned a

golden form and from the locks of sleeping winds have I stolen the magic that

breathes on her limbs.

O! her eyes are sunset stars bathed in the glory of a dream, and her gaze

fades on the array of this warring world !

From the womb of my life, have I brought this shadow to shine: and from

the face of this trembling sky will I sweep this phantom and the daylight of these

valiant hearts.

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(Strikes off her head)

Ah, the agony of Rama’s army at seeing Sita die ! in their agony their

hearts will change and Rama’s valorous purpose dies.

At this hour will I fly to Nikumbhila and do sacrifice to the spirits that gave

me life and bear my fate in their watchless tread.

I will gather their tenderness and grow immortal in their love. They will arm

me, their warrior, and send me to battle warm with their passion and their

lightning.

3. Sulochana, Indrajit’s wife

(from her chamber overlooking the battle-field)

Oh Gatherer of midnight worlds! victorious over heaven,

Oh to feel thee in the warm world of my desire, and hold thee captive,

Thunderer, to the tune of my heart !

So will I gather thee to my heart, and treasure thee, by the power of my

womanhood, from the eye of Fate.

(The sound of a chariot at the palace-door comes to her ears)

Oh! he is come, my hero, with victory singing in his chariot wheels.

He will dwell in this nest with me, the hours raining benediction. And the

sorrows of this land will cease, when the song of reunion bursts from our world.

(Enter Indrajit)

Oh! my warrior armed for battle! power and glory are on thy brows and a

devouring mystery in thy lips. But Fate shines a red star in this sky.

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Oh yield me my kingdom and grow tiny at my breast. I will nurse thee as a

dream at the wells of my tenderness. I will wear thee as my heart’s flower in this

withering hour.

(Folds him in her arms)

Indrajit :

I would fly in the face of the sky and devour the sun like a red fruit of

dream:

I would leap into the depths of darkening river and steal its fount of melody:

I will sack the palaces of Death for the treasure of a lost sweetness.

I will gather all heaven into my eyes,

To wake thy smile,

Oh flower of shadowless isles,

Shadow-gleam of Infinity !

4. Indrajit to the spirits at Nikumbhila

Ye spirits attendant at my birth, sing me from your bourne, of the dark

travailing of storm and fire on seas, and of eyes that shine in poison-flower and

baleful root.

Mix me your drink ethereal of poppy and cereal of fields, enriched with

blood of victims of the night.

Make me your heir of springs secret of tumult and life, of crystal cool

waters of blight and tongues of death.

Fill me with your phantasy, free and nervous, and glowing with the gift of

change, bewildering sense and mind of mortals.

68


Give me the power of the eye to strike, and the thrill of the kiss of Death to

breathe upon mine enemies.

I have clouded their gaze and wrought enchantment in their hearts that I

may strike them lifeless with one wave of my arm.

I wove from the breaths of pathless winds a shining garment and filled with

magic a faery form, the shadow of golden-hearted Sita, and made pretence to

slay her, and the heart of the hosts of Rama was still, and a wail rose in the

hearts of the heroes whose fire melts all the armoury of my austerities.

Give me, O spirits sempiternal ! powers pregnant in this dark place and this

holy sacrifice, give me to war with this fire raging in the heart of my city and my

father’s home, the might of this arm to fall upon this fury as a deluge in darkness

and thunder.

And me, guard Ye, that dwell this vaporous midnight with the hanging red-

light of Death.

Give me the shelter invincible of your bosom, O loves of starry births world-

conquering, that I may shed fire and scatter this pestilence.

69


MISCELLANEOUS

TO ABHIMANYU

Oh thou imperishable heart of the heroic energy of our earth,

Bright star-flower of Arjuna’s fadeless glory !

Child of the light and power and favour of God that chose to walk with Man

in the whilwind of that hour !

The light wind of battle kissed thy breath. At the flame-call of honour uprose

thy spirit to greet the meeting clouds of hosts and melt them in the keen glance

of thy valour. And the young sun marched over field of red earth and dying men,

glorying in thee.

But with the close of the day, with the sword-arm broken and the sword-

end planted in the dust, with the single wheel of thy chariot thou didst rage, like

a God, against odds inhuman of earth and heaven.

And fighting alone, at the end of thy fierce day, thou lay’st over borne, Pride

of the Sun, in the red earth.

And the heavy clouds passed over thee and the star-cloud of victory shone

where the pale crescent of thy smile broke amidst the ruin.

Thy life, betwixt hill and dark cloud, ran as a stream in the sky and at the

close of thy hour it lives in bloom of the fragrant sky in a stretch of wild flowers

on the blue hills.

Will no wind blow a feather, fragrant tongue of life_from the bed of the

warrior on the summit of the sun-crowned hill?

The earth that drank thy blood hath given birth to the fiery-hearted. In the

watches of her night the Mother hath sung thy story to the tune of the hunger of

her heart : and her still sad eyes rest on thy sky, waiting to be free.

70


EARLIER PIECES

GOD AND THE COBBLER

“His hurt is mine” the Lord cried, and barred the door against his priest.

The priest stood still and trembled where he stood. Hushed were the music

and the chant, and the wondering devotees were silent as under a spell. The

morning time wore on, and care was on the face of the priest and fear as at a

sudden wail from death’s house at midnight.

The Lord raged and thundered and the heavy doors of his shrine echoed his

wrath. Far off his servant sat beyond the fields lost in trance mending shoes,

singing to himself the glory and grace of the Eternal. Blood flowed from his

temple ; a bigot’s stone had hurt the lover of the Lord who sat in the path of the

priest carrying holy water for bathing His feet.

The morning ran with hurrying steps to meet her lord in high heaven. But

care sat on the face of the priest and fear in drops of sweat.

Suddenly he had a thought and cast his vessel and flew down the steps to

the fields where god’s lover sat humming the song of his meeting. He set him

on his shoulders and ran and set him at the feet of the Lord whose doors had

opened, and whose face shone like the face of a bride.

And he saw the Lord of his dreams and closed his eyes in endless vision.

And he lived singing His Song and mending his shoes till when the Lord took him

and wore him as a jewel in His breast.

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THE STORY OF THE ANCHORITE

The anchorite sat in the forest ways before his hut seeking his Lord through

the ages. An earthen jar lay beside his seat with his holy stick neglected. For an

age had he sat in wind and rain, nor had he opened his eyes, nor fed on aught

save His honey - sweet Name. And the beings of the forest glades passed him

by in wonder and mute pity while his rapt inward song pulsing through space

filled the quarters with yearning.

And God came as a child and danced before him with His ringing anklets.

He broke his jar and plucked his beard and played with his hairy hands and eyes,

and sent up shouts that filled the forest with echoes. But the ascetic stirred not,

nor heard; he knew Him not whom his whole soul strove to reach, the doors of

sense all closed.

And the Lord touched him and opened his eyes and vanished. The anchorite

woke with a cry, and rose and looked: “Oh where? O where is he that came and

stayed not to bless me?” And he sped through the forest, and Light before him,

and the sound of little steps and of a child’s laughter. And he crossed many

rivers and passed many lands, crying in the wake of the Gleaming Presence; and

the woods were in May and the birds were in song that wondered at the strange

pursuit.

And they came to a land by the sea, where grew a giant tree by the shore.

For an instant rayed a glory from near it, and the Lord passed into the tree,

eluding all pursuit. And the tree fell as in earth quake and the sea was stunned

by its fall. And the believer fell on earth, and wailed, and the sea wailed with him.

Anon came a voice of comfort, and thrice measured he the log with his holy

stick and worshipped Him that slept in it with his palm over the swelling waves.

And there grew a city around him and the kingdom of men, and still the holy

man worshipped with fruit and flowers, the merry Lord that had so rewarded his

age - long worship.

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FOREWORD

In this Part of the Memorial Volume we present to the public the greater part of

the writings, in verse and in prose, in English and in Tamil, of Principal Saranathan.

The manuscripts of these writings are contained in a series of note - books

carefully preserved by him and also on many loose sheets of paper. We have

studied these manuscripts with diligence and omitted only those portions which

were found redundant or too ephemeral in interest to merit inclusion in a volume

of collected works. We can assure the reader that the best part of Saranathan’s

literary output is here.

And what a rich and varied crop it is ! To attempt anything like a literary

appraisal of the pieces brought together here would be an act of supererogation

on our part. We are, moreover, fully aware that we are not competent for a

task of this kind. But it may be of interest to the reader to be told a few things

that we have been able to discover for ourselves about the deployment over a

period of years of Saranathan’s literary powers. He seems to have been

particularly active in the writing of poetry between the years 1917 and 1920. A

slim volume of prose poems –– First Sheaves –– was published by him in 1918.

Then followed a fairly prolific output of verse in which lyrics take the pride of

place.

When one remembers that during this period Saranathan was a young man

in his twenties one is amazed at the versatility he displayed and the ease with

which his poetic temperament found expression even through a foreign medium.

The most diverse themes are handled by him with a deftness and a charm that

almost take one’s breath away. Paying his meed of praise to our immortal poet

Kalidasa, he sings :

He dreams, of a God’s forehead stilled

In penance for a world,

Whose waters roll upon him, filled

With peace from Heavens hurled,

43


Of vernal hills and Uma’s vow,

And streets of Alaka,

And clinging sweetness and the brow

Like day - break of Sakuntala.

How gracefully do these lines evoke in our minds memories of Kumarasambhava,

Meghaduta and Sakuntala!

Look again at the evocative power of the following lines in his poem, The

Word :

It rises from beds of transient weaving

And story - embroidered dream,

And breaking a Thought of the Soul upheaving,

Opens a cloud and a gleam ......................

Saranathan’s verse could also take on the hue of a lighter mood. We feel

the lilt and the spring of youth in these lines from A Pariah Girl :

I grew to be a maiden bold;

My mouth could fling a smile;

My body brewed a drink to hold

The headiest youth awhile.

And again, in the song of the maidens to Krishna :

Ab, we love thee

Who art like the Sea,

And we as the bee

Wander to thee

Who art a flower!

44


To a son of India the things of the spirit must always have a primacy denied

to every other factor of existence. In his Ode to Shakti or the Power of Nature,

he speaks of her universal sway :


The burden of all earthly dower, ––



And moonlight born of passions wild.

Witness, again, the delicacy of touch in the following lines on Woman :

And ever let the spiritual Rose

That on thee so magically grows

Warm her soft petals in the blaze

Where Aspiration rides thro’ maze

Of rock and flame and wind and cloud,

And thy Saviour’s face shines velvet - brow’d.

Enough samples have been given of the early poetry of Saranathan to

whet the reader’s appetite for more.

For many years after 1920, Saranathan does not seem to have continued

his poetic efforts. Probably the world of educational administration was too

much with him. The demands made upon his time and energy by the routine

duties of his office as Principal and also by his membership of the Syndicate of

the Madras University might have been too exacting to permit of his persevering

to pay homage to his muse.

From 1938 to 1942, the active phase was renewed in his career as a poet.

This time he did not attempt lyrical themes or experimenting with verse forms.

He seems to have concentrated on sonnets, most of them being political in

character. He became, increasingly, a bird with one note –– the political. His

45


sympathy for the under - dog and a keen realization that in the capitalistic world

this type failed often to receive a square deal swung him definitely to the left, as

his sonnets on Spain, Czechoslovakia and Russia clearly show. The sonnets

entitled “Workers of the World, Unite!” are in similar strain :

But men shall live, hand on the torch of life,

Still drink life’s waters from sage men sprung forth,

From Saviours born of endless agony,

Christs of the plough and smithy !

* * * *

The Prose Section of his writings does not need any elaborate introduction.

It consists largely of essays, addresses and broadcast talks on literary and

educational themes. The first piece in it ––on the Poetry of Francis Thompson –

– was the thesis he wrote in 1913 for his M.A. Degree. Special mention should

also be made of the series of essays on ‘Style in Poetry’, for their literary charm

and for the spirit of reverent love underlying their appreciation of some of the

great English poets. The following passage on Shelley may be taken as an

instance in point :

“In Shelley’s poetry, there is a vision of general loveliness which is, half, the

loveliness of his own spirit, and, half, that of the skiey worlds and shapes it

creates. This is why perhaps we find in Shelley not so constant an achievement

of whole and undying beauty of phrase as in Keats or Milton. There is a wealth

of absolutely original and full imagery, but it is all to use his own words ––

“beautiful as a wreck of Paradise”; it is unformed as his own thought, with an

Ariel - quality like himself. Shelley is perhaps the supreme instance of the lyrical

spirit, unclouded and wearing “no manacles of Space”, in whose rich lightning

career even metaphysical thought becomes charged with a fluid and quick life.

In his poetry, therefore, we hear the “Aeolian Harp”, and style is disembodied;

and we get shadow - gleams and forms less ‘real than living man’ though perhaps

‘nurslings of immortality’ ”.

46


One of the essays in the second sub-section –– The Problem of Popular

Culture in India –– drew forth from a distinguished scholar and Professor of

English in our Presidency the following tribute : “What a piece of prose have they

got out of you!” (It was an address in connection with the Library Movement.)

“It would make Pater green with envy. I never thought words could be so

charged with richness of meaning, with vibrancy of passion. Write more, you

gifted sloth”.

In the later years of his life, he became more and more the “elder statesman”

of the educational world, giving the benefit of his wisdom and experience to

gatherings of teachers and educational administrators. The Presidential Address

he delivered at the XXIV Provincial Educational Conference held at Madura in

1932, and the Welcome Address he gave as Chairman of the Reception

Committee to the XXV Provincial Educational Conference held at Tiruchirapalli in

1933, are printed almost in full in this volume.

Occasionally Saranathan seems to have made an attempt to maintain a

Diary. The results of this are reproduced under the caption, ‘Pages from his

Journal.’

* * * *

As the call of nationalism became more and more strident in the history of

our land, ardent patriots like Saranathan could hardly resist it. One result of this

change in mental climate was that he turned more and more to Tamil as the

vehicle for the expression of his ideas. Not that he loved English less, but that

he loved Tamil more.

A good number of the pieces collected in the Tamil Section were broadcast

from All India Radio, Tiruchirapalli, and one or two from Madras and Delhi. We

are publishing them with the kind permission of AIR, to whom we take this

opportunity of making our grateful acknowledgements.

47


A series of talks on the ingredients of a fully - rounded life, with the intriguing

title has already appeared in book form and is reprinted here.

We have no doubt that it will grip the attention of our readers. The late

Mahamahopadhyaya Dakshinatya Kalanidhi Dr. V. Swaminatha Iyer, acknowledging

receipt of a copy of this book, wrote in a letter to the author : “ ”

The essay on gives a synoptic survey of the

growth of our culture through the ages. Inaugurating the Educational Broadcasts

of AIR, Tiruchirapalli, Saranathan gave a talk on ‘’ which the reader can find

in these pages. Some autobiographical sketches contributed by him to the monthly

‘Cauveri’ and some left in an unfinished state also find a place here. We thank

the Proprietors of the ‘Cauveri’ for their kind permission to include in this Volume

the contributions that originally appeared in that periodical.

* * * *

We have a vivid impression on our mind of the trials and difficulties that

Saranathan encountered in his attempts to combine devotion to letters with the

strenuous life of an educational administrator. The way in which he overcame

these difficulties and managed to leave behind a sizable output of verse and

prose brings to our memory the lines of the poet :

Quench not

The holy fires within you; though temptations

Shower down upon you, clasp your armour on:

Fight well, and thou shalt see, after these wars,

Thy head wear sunbeams, and thy feet tread stars.

The Editor now makes his bow, wishing the reader “Good Reading!”

48


L Y R I C S

SIVA

Upon his head the shy moon gleams

Athwart his matted hair;

In restless fires close-woven, teems

That ashy-tinted lair

Of deep thoughts ravaging a world

Grown grey and mounded high,

Of power and peace then dawning, curled

In Smile of his forehead eye!

Ah that wild forehead flaming far

On many a city’s dome

And sin complete, enkindling war

In field, and sky, and home !

His fiery eye is Thought; His brow

Is bound with little arms

Of child-like faiths so brave. Ah, how

His Serpents wind alarms !

O Siva, Lord of the Flaming Eye,

Symbol of Thought’s Storm-Sky

And constellation of mystery !

My Soul would Thy banner fly !

49


SHAKTI

O thou imperishable Heart

Whose Sway is all a vernal grace !

O soft, divine, heroical part,

O Streaming Angel with no face !

Thy dream is in the laughing sea,

Thy smile doth spray up every tree,

We wake, we hear each morn how rings

Thy call on beast and man, while Skies fill deep thy wings !

From heaven to heaven thy flight is spread ;

Thou break’st the peace of childless skies,

Both star and cloud proclaim thy dread,

They rise, they sink before thine eyes;

Thou art still Woman, gentle, bright.

O Thou dost hold all god’s delight,

His sweet, ungathered, dreaming powers

Thy hand doth ope and softly close eternal bowers !

Mystical, yet a homely Power !


The burden of all earthy dower, _



And moonlight born of passions wild;

Still dost Thou heal, O Saviour fair,

Each flowering dream and beauty in Time’s eyes and hair.

By figure and by mystery,

We speak of Thee whose name is Life !

They love is near, Thy love is free,

Thy majesty of sounding strife !

50


Thy Children move in fierce alarms,

They love, they grow amidst thy harms.

Thou dost surround them in Thy light,

Imperious One, Who lay’st Thy children with Thy sight !

Still our delights are wrapt with Thee

In fold on fold of strong desire,

And the soft soul herself makes free

To pour with both hands streaming fire

An offering to Thy victory !

Our passion clings to Death and Thee !

We tend Thy steps and Thy red mirth

Flows on our foreheads from Thy fierce and shining Earth !

GOD

God moves amongst His magic vessels,

In a starless-green retreat;

The ground He treads, has eyes and cells

Of bright unhappy heat,

He moves, and stirs, and sits, and muses,

And wild desires escape ;

He knows not how his hand refuses

What sweet Compassion would shape.

He plays, and is a plaything still ;

His feet are clothed with light ;

His throne heaves sadly on a hill

Above the water’s might ;

For a great deep swells and o’erflows all round

Where He designing shines ;

His home is a boundless Purpose wound

Round Him, where He sometimes pines.

51


POEMS OF EARTH AND SKY

DEATH

The earth we tread is every step a grave ;

In silent grass or hollow glade or street

Of city bent with steps of men, we meet

Ever a sound of still surrender. Wave

On wave of sea doth bear desire of brave

Ungathered life which breaks on shore. On sweet

Heroic Freedom weeps a cloud, and seat

Of mighty kings in shadow lies. Yet gave

Death his delight, _ to flower and deed and rare

Endeavour of life, _ season high and charm

To live more fair in stillness. He in bare

Yet gracious majesty of spirit, calm,

Treads on adventure wide, forlorn, to snare

In love, a flower still trembling for alarm.

THE SPIRIT OF INDIA

INDIA - AN ODE

Argument

The Ode commencing with an address to the natural powers and sanctities of India and

invoking them in the present hour of decay and fear, proceeds to tell of the happy strength of

Ancient India as called up by memory; how it was broken; how the darkness of time and

variety of change of attainment and fall in the centuries, continued; how in the present time of

her world _ contact, her afflicted children should rise. The Ode concludes with an appeal to

help India to stand again as ‘before God’s eyes.’

52


I

Splendour of mountain - sunsets! And ye Streams,

That from cloud-summits heavy-wooded bear,

Ye bring in foam and flood old hermit-dreams,

And pageants of our Truth! And Stars that wear

Your Deity above us, ye rejoice,

Ye wield dear strength, and glowing armoury !

Ye hills have love, remembering Mercy’s Voice

That rose in Himalaya, when Victory

Became a flower in womb of Uma !

Ye winds that blow on Steeps of Vindhya,

O anchorites., in rage still pure,

And Rivers filled with gentle Awe from Breath

Divine, Ye bless our Faiths demure,

Whom Powers in sunsets deep and hill defend ‘gainst Death!

But no reviving airs on us yet fall,

Like winds and mountain-herbs of old, nor chanta

Funereal cease around us ! Ye appal

Ye slay us, Gods of ambrosial eyes and fame !

O flame-borne Prayer unto each soft Name !

O Truth so dark beset ! Lo in wild haunts

Thou singst alone and keepst thy wind-blown flame !

II

The melodies how softly they awaken !

And Meditation leads us gently round,

Where our Sweet Mother’s storied joys resound,

On song-ways and memorial stones forsaken !

Her Shadows shine where golden fruits allure,

53


Her play and sacred song in Beauty rise,

Her journeys bring home Truth’s white merchandise,

All fadeless faiths and loves in raiment pure !

The forest flowers at Rama’s feet,

From clinging stone doth rise and greet

Ahalya mild ! And Wisdom comes

That royal sages, silver-throned, inspires,

And brightlier dwells in hermits’ homes,

And brings them benediction high for proud desires !

And Man holds sway, companioned of the Gods,

Why heavenly maidens serve in courts of Kings,

And anchorites move with their shining emblem rods

And hermits’ wives lend guidance unto each star,

And Peace as War

‘Gainst her strong battlements flying breaks his wings,

While Vishnu dreams in silent seas afar..

III

Mid thunder of subterranean disease,

And multitude of names and rights and feuds,

Mid altar-smoke enfeebling fortitudes, -

Break all her terraces of might and peace !

And those auroral rites and fiery time,

And fruit of Kingdoms set on mountain snows,

And windward rapture of her cities’ chime, -

In shattered skies on flooding darkness, close !

Her codes, her creeds, her graceful arts,

Her arrows, poems, and cohorts

Of Learning’s lance, and fierce displays -

54


What Kapila and Patanjali wrought -

Scatter afar in violent ways !

Kings, Priests, cows, wives, and holy books are naught !

A natural wave as of a forest moving,

A gentle Gaze o’erflowing Man and Bird,

And pain and death and beauty softly proving,

The Buddha’s silver-footed Love ! Ah, slain !

Nor Sankara’s armoury avails again,

Nor fountain fires by princess-hands yet stirred,

Unsway offended stars that crush her plain !

IV

Stars roll, descend, and heavy-armed arrive,

‘ Tween Earth and Sky inalienably throng !

From fastness bending, _ hearts invaded long _

Deluge sweeps richly honey and the hive !

On changing plains the waters build and break

Thrones, wisdoms, pillars, fantasy and flowers

Of sympathy, elegiac stones, - now wake,

Now cease upon the view, becoming dim hours !

Stories of Kings’ delight and harm,

Of Beauty adventurous in alarm,

Imperial, round with clouds arrayed,

Sound along incantation of the Waves;

Nurjehan’s light; and Padmini’s braid

By tender hands unloosed which pure fire laves,

When dedicated live fly to the dwelling

Of the Sunrise ! Those unconquerable souls yet hear !

The flood hath passed to sound of stars revelling;

55


While towers and headlands, art and time remain !

But still are heard those tramplings on her plain,

Still bound with planetary travailings of one Fear,

Whirl hopes and renunciations, holy, slain !

V

O wild unceasing Terror of our days,

O Power of deep importunate skies and seas,

O Voices, what may your dread hour appease, _

Tears, pain or innocence of lonely ways,

Or calm unprofitable disdain of time,

And building of the minarets of Rhyme

And seeking the shadow-land of aim,

Where the Moon holds her silver life and clime !

The Sea has come from far to mingle,

And our world-streams and stones do tingle

With leavings of ancient floods and hills ;

Our Soul dissembles, our hands fail, we die,

O Brothers, uncompanioned Wills !

While stranger sails from western oceans lie

Sheltering our ills ! O Western suns inspire !

O clothe ye with soft healing and array.

These puissances ! Around the ancient fire,

We stood in kindred under oblivious skies,

And swept in early light the World ! Arise,

O gatherers of midnight fruit astray,

Children of India, wake, here are God’s Eyes !

56


RABINDRANATH TAGORE

When light in evening holds a tryst with Time

In deepening sky and far-adventuring Sea,

And men do raise their hearts and eyes in free

Yet ancient reverence lovely, for high aim

And passion moulding heaven bright, in rhyme

Of sunset hymns, then we of thy country

In thought behold thy deep austerity,

And tender-seeing truth, and valiance prime

‘ Gainst foes of land and right and blessedness

Of man, and thee whose Love is homely nurse

Of mortal ills, yet silent crowned a star

Awake and glad, and thy sweet shining verse

In fantasy like morning’s sacredness,

Whose wonder strikes, as moonlight on Dawn’s car.

GANDHI

I

Come, blessed voice, from the country of No Fear,

Come, with clear hope and conquering gentleness !

Pronounce, in stormy, rushing untruth’s stress,

The soul’s still perfect mastery to ear

Of Man, lost, wild, his life’s springs dry ! yet hear,

O world: “Ne’er Hunger’s Waters of wrath shall press

In surging fountains forth on heaven’s realm, mess

All that dear work of God and Man, besmear

Divinity of both.” His word doth fill

The hungry, waken the heart, the hand make strong

Of mild men welded in his fire, who till

57


The ground of undefeated hope, to gong

Of no slave-driver listen, but conscience, will,

And reason dewing o’er with mercy’s song.

10-4-39

II

Thy well of suffering shone upon by God,

Thy single hest, ‘ Ye pure, cast off all arms,

Yet stand ye at Thermopylae,’ thy forms,

Vows, courtesies to the Holiest, the rod

Thou wield’st gay untruth fears, yet kisses, - how awed

We stand at these (but how thy quaintness charms)

O Splendid watchman of the soul’s alarms !

How thou perpetually wak’st the human clod !

But how poor, weak, their faith who take thy name,

Who fain would walk behind thee to the tryst

Heroic love still bids us to, the same

Way that Siddhartha went, his feet sweet kissed

By kings and women, yea, by all poor game

In life’s drear forest where great serpents hissed.

16-4-39

III

The world will not obey aught but the brute,

Hitler or Mussolini, or worldling base, -

Chamberlain’s tradesman’s unction, precise phrase,

Hold England bound, her conscience all but mute -

But Gandhi the whirlwind rides, directs, the lute

And symphony of faiths attending, lays

58


Him down among the lowliest in the hard ways,

Highroads of armies, of pity destitute.

The armies march about him, drunk with creeds,

Not loth to slay this new-born unity,

Our dream-tost, gentle race, made one, - that pleads,

“Tis ours to beat the swords of history

Still into ploughshares, make melodious deeds

To flower on Gandhi’s spinning-wheels that ply.”

19-4-39

IV

From agony to agony he goes,

Self-chosen, to explore how man may dare,

May through the valley of defeat upbear

Truth’s banner, while his peaceful heart still glows,

A fire of pity hungry to burn. How rose

The Flame? How fed? By holy things and fair,

Innocent hands at toil, and women’s prayer,

And a heavenly wind that silently inflows -

This, his Satyagraha! Not from the proud

Shall sacrificial gifts the altar crown,

Not from the gay, immodest, shiftless crowd

That lives, but thinks no thoughts which are its own,

But from poor men, birds shut up where the cloud

Now bursts, _ sweet Freedom with her showers poured down.

7-5-39

V

What have ye done to lift the mountainous cloud,

The centuries’ dread and chaos of your being,

Who woke the intellectual stars to seeing,

59


When the Upanishads took birth? Dream that proud

Dream still, but navigate truth’s streams, new, loud

With hundred engines of time’s prophesying,

While within you the lover-soul for fleeing

Urvasi waits not wilder’d, and heaven is bow’d,

O’er wisdom’s birth. We answer, “Hunger slays

These poor companions, countless minds once dear

To Beauty’s self and tenants of sun-lit days ;

Ourselves strain after her music with deaf ear ;

And wisdom, a collective farm, repays

No solitary ploughers in lands of fear.”

1941

VI

But one man, Gandhi, ploughs, unsmitt’n with fear,

These six hundred thousand villages alone ;

Farmer and weaver, poet of one tone,

Diver for one embedded pearl, God’s tear,

At world’s heart, for man let blood with his own spear.

He ploughs for wisdom and two meals for one

For dwellers in the mud huts, turns to stone

His heart, to “plough the rock until it bear.”

And the end? Still he weaves his single web,

Waxes and wanes like yon persistent moon

Who yet communicates one candidness.

The poor behind him walk, ask for no boon

Save that his pilgrim smile a moment bless

Their gaze, while tides of old thought rise and ebb.

1941

60


O C C A S I O N A L P I E C E S

ON THE CHATURTHI DAY

The Tiruchirapalli Rock

Pilgrims pass up the sun-burnt steps in fire

Of August’s light, when Air as element

Of hungry heat earth-borne seems fiercely bent

To scourge our bravery of devotion; lyre

And lamp and adoration and attire

Of loves all weak, and worldly commandment ;

While in dark kingdoms strives our sires’ lament !

Lofty shrine excellently reared ! Desire

Of stars in strange nights hovers o’er thy white

Immovable destiny, while all round hard

Untamed inflammable rock, lies old rite

Of passionate builders great, in wall and ward,

And fountain’s hoary steps - mid Time’s despite,

Unnatural twilight wars and emblems marred.

29-8-19

FROM THE MEGHADHUTA

Thy body in dark creepers; and thy glance in look

Of frightened deer ; and in the moon, thy countenance ;

Thy hair, on peacock’s heads in feathery burden shook ;

And in the slender wave of streams, thy dalliance

61


Of brows ; these, these in several chance oft whiles I find !

Ah, where, sole image thine (to jealousy inclined)?

While as with coloured stones I paint thee on the rock

As in love’s idle angry mood, and at thy feet

Me figure, fallen for sweet grace ; then in Fancy’s shock

The instant tears which there collect, my sight defeat,

And labour all, efface. Ah! cruel Fate suspends

What joy of love and union that hour’s fancy lends !

When scarce of dreams observed, still deeming thou art won,

Out in the air my arms I send in phantasy

Of a furious and fond embrace, then from many a one

Of those o’er woodlands ruling, Spirits beholding Me,

Fall natural tears so free, as pearl-drops whole and round,

On tender leaves, all open-my soul’s witness found !

How shall thrice-partitioned Night, of hours so lone and long,

Like to a moment wear away all shrunk, and Day,

Of every season, in his mode and change of wrong

Inflicted, softer grow and his fierce heat allay, _

Thus, O despairing-eyed, my heart by thriftless prayer,

Holds ever during pang and passion of despair!

62


IN MEMORIAM

THE LATE G. SESHA IYENGAR

“Ask not the world’s cold alms for Learning. Deep

Within, thy constant spirit shall find gold

To build a house yet made with hands. Uphold

What strife high sacrifice embalms ; let sleep

Forget not life’s one dream,” Thou saidst, “And keep,

Unspotted from the world, thyself.” So roll’d

Year on year hope fulfill’d! so grew thy bold

Intention, breath’d on stone and brick! Oh, weep

Not, brothers, now he goes with love yet strong

For us, his heirs, by homely, struggling might

Enrich’d; he plough’d alone, mid proud men’s wrong,

This hard earth, ours who teach, and sought no light

Save God’s; with simple hands he builded long,

With heart-beat tuneful in the starless night.

August, 1937

LINES TO MY OWN MEMORY

He lived in Thought awake, and knew the Voice

Of Immortality whose smile did fall

On flowing hair of his dark dream; and choice

Of fame, declined, for glamour of Death’s call.

14-4-1919

63


FIRST SHEAVES

INDRAJIT

A DRAMATIC POEM

Some Sketches

[INDRAJIT, son of Ravana, King of Lanka, is one of the finest of the heroic

characters in the Ramayana. Called Thunderer (Meghanada) at birth, he, as a

boy, took captive Indra, the Ruler of Heaven, and was thence known as Indrajit

(Conqueror of Indra). A magician and a warrior, he distinguishes himself in the

war in Lanka by striking the whole army of Rama lifeless with the Nagastra

(serpents) and later with the apparition of Maya Sita, a creation of his magic,

beheaded by him in the sight of Rama’s hosts. He makes preparations for a

great sacrifice at a place called Nikumbhila, by which he should be rendered

invisible and invincible in battle. His plans are betrayed to Rama by his uncle

Vibhishana, who is Rama’s ally; and the sacrifice is frustrated, and he is himself

killed in a long and furious combat with Lakshmana, Rama’s brother. So the

hope of Lanka dies, and Ravana fights his last battle and dies; and Lanka is

subdued by Rama

The writer conceives Indrajit as a poet, magician, warrior, a hero fired by

patriotism and the finest spirit of chivalry.]

1. Indrajit’s Address to the Earth

In the heart of the Earth is a lone bird singing the song of the life of flower

and rain.

In that garden of Night, the light of her wings doth tremble as the gleam of

a melting cloud.

64


Out of the depths of shadowed silences, comes a breath of the phantasy

that thrills the heart of that lonely bird.

Mother of mystery, whose dream is the birth of the laughing sea and the

sun-kissed slumberer in the glades of Death.

Her cry takes wing and fills the sky with a still song of agony, and her heart

grows cold in pale births dolorous at the death of her Love.

2. The Vanaras before Lanka

Behold! the foes are flying like sea-birds in the wrath of the wind : their

shoulders are falling as trees upturned, and crowned heads tumble as violent

stars.

In the path of the foemen is the might of their city fallen like Worlds thunder-

riven. In the hearts of the foemen is a burnt fire leaving desolation.

From the might of these arms are flying the blasts that rend their towers

and their hosts. From the arrows of the heroes are speeding the fates that seal

Ravana’s doom.

From the ranks of our hosts, the bright car of Victory rises with banners

unfurling Death. From the heart of the city rises a wail that answers the wail of

the Sea.

Behold this sea and this city ravished by our fury, opening their womb! And

the air is full of the horror that meets the flame of our valour in rage immortal

for that mortal queen.

Oh that miracle of woman ! treasure of Earth’s Heaven, heart of Rama

enshrined !

The light of her spirit doth flash on the waters of this strife and the soul of

the warrior takes wing enraptured and kisses the eyes of Destiny.

65


(Suddenly a golden form appears in the air)

Behold! the wonder of our hearts hath taken a body and beckoneth from

the sky, the golden dream of our nights doth hang in the air in luminous ecstasy.

Is it phantom or corporeal grace of the sunset sky or magic of wizard

winds in cloudland and fire?

Oh it is Sita, queen of our devotion, heart of Rama enshrined !

Ah what a mist rolls over her, soul of our valour, song of our agony !

Her hair weeps around her face and a fateful wind plays about her limbs,

and her eyes are large and full of dolour.

Her arms are stretched towards the sky impenetrable, and the flash of a

red sword grows vivid round her head.

(Enter Indrajit careering in the sky)

Indrajit

I have come from the woodlands of the sky and on the wilds of war I shine.

With fierce hands I seized the glory of the setting sun and fashioned a

golden form and from the locks of sleeping winds have I stolen the magic that

breathes on her limbs.

O! her eyes are sunset stars bathed in the glory of a dream, and her gaze

fades on the array of this warring world !

From the womb of my life, have I brought this shadow to shine: and from

the face of this trembling sky will I sweep this phantom and the daylight of these

valiant hearts.

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(Strikes off her head)

Ah, the agony of Rama’s army at seeing Sita die ! in their agony their

hearts will change and Rama’s valorous purpose dies.

At this hour will I fly to Nikumbhila and do sacrifice to the spirits that gave

me life and bear my fate in their watchless tread.

I will gather their tenderness and grow immortal in their love. They will arm

me, their warrior, and send me to battle warm with their passion and their

lightning.

3. Sulochana, Indrajit’s wife

(from her chamber overlooking the battle-field)

Oh Gatherer of midnight worlds! victorious over heaven,

Oh to feel thee in the warm world of my desire, and hold thee captive,

Thunderer, to the tune of my heart !

So will I gather thee to my heart, and treasure thee, by the power of my

womanhood, from the eye of Fate.

(The sound of a chariot at the palace-door comes to her ears)

Oh! he is come, my hero, with victory singing in his chariot wheels.

He will dwell in this nest with me, the hours raining benediction. And the

sorrows of this land will cease, when the song of reunion bursts from our world.

(Enter Indrajit)

Oh! my warrior armed for battle! power and glory are on thy brows and a

devouring mystery in thy lips. But Fate shines a red star in this sky.

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Oh yield me my kingdom and grow tiny at my breast. I will nurse thee as a

dream at the wells of my tenderness. I will wear thee as my heart’s flower in this

withering hour.

(Folds him in her arms)

Indrajit :

I would fly in the face of the sky and devour the sun like a red fruit of

dream:

I would leap into the depths of darkening river and steal its fount of melody:

I will sack the palaces of Death for the treasure of a lost sweetness.

I will gather all heaven into my eyes,

To wake thy smile,

Oh flower of shadowless isles,

Shadow-gleam of Infinity !

4. Indrajit to the spirits at Nikumbhila

Ye spirits attendant at my birth, sing me from your bourne, of the dark

travailing of storm and fire on seas, and of eyes that shine in poison-flower and

baleful root.

Mix me your drink ethereal of poppy and cereal of fields, enriched with

blood of victims of the night.

Make me your heir of springs secret of tumult and life, of crystal cool

waters of blight and tongues of death.

Fill me with your phantasy, free and nervous, and glowing with the gift of

change, bewildering sense and mind of mortals.

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Give me the power of the eye to strike, and the thrill of the kiss of Death to

breathe upon mine enemies.

I have clouded their gaze and wrought enchantment in their hearts that I

may strike them lifeless with one wave of my arm.

I wove from the breaths of pathless winds a shining garment and filled with

magic a faery form, the shadow of golden-hearted Sita, and made pretence to

slay her, and the heart of the hosts of Rama was still, and a wail rose in the

hearts of the heroes whose fire melts all the armoury of my austerities.

Give me, O spirits sempiternal ! powers pregnant in this dark place and this

holy sacrifice, give me to war with this fire raging in the heart of my city and my

father’s home, the might of this arm to fall upon this fury as a deluge in darkness

and thunder.

And me, guard Ye, that dwell this vaporous midnight with the hanging red-

light of Death.

Give me the shelter invincible of your bosom, O loves of starry births world-

conquering, that I may shed fire and scatter this pestilence.

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MISCELLANEOUS

TO ABHIMANYU

Oh thou imperishable heart of the heroic energy of our earth,

Bright star-flower of Arjuna’s fadeless glory !

Child of the light and power and favour of God that chose to walk with Man

in the whilwind of that hour !

The light wind of battle kissed thy breath. At the flame-call of honour uprose

thy spirit to greet the meeting clouds of hosts and melt them in the keen glance

of thy valour. And the young sun marched over field of red earth and dying men,

glorying in thee.

But with the close of the day, with the sword-arm broken and the sword-

end planted in the dust, with the single wheel of thy chariot thou didst rage, like

a God, against odds inhuman of earth and heaven.

And fighting alone, at the end of thy fierce day, thou lay’st over borne, Pride

of the Sun, in the red earth.

And the heavy clouds passed over thee and the star-cloud of victory shone

where the pale crescent of thy smile broke amidst the ruin.

Thy life, betwixt hill and dark cloud, ran as a stream in the sky and at the

close of thy hour it lives in bloom of the fragrant sky in a stretch of wild flowers

on the blue hills.

Will no wind blow a feather, fragrant tongue of life_from the bed of the

warrior on the summit of the sun-crowned hill?

The earth that drank thy blood hath given birth to the fiery-hearted. In the

watches of her night the Mother hath sung thy story to the tune of the hunger of

her heart : and her still sad eyes rest on thy sky, waiting to be free.

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EARLIER PIECES

GOD AND THE COBBLER

“His hurt is mine” the Lord cried, and barred the door against his priest.

The priest stood still and trembled where he stood. Hushed were the music

and the chant, and the wondering devotees were silent as under a spell. The

morning time wore on, and care was on the face of the priest and fear as at a

sudden wail from death’s house at midnight.

The Lord raged and thundered and the heavy doors of his shrine echoed his

wrath. Far off his servant sat beyond the fields lost in trance mending shoes,

singing to himself the glory and grace of the Eternal. Blood flowed from his

temple ; a bigot’s stone had hurt the lover of the Lord who sat in the path of the

priest carrying holy water for bathing His feet.

The morning ran with hurrying steps to meet her lord in high heaven. But

care sat on the face of the priest and fear in drops of sweat.

Suddenly he had a thought and cast his vessel and flew down the steps to

the fields where god’s lover sat humming the song of his meeting. He set him

on his shoulders and ran and set him at the feet of the Lord whose doors had

opened, and whose face shone like the face of a bride.

And he saw the Lord of his dreams and closed his eyes in endless vision.

And he lived singing His Song and mending his shoes till when the Lord took him

and wore him as a jewel in His breast.

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THE STORY OF THE ANCHORITE

The anchorite sat in the forest ways before his hut seeking his Lord through

the ages. An earthen jar lay beside his seat with his holy stick neglected. For an

age had he sat in wind and rain, nor had he opened his eyes, nor fed on aught

save His honey - sweet Name. And the beings of the forest glades passed him

by in wonder and mute pity while his rapt inward song pulsing through space

filled the quarters with yearning.

And God came as a child and danced before him with His ringing anklets.

He broke his jar and plucked his beard and played with his hairy hands and eyes,

and sent up shouts that filled the forest with echoes. But the ascetic stirred not,

nor heard; he knew Him not whom his whole soul strove to reach, the doors of

sense all closed.

And the Lord touched him and opened his eyes and vanished. The anchorite

woke with a cry, and rose and looked: “Oh where? O where is he that came and

stayed not to bless me?” And he sped through the forest, and Light before him,

and the sound of little steps and of a child’s laughter. And he crossed many

rivers and passed many lands, crying in the wake of the Gleaming Presence; and

the woods were in May and the birds were in song that wondered at the strange

pursuit.

And they came to a land by the sea, where grew a giant tree by the shore.

For an instant rayed a glory from near it, and the Lord passed into the tree,

eluding all pursuit. And the tree fell as in earth quake and the sea was stunned

by its fall. And the believer fell on earth, and wailed, and the sea wailed with him.

Anon came a voice of comfort, and thrice measured he the log with his holy

stick and worshipped Him that slept in it with his palm over the swelling waves.

And there grew a city around him and the kingdom of men, and still the holy

man worshipped with fruit and flowers, the merry Lord that had so rewarded his

age - long worship.

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LITERARY CRITICISM

THE POETRY OF FRANCIS THOMPSON*

FRANCIS Thompson was born in 1859 and died in 1907. He began to write

only in about 1890 and his first volume of poems was published in 1893.

Subsequently there appeared two new volumes, the New Poems and the Sister

Songs; and a prose essay on Shelley, written as early as 1889, was published

only after the poet’s death.

The compass of the poet’s work is thus very small; but he has crowded

into it rare and great excellences. The poems, even as they came, were recognised

as coming from the hand of an authentic poet. Enthusiastic critics hailed the

writer as a new great poet, the greatest after the Titans of the century, Tennyson

and Browning. There was, however, no wide immediate recognition for the major

part of the work; but the best things - The Hound of Heaven and the wonderful

Poems on Children - leapt into immortality at a bound. There were, it is true,

glaring defects in the work, faults of taste and style, and many of these were

extraordinarily bad. But, through them and in spite of them, there gleamed the

face of a strange and lovely poetry. And the utterance in them was unmistakably

the utterance of genius and the great and individual utterance of a rare soul.

That this was so, was really one of the wonderful things in literature. The life

of the man was wretched, lived among moral misery of the worst kind; it was a

sorrier and bitterer existence than generally falls to his unhappy race. Yet the

soul was untarnished, and uttered itself as a pure spirit, in a stately poetry, rich in

ardour and thrilling and lifting up to the highest degree, as the poet wings up his

flights. The son of a doctor, he studied for his father’s profession, but left his

college and wandered away as, of old, De Quincey did before him. A poor fragile

*Works consulted :-

1. Coventry Patmore’s Article in The Fortnightly Review.

2. Katherine Tynan’s Article in the same.

3. H.D. Traill’s Article in The Nineteenth Century.

4. Wilfrid Meynell’s Notice in The Athenoeum.

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spirit, yet proud, he cast himself adrift on London and lived unknown for long in

utter nakedness of misery till some poems in a magazine found him friends who

sought and sheltered him thereafter. This was his life. They say that poetry is

the effluence of the poet’s life, and the wonder and glory of Francis Thompson

was that his poetry was the effluence of his life.

The poetical era in which Francis Thompson appeared was one singularly

unsuitable to the appearance of a true poet. By 1890, the major poetic energies

of the century were extinct or were fast becoming extinct. Of the twin greatest

men of Victorian poetry, Browning had,a good time before, produced his best

work, and though he continued prolific in the eighties, there was a decided

slackening of power, a decided loss of true poetry with a greater growth of his

selfwilled obscurities. The themes of such poems as the Red Cotton Night – cap

Country were not even slightly poetical and the treatment was essentially

uninteresting. The same decline of power is also visible in Tennyson’s poems of

the period; and though there is still some charm in a poem like the Death of

Enone and a grip of reality and thought grown in weight in Locksley Hall Sixty

Years After, the poet had left far behind him his great characteristic work. Of the

poetical movements that had arisen in the flowering time of the century with

others than these two, few had left substantial traces by the time we are

considering now. “The Oxford poets left no successors save in William Watson.

The spasmodic school died with Dobell.”* The Pre-Raphaelites left a progeny,

but over their work, as over Tennyson’s, a change had come. In the work of

William Morris, for example, there was, in place of the old medievalism, a quite

distinct modern note as in the Chant for Socialists. The influence of Carlyle was

becoming increasingly felt, this phase of poetry being in a great measure derived

from him. New kinds of poetry also arose, the most distinguished of which–and

which still prevails–is the poetry of Nationality. Robert Buchanan expressed a

sense of nationality with a newer return to Nature; the Celtic Revival was headed

by the distinguished living Irish poet W.B.Yeats. At the same time there was a

* I am, in this part of the essay, very largely indebted to Hugh Walker and Stedman.

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revival of Scandinavian myth and legend; and quite latterly almost in our own

time a new jingo poetry, the poetry of Imperialism, has risen in the work of

Kipling.

This is the catalogue of names and movements in the poetical era that just

preceded ours and also in some part of our own. A survey of the period quite

distinctly shows that poetry was struggling for genuine existence in the rivalry of

various new sources of stimulus that had come into being by the close of the

century. And though the age was sufficiently imaginative and there was abundant

love of excitement, it was not the age for poetry. It was mainly an age of

journalism, of criticism and scholarship rather than of imaginative creation.

The same is, in a greater measure, characteristic of the latest era. Besides

the tendencies we have detailed, there is one chief characteristic that deserves

noting. Poetry is in a large measure imitative – imitative, among others, of

Rossetti and contemporary French Lyric forms. Poetry is for the most part

‘elegant rhyming,’ “light, delicate and pretty,” and the substance is often mainly

“exotic - the chivalry, romance, and mysticism of foreign literatures.” There is

thus chiefly a growth of minor verse, often effective and pointed, rarely even

brilliant, but seldom rising above minor verse. And the technique in the poems is

marked by extreme ‘finical nicety’ and ‘polishing of measures.’ There is in them

an obsessing self-consciousness characteristic of all the literary effort of the

time, that distinct subordination of inspiration to art which makes true poetry

impossible. Against “this predominance of art over inspiration, of body over

soul,” Thompson himself in his splendid essay on Shelley, inveighs in excellent

words. Really conditions have arisen directly adverse to the imaginative exercise

of the poet’s powers. It is distinctly uncongenial time for real poets.

Francis Thompson came at this time. The new poet had nothing of kindred

with the world that got him, and in soul and manner of expression he was totally

alien to that world. He came among the writers of minor verse with the voice

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and accent of true genius. He was the descendant of the eldest English poets;

and he brought with him their imagination and something of their large utterance.

Francis Thompson has the speech of the great Post – Elizabethans, Crashaw

and Donne, and in him came again to poetry their soaring phantasy. He has in a

measure the same outlook and, to a large extent, much the same poetic

substance. He was not an imitator of them, but a kinsman born long out of his

time. He has their faults, but he is greater in their merits; and there is a

magnificence about his worst extravagances. His work is certainly of very unequal

merit. No poet has loftier imagery, but no other has an equal measure of the

excessive and the false. In his greatest poems, there is a majestic harmony of

thought and word which is elsewhere unequalled : but he has fallen, sometimes

even in the very same poems, into harsh monstrosities of diction which are

equally unequalled. Still, at his very best, he approaches the greatest in the

literature and has an individuality of poetic thought and speech.

Indeed, this individuality is the most striking fact about the poet. His poetry

is essentially a new poetry. It is true that, besides the poet’s inheritance from

Crashaw and his school, there is in a large part of his work a remarkable kinship,

in substance, manner and tone, with the poetry of Shelley, and that through the

work are strewn resemblances to Patmore, Rossetti, Coleridge and even to

Wordswoth. In spite of this, the poetry possesses a peculiar greatness and

brilliance. It has a distinct note of its own, and there is in it an indefinable pervasive

spirit quite characteristic of the poet himself.

We see this in his earliest book. The ‘Poems’ published in 1893 form a body

of poetry that in its small compass holds an extra-ordinary variety of form and

theme and consequently quite an extraordinary variety of appeal. Platonic love,

God’s love, Childhood, Death, The Poet’s life, Autumn, – all manner of themes

are dealt with. Ode, rhymed stanza of varied kinds, song-lyric, various

experimentations in metre – all are found. Besides this, we find in the poems, in

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the utterance and in the execution, really great qualities --- stately noble

imagination, subtle powerful thought and splendid mastery of words. And the

individual element in the poems consists in the peculiar poetic feeling that informs

them and in the spirit of dream and that intangible starry essence --- what

Thompson elsewhere styles ‘skiey grain’ --- with which the poet has endowed

them.

The ‘Poems’ open with a dedication to Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, the husband

and wife who discovered Francis Thompson and who reclaimed him from the

slums and gave him a place in their family till his death. Here, by a series of

beautiful comparisons, the poet expresses the measure of his debt to whom he

calls “the dear givers of his muse.” The simple words are remarkably expressive,

and the objects compared to are the various sources of beauty and good --- the

rose, grapes, gladness. The friends that are addressed, are at once ‘the growers’,

‘the diviners,’ ‘the awakeners’ and ‘the finders’ of his muse. There is a wealth of

very original and poetic illustration, and a simple emotion runs sweetly from line

to line.

After this short piece comes a series of poems entitled “Love in Dian’s Lap,”

in which Francis Thompson addresses, in poetry of rare beauty, the bright woman

of genius who presided over the house in which he was harboured. It is the most

unique kind of tribute that a poet has paid to a woman, and is comparable, as

every one has remarked, to the verse-offering that Petrarch made to his Laura,

and Shelley to the Italian maid. In tone and feeling there is a perceptible

resemblance to the Epipsychidion, but in the art, though there are glimpses of

the manner of Shelley, the poet is pre-eminently individual. And the love in the

poems is ‘Love in Dian’s lap,’ chaste love, of a kind that is not at all of the earth.

It is a love “laved with purging thoughts from all mortality” - a spiritual

comradeship.

“For lofty love and high auxiliar

In daily exalt emprise

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Which outsoars mortal eyes;”

where his soul is laid on hers

“As maid’s breast against breast of maid.”

It is an intimate companionship where he stays himself fast

“within her spirit’s arms”

“Against the fell

Immitigate ravening of the gates of hell,”

and where he grows “like a wind-sown sapling from the clift of her skyward

jetting soul.” Yet it is not quite companionship; the attitude is one of reverence.

“Too shyly reverencing

To let one thought’s light footfall smooth

Tread near the living consecrated thing.”

And this ‘living consecrated thing’ is the rarest flower of womanhood – a spirit

from ‘a distant sphere’ that has “in a dear courtesy assumed woman for grace

to womanhood.”

Her mortal part suggests in every trait her immortal soul; and

“God laid His fingers on the ivories

Of her pure members as on smoothed keys

And there out-breathed her spirit’s harmonies.”

And on her face “He has set his poems” and he has laid on her head the poet’s

crown and thrown round her the singing - robe of Paradise. And she sings, sadly

drooping, ‘to alien ears’

“The uncomprehended music of the skies,

The exiled airs of her far Paradise.”

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And time makes no mark on her and as “he works hidden by her soul’s

luminousness,” “every line he labours to impress” “turns added beauty” on her

face

“Like the veins that run

Athwart a leaf which hangs against the sun.”

And that face remains ever the same :-

“There regent Melancholy wide controls;

There Earth-and Heaven-Love play for aureoles,

There sweetness out of sadness breaks at fits,

Like bubbles on dark water, or as flits

A sudden silver fin through its deep infinites;

There amorous Thought has sucked pale Fancy’s breath,

And Tenderness sits looking toward the lands of Death,

There Feeling stills her breathing with her hand,

And Dream from Melancholy part wrests the wand.

And on this lady’s heart, looked you too deep,

Poor Poetry has rocked himself to sleep;

Upon the heavy blossom of her lips

Hangs the bee Musing; nigh her lids eclipse

Each half-occulted star beneath that lies;

And in the contemplation of those eyes

Passionless passion, wild tranquillities.”

In these lines we have the very best example of that quite individual attitude

towards woman and picturing of her that are characteristic of Francis Thompson.

And the picture in these and other lines is not so much of a new woman as of a

perfect woman so perfect indeed that the poet would not even have her like

finery as a real woman would:

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“Where a sweetness is complete

Add not sweets unto the sweet !”

The idealisation is in fact so complete as to set the picture above the human

plane. But the figuring is by itself very original and instinct with poetic beauty of a

rare kind. It is full of a strange imagination and brilliant fancy and a continual

sparkle of phrase and image. The prevailing poetical attitude is half-dreamy ---a

certain wistful - eyed reverie where the poet, for instance, sits before her portrait

in youth “and from the fragrance dreams the flower.” And there is a kind of

‘passionate coldness’ in the feeling and also a certain mystic looking-upward

with a certain search of a joy that is not common joy. In a ‘Carrier Song’ that he

sends after his lady, the simplest words clothe with a strange beauty an emotion

that is not of the earth but of the very being of his Paradise. The yearning in the

piece is intensely sweet.

“Whereso your angel is,

My angel goeth ;

I am left guardianless

Paradise knoweth ;

I have no Heaven left

To weep my wrongs to ;

Heaven, when you went from us,

Went with my songs too.

Seraphim,

Her to hymn,

Might leave their portals ;

And at my feet learn

The harping of mortals !

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“I have no angels left

Now, sweet, to pray to :

Where you have made your shrine

They are away to.

They have struck Heaven’s tent,

And gone to cover you :

Whereso you keep your state

Heaven is pitched over you !

Seraphim,

Her to hymn,

Might leave their portals ;

And at my feet learn

The harping of mortals !

It is hard to find such a singular union of beauty --- a child-like divine emotion

expressing itself in words which have the witchery of a child’s. There is a music in

the verse which is of the same kind; and the exquisite fancy and the infinitely

tender sentiment of the poem are fused with a religious feeling which is also

sweet and tender like a child’s. The poetry affects us as the sob of the lone

Lover-Soul in the Deeps of Night when parted from Divine Love.

This is of quite different kind from that other manner of Thompson found

largely in many of these poems --- where a similar quite individual emotion, less

simple, more solemn-stirring, is expressed in slower-moving verse filled with

obscure, but oftentimes quite beautiful, imagery and with harsh coinage of words.

Yet even here, in these small lyrics, we have words and phrases, unusual,

sometimes obscure :

“How frontier Heaven from you !”

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It is usual to hunt for the note of distinction in a writer - in poetry as in

prose. Every line of Thompson is bristling with distinction. In these and the

poems that follow, there speaks certainly one of the most original voices that

have uttered themselves in the poetry of the century.

And this most original poetic voice sounds exultantly in the poems that

follow, which form, in many ways, perhaps the most distinctive expression of

the poet’s genius. There is, in them, a ringing power of intellect, mingled with a

strange and incredible beauty, and there is also a very stirring and intensely

pathetic personal appeal; and there is an almost unrivalled splendour of language

as well as a quite original music of verse. In the Miscellaneous Poems that

include the Hound of Heaven, we have the very greatest and, in substance and

expression, the most characteristic portion of the poet’s work. The poem to the

Dead Cardinal of Winchester, which opens the series, rings with a passionate

personal emotion tersely uttered and is filled with bitter throbbing words on the

pain on earth and dark thinkings on man’s life.

“Life is a coquetry

Of Death which wearies me

Too sure

Of the amour ;

“A tiring - room

Where I Death’s diverse garments try,

Till fit

Some fashion sit.

“It seemeth me too much

I do rehearse for such

A mean

And single scene.”

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And there is an intensely morbid fore-feeling of death where he feels that

“the grave is in his blood” and speaks of his thoughts as repeating in him “the

turn of the worm beneath his appointed sod.”

This pain on earth and this loathsomeness of death are for the poet’s

anguished spirit the two most certain things in the world. The consciousness of

them never leaves him, and though he has gained a faith that thrills us in his

work, he has no thought, in these poems, but of his hopelessness. And this

hopelessness is not his alone but of all poets. Every poet is in a measure born to

it, “stricken from his birth with curse of destinate verse.”

“Given

In dark lieu of Heaven,

The Impitiable Daemon,

Beauty, to adore and dream on,

To be,

Perpetually hers, but she never his !”

And what is the result?

“He reapeth miseries,

Foreknows

His wages woes ;

“He lives detached days ;

He serveth not for praise ;

For gold

He is not sold.

“Deaf is he to world’s tongue ;

He scorneth for his song

The loud

Shouts of the crowd ;

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“He asketh not world’s eyes ;

Not to world’s ears he cries ;

Saith, - ‘these

Shut, if ye please.’

“He measureth world’s pleasure,

World’s ease as Saints might measure,

For hire

Just love entire.

“He asks, not grudging pain

And knows his asking vain,

And cries -

Love! Love! and dies ;

“In guerdon of long duty

Unowned by Love or Beauty ;

And goes -

Tell, tell who knows.”

In these powerful lines, we have a description of the poet’s life more poignant

and more laden with bitter plaint than anywhere else to be found in literature.

Again and again Thompson comes to this theme and intimately portrays the

poet’s burden and his pains, the pains of his double life, ‘the life of flesh and life of

song.’ For he knew them; he lived that very life; his proud sun-spirit, kinsman to

the stars, dropped on the ‘sick earth’ and pined, but did not die.

The same theme recurs in A Judgement in Heaven, where, amidst majestic

verse and extremely brilliant and obscure imagery, the singer of God and the

rhymer of Earth meeting and jostling in one on whom the singing-robe tears the

flesh and the chaplet flowers ‘puncture’ the hair, are both taken by the hand of

the Lord and admitted to the grace of Heavenly Mary “two spirits greater than

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they knew.” But besides this “expiating agony” and “these deep austerities of

strife” of the poet’s life, we have in the Miscellaneous Poems many other sources

of imaginative appeal. In the poem to a Fallen Yew, there is, amidst numerous

beauties of detail and a prevailing stateliness of expression as of verse, a good

deal of the peculiar spiritual poetry of Thompson --- where the theme is the hid

heart of the soul, “the hold which falls not when the town is got,” the heart’s

heart ‘whose floors are trod by God.’ In the three stanzas of Dream Tryst we

have a piece of pure golden poetry which Coleridge might have written; and

there is, in it, a certain mystic tone together with an ornateness of phrase akin

to Rossetti’s. The very air of dream-land is over the piece and the beauty of

dream figures.

“The breaths of kissing night and day

Were mingled in the eastern Heaven :

Throbbing with unheard melody

Shook Lyra all its star chord seven :

When Dusk shrunk cold, and light trod shy,

And Dawn’s grey eyes were troubled grey ;

And souls, went palely up the sky,

And mine to Lucide.

“There was no change in her sweet eyes

Since last I saw those sweet eyes shine ;

There was no change in her deep heart

Since last that deep heart knocked at mine :

Her eyes were clear, her eyes were Hope’s

Wherein did ever come and go

The sparkle of the fountain-drops

From her sweet soul below.

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“The chambers in the house of dreams

Are fed with so divine an air

That Time’s hoar wings grow young therein,

And they who walk there are most fair.

I joyed for me, I joyed for her,

Who with the Past meet girt about ;

Where our last kiss still warms the air,

Nor can her eyes go out.”

Yet even here there is a certain far-fetched character in the images - “The

breaths of kissing night and day”*, “Who with the Past meet girt about”; but the

lyric is wonderful on the whole.

There is a rude shock as one turns from this to the poem that follows. In

A Corymbus For Autumn, there is a rush and shattering force which strikes and

bewilders the senses, and a furious fantasy is at work ‘which spills poetry like

wine.’ Yet, even here, there are clear, noble passages and there are examples of

a fine vision and a high-toned imaginative utterance.

“But a great wind blew all the stars to flare

And cried ‘I sweep the path before the moon

Tarry ye now the coming of the moon

For she is coming soon’,

Then died before the coming of the moon

And she came forth upon the trepidant air,

In vesture unimagined-fair.”

* I owe this to a chance suggestion of Mr. Hunter

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And she came,

“As if she had trodden the stars in press,

Till the gold wine spurted over her dress,

Till the gold wine gushed out round her feet,

And hung like a whirlpool’s mist round her.”

The last lines truly express and illustrate the quality of the poetry. Imagery,

amazing and excessively obscure, is thrown in heaps and it is all ‘a whirlpool’s

mist.’ Nowhere else is the poet’s genius more manifest or more at worst.

There yet remains The Hound of Heaven, the greatest poem of this series

and very certainly the greatest poem of Thompson. It has received the highest

praise from all the critics of the poet, even from those who have found very

little poetry in much of his other work. It has been universally hailed as one of

the most wonderful lyrics in the language. In its own compass, it contains possibly

the very greatest religious poetry that is to be found in the literature. The ecstasy

of spiritual passion which inspires much of the poetry of Crashaw and his

compeers has perhaps never before found such sublime expression as here.

The majestic rush of the verse and the wonderful loftiness of imagery and speech

harmonise with the great motive of the Ode, which, in fact, in a great measure,

creates them for itself. God’s love pursues man ; he flies before it ‘sore adread,’

“Lest having him, he should have naught beside.”

And he seeks refuge in the things of the earth and of the Universe in the

wind, the sky and the stars, in the ‘young eyes’ of children and in the ‘children of

Nature.’ But they deny him. God’s servitors betray him “in their traitorous trueness

and their loyal deceit.” The good angels of children pluck them away from him

and Nature could not ‘ease his human smart.’ His harness piece by piece is hewn

from him and he ‘is smitten to his knee’ “defenceless utterly.” And he submits,

and God takes him to his love.

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“Strange, piteous, futile thing !

Wherefore should any set thee love apart?

Seeing none but I makes much of naught” (He said)

“And human love needs human meriting.

How hast thou merited -

Of all men’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?

Alack, thou knowest not

How little worthy of any love thou art?

Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,

Save Me, save only Me?

All which I took from thee I did but take

Not for thy harms

But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.

All which thy child’s mistake

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home :

Rise, clasp My hand and come.”

This is the superb motive of the poem; and in carrying it out, the poet has

thrown a glorious stream of thought and mystic language that is hard to see

anywhere else even in great poetry of its kind. And in the midst of the poem

there occur passages of extraordinary brilliancy, of poetry ‘plashy with flying

lightnings’, as well as passages of very powerful personal appeal, as this following:

“In the rash lustihood of my young powers

I shook the pillaring hours

And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,

I stand amidst the dust o’ the mounded years -

My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke.

Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.”

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And there is dazzling beauty in the lines where he talks of his ‘delicate

fellowship’ with Nature, in which we find thought as profound as Wordsworth’s

and poetry with a kind of brilliancy that was never Wordsworth’s. This one poem

will make Francis Thompson for ever remembered.

There remains, at the close, a small group of poems, the Poems on Children,

which have, in as great a measure as The Hound of Heaven, the excellence and

the quite different, though equally peculiar, qualities of the poet’s genius. There is

in them a divine grace and a rare sweet pathos; and also that peculiar kind of

Love towards the children whom he addresses, a ‘foster-Love’ ‘without one

blame or fear’ ‘unchided but by his humility.’ There is further a certain atmosphere

in the description both of things and of feeling which critics have tried to call ‘the

air of Wordsworth.’ But it is a subtler spirit that is present in lines like these of

The Daisy :

“For standing artless as the air,

And candid as the skies,

She took the berries with her hand,

And the love with her sweet eyes.”

“She looked a little wistfully

Then went her sunshine way

The sea’s eye had a mist on it,

And the leaves fell from the day.”

A mist is on the eyes as one reads them. But in the midst of this sweet

strain, there come subtle glancings at pain --- pain which is, according to

Thompson, the fundamental fact of the world.

“Nothing begins and nothing ends,

That is not paid with moan ;

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For we are born in other’s pain,

And perish in our own.”

“Our first gift to you is a

Gift of tears, my Viola !”

There is a different kind of poetry altogether in the poem To My Godchild,

where we find a stateliness of movement and many a flower of deep-wrought

fancy. There is a certain sedate brightness and a restrained flow of personal

feeling. In The Poppy there is excessive but surprisingly expressive imagery in

the first stanzas, and in the body of the poem is running a tender, wistful, half-

spiritual emotion. And there is a peculiar personal appeal here as well as in the

last stanzas --- where there is a pathos that moves us.

“I hang, ‘mid men my needless head,

And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread.

The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper

Time shall reap, but after the reaper

The world shall glean of me, me the sleeper !

........................................................

My withered dreams, my withered dreams.”

There is an accent of bitterness in these, and the bitterness element gets

rather uppermost in To Monica Thought Dying with its recurring Death-refrain.

“A cup of chocolate

One farthing is the rate,

You drink it through a straw, a straw, a straw.”

In these poems on children, intimate personal pathos --- almost pain ---

together with swift sudden glancings at the pain in the world, is interwoven in an

inexpressibly sweet manner with simple childlike joy in children and childhood ---

a unique poetry of childhood.

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And this poetry of childhood becomes glorious and endowed with Thompson’s

peculiar strain of thought and imagination in the poems addressed to the two

children of Alice Meynell, the Sister Songs. A new attitude towards the child

comes to the fore in them. He kisses in the child “the heart of childhood so divine

for him”; he kisses ‘innocency’

“And spring, and all things that have gone from me

And that shall never be ;

All vanished hopes, and all most hopeless bliss”

that ‘comes with her to his kiss’. And the child’s shadow soothes ‘the weak and

distempered being of his’ :

“In all I work, my hand includeth thine ;

Thou rushest down in every stream

Whose passion frets my spirit’s deepening gorge.

Thou swing’st the hammers of my forge ;

As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,

Moves all the labouring surges of the world.”

The child’s ‘pictured countenance lies enfurled in all his springing thought,’

and he loves her with a Love

“Without one blame or fear,

Unchidden save by his humility.”

Corresponding to this attitude, there is a low-long yearning in the poems, a

slow winding of emotion which is difficult to follow. And there is therefore, in the

major part of the poems, a long-drawn obscure metaphysique which mars the

charm of the abundant and fine poetry that surely exists in them. Now and again

this true poetical element breaks through the general unintelligible, and we light

on marvellous passages of unsurpassed witchery of word, image and music and

breathing supremely poignant pain. The exquisite fancy and spring-dance of words,

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in the first part, is of the perfectest Shelley strain; and the personal passages

more stately-moving have a unique appeal. In the second part, in addition to

the autobiographic passages, there is much excellent characterisation of the

poet’s own poetry and achievement. The magic of language displayed in these

makes hard of believing that the same poet should have side by side produced

such cumbrous ware.

There is much poetry of nature, in the first part, brilliant but a little obscure.

The imagery is very much like Shelley’s and there is a lighter lyric movement in

contrast with the stately ode movement of the second part. It is not, however,

so purely lyrical as Shelley’s, and there is much metaphysical conceit-making.

But the substance is quite as ethereal-beautiful as Shelley’s.

“The leaves dance, the leaves sing,

The leaves dance in the breath of the spring.

I bid them dance,

I bid them sing,

For the limpid glance

Of my ladyling.”

The opening lines have a fine clangour and the succeeding lines call up a

series of strange, sparkling, beautiful pictures.

“And the scattered snowdrop exquisite

Twinkles and gleams,

As if the showers of the sunny beams

Were splashed from the earth in drops of light.”

There is beautiful fancy in the lines and a rare felicity of phrase. In the midst

of the play of this exquisite fancy, there come now and again poignant passages

of the poet’s pain - intense pieces of autobiography as this one that follows:-

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“Once, bright Sylviola! in days not far,

Once --- in that nightmare-time which still doth haunt

My dreams, a grim unbidden visitant ---

Forlorn, and faint and stark

I had endured through watches of the dark

The abashless inquisition of each star,

Yea, was the outcast mark

Of all those heavenly passer’s scrutiny;

Stood bound and helplessly

For time to shoot his barbed minutes at me;

Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour

In night’s slow-wheel’d car ;

Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length

From under those dread wheels ; and, bled of strength,

I waited the inevitable last.

Then there came past

A child, like thee a spring-flower; but a flower

Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,

And through the city-streets blown withering.

She passed - O brave sad, lovingest, tender thing :-

And of her own scant pittance did she give,

That I might eat and live ;

Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.”

Such pieces of stirring personal experience are strewn also throughout Part

II of the poem, and amid arid wastes of obscure passages there are now and

again bursts of pure passion and personal description --- description of himself

and his own poetry --- set in matchless words. And though the diction is often

marred by an unmeaning Latinity the poem contains numerous verbal felicities.

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There is exquisite sentiment in this :

“They say Earth’s beauty seems completest

To them that on their death-beds rest ;

Gentle lady! she smiles sweetest

Just ere she clasps us to her breast.”

And there is a wonderfully refreshing picture, a comparison of a rare daisy-

sweetness in the following :-

“But, while as on such dubious bed I lay,

One unforgotten day,

As a sick child waking sees

Wide-eyed daisies

Gazing on it from its hand,

Slipped there for its dear amazes ;

So between thy father’s knees

I saw thee stand

And through my hazes

Of pain and fear thine eyes’ young wonder shone.”

And the poet passes on immediately to daring conceit-making.

“With rainfall as the lea,

The day is drenched with thee.”

There is much powerful as well as beautiful poetry in the description of the

desert and of the Saxon maiden, and there is really fine poetry at the close

where he describes the birth of the Sister Songs, ‘dewy love’ “taking rise and

misted into music” and anon ‘loosening back into love’ and we find the same in

the ‘Inscription’ where the poet describes ‘the two souls,’ ‘the two spirits high’

“whose shapes were familiar as love,” at whose feet “he drops his frail and

frightened flower of song.”

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There yet remains the volume of New Poems, which is by far Thompson’s

largest as well as the most various book of songs. It contains much religious

poetry, much metaphysical love-poetry, his own peculiar nature-poetry, and

short lyric fantasies where Love, Nature, Religion, Philosophy --- all come in.

There is also a great variety of metrical experimentation and achievement. Still,

the book, as a whole, does not advance the poet’s reputation. Though now and

again we come at surprisingly beautiful things, passages where the words have

‘the living tremor’ in them, the work is in the major part distinguished by an

obscurity that is very near the unintelligible, and it is bristling with Thompson’s

characteristic imperfections and faults. The conceits, the obscurities, and the

wilful rhythm-marring word-coinages which are found even in many parts of his

earlier work, where, however, they are excused by really fine feeling and form

but a part of the prevailing prodigality of power, are found here in much greater

profusion and often in a distinctly bad and unpoetic form. They come of the

profundities of his peculiar strain of thought, but more often they are due to

mere wilfulness; and this wilfulness sometimes leads him into the grotesque, as

where he talks of man as

“Cosmic metonymy !

Weak world - unshuttering key !

One

Seal of Solomon !

“Trope that itself not scans

Its huge significance

Which tries

Cherubic eyes,

“Primer where the angels all

God’s grammar spell in small,

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Nor spell

The highest too well,

“Point for the great descants

Of starry disputants;

Equation

Of creation.”

However true and subtle the thought, it is certainly not poetry and the

greal defect of this volume of New Poems is that such distinctly unpoetical

things abound in it.

It is therefore infinitely refreshing --- “a sight like innocence when one has

sinned” --- when one comes at those poems and passages of pure poetry that

are strewn here and there in the work. In the series of Poems on “Sight and

Insight,” a body of religious poetry, very near denominational, where the poet

works out ‘the hitherto unworked mine of Catholic philosophy,’ religious passion

becomes a human passion and the ardent Catholic mystic sings of Love and

Immortality and preaches Renunciation in a wonderful poem to the Mistress of

Vision. We are, in this last, taken to the very land of enchantment, ‘the land of

Luthany, the region Elenore,’ where the lady sits in the ‘secret garden’

“Set i’ the pathless awe

Where no star its breath can draw”

and where she

“The Lady of fair weeping,

At the garden’s core

Sang a song of sweet and sore

And the after-sleeping.”

A peculiar witchery is in the lines

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“So sang she, so wept she

Through a dream-night’s day ;

And with her magic singing kept she

Mystical in music -

That garden of enchanting

In visionary May.....”

And

“Her tears made dulcet fretting.

Her voice had no word.

More than thunder or the bird

Yet unforgetting,

The ravished soul her meanings knew. Mine ears

Heard not, and I heard.”

We find something of the same exquisiteness in many of the verses of the

song of the ‘Maiden Heaven,’ Assumpta Maria.

“Then commanded and spake to me

He who framed all things that be;

And my Maker entered through me,

In my tent His rest took He.”

...........................................................

“Where is laid the Lord arisen?

In the light we walk in gloom;

Though the sun has burst his prison,

We know not his biding-room.

Tell us where the Lord sojourneth,

For we find an empty tomb.”

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There is a different poetry in the magnificent ‘Anthem of Earth’ where the

Mighty Mother is invoked in the poet’s peculiar starry-splendid language and

there is a piteous wailing, the voice of sheer misery, where he asks Her ‘What is

man?’

Ay. Mother !

Mother !

What is this man, thy darling kissed and cuffed

Thou lustingly engender’st

To sweat, and make his brag, and rot,

Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness?

From nightly towers

He dogs the secret footseps of the heavens,

Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust,

And yet is he succesive unto nothing

But patrimony of a little mould

And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth

Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,

All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs

All beauty, and all starry majesties

All dim transtellar things ; even that it may,

Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,

Confess - ‘It is enough.’

The same strain is heard again and again. This pain in life and this insignificance

of our existence are the one essential substance of all Thompon’s poetry. No

poet or prophet ever felt pain as he; he realised pain as the Wise Men of old

sought to realise God.

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There is, however, in small strips of his work as in some of the lyrics at the

close of this volume, a poetry perfectly free from pain, which is bright and sweet

like flower-shine in the sun.

“God took a fit of Paradise wind,

A slip of coerule weather,

A thought as simple as himself,

And ravelled them together.

................................................

Beside the flower, he held his ways

And leaned him to it, gaze for gaze

He took its meaning, gaze for gaze

As baby looks on baby.

Its meaning passed into his gaze,

Native as meaning may be;

He rose with all his shining gaze

As children’s eyes at play be.”

In such and other passages, this volume of New Poems touches exquisite,

great, and even wonderful poetry; but the general level is a hard and dry

monotone though there is a freight of religious passion and of faith.

Almost all Thompson’s available poetry is contained in these three volumes.

Besides them, he wrote a large number of poems for magazines, and in a

striking series of such poems ‘he has glorified cricket as no other English poet

has done.’ In addition to strictly poetical work, Thompson wrote a good deal of

criticism, sane and often very acute and expressed in fine rhythmical prose. The

Essay on Shelley, which was his first piece of writing, is not merely excellent

criticism, but a ‘piece of pure poetry’ as well as an intense personal document. It

is the first essay of the poet, and some of the most exquisite things in his

poems that come after, are found as uncut jewels here. There are also

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presuggestions of some of those supremely poignant passages of autobiography

strewn in the Poems and the Sister Songs. In his wailing over Mangan’s misery

we should find the wailing over his own misery; and after, when he speaks, in

beautiful variation of phrase and image, of the poet wandering over Heaven and

returning with bleeding feet,’ we have the same bitter marking of himself. But the

Essay is, above all, valuable as revealing Thompon’s own affinities in poetic gifts

and manner. Thompson’s poetry of nature and of phenomena --- of Night, Even,

Morning --- is of the same kind and quality as Shelley’s, though he is very often

extravagant in his imagery and though there is a distinctly religious character in

this latter which is probably due to the influence of Patmore. Nature was for

each ‘not a picture set for his copying, but a palette set for his brush; not a

habitation prepared for his inhabiting, but a Coliseum whence he might quarry

stones for his own palaces.’ There is the same sparkling aeriness or starriness in

both --- a certain brilliance of expression combined with a very subtle quality. But

Thompson lacked the feminine qualities of style which Shelley possessed in full :

Thompson is more virile and has a powerful intellect whose ringing power is felt

in every line. And though in passages he is quite like Shelley in liquidity of

movement, he is a more difficult writer, and in his poems there is a stateliness in

place of the pure Ariel-quality of Shelley’s poetry.

All great poetry is ‘simple, sensuous, and impassioned.’ Thompson’s poetry

is often impassioned, but it is rarely ‘simple and sensuous’ --- except in the

shorter lyrics where the simplicity is combined with a nameless grace. The usual

characteristic of Thompson’s poetry is imagination : it is all compact of it ---

imagination, profound, soaring, and splendid with a certain ‘far-fetched’ splendour.

This is seen in his great longer poems which are distinguished by the strained

working of the intellect but lit up now and again by gleams of an almost unearthly

beauty. There is further in the longer poems a daring choosing of imagery brilliant

and full of suggestion with a certain strangeness and loftiness but perfect visual

effect and thrill of fancy. And there is also much obscure run of thought as is to

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be found in the Epilogues in the poems which makes them very hard reading.

But signs of genius are plentiful throughout the poems and they stir and stimulate

the reader. The poet has a faculty for fully carried out but very original metaphor,

which is a quality of metaphysical poetry. He has also a rare faculty for mystic

phrase with a whole volume of deep indefinable suggestion.

“Whose form is as a grove

Hushed with the cooing of an unseen dove;

Whose spirit to my touch thrills purer far

Than is the tinkling of a silver bell.”

The poet has also a command of what may be called the characteristic

epithet, a word, a phrase, distinctly hitting off a whole scene, a whole personality.

“She listened with big-lipped surprise

or “She looked a little wistfully,

Then went her sun-shine way.”

And he often packs thought, an extremity of meaning in a few simple

words :

“Lest my feet walk hell;”

there is often a whole throng of ideas, sometimes a whole faith in a single line.

“God sets His poems in thy face !”

“Look for me in the nurseries of heaven.”

But, side by side with these, there are outrages on language - ‘preparate

worm,’ ‘soothing presciences’ ; and elaborate comparisons of a fantastic nature,

the Lady in ‘Love in Dian’s lap’ to Summer, Artemis to a vintager. The illustrations

are far-fetched but finely varied ---which variation is a characteristic. The objects

of comparison are unusual, often strange and shadowy :

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“most strangely rare”

As in a vision remembered in the noon.”

But in these there is often a fine suggestion and a sense of rare fittingness.

Sometimes, however, they become fanciful and involved to a degree, which is

irksome.

“Purities gleam white like statues

In the fair lakes of thine eyes,

And I watch the sparkles that use

There to rise

Knowing these

Are bubbles from the calyces.

Of the lovely thoughts that breathe

Paving, like water-flowers, thy spirit’s floor beneath.”

The quality of the poetry ---with its merits and defects --- is plain. Thompson

himself again and again talks of his ‘mind and art’ in fitting words. His mind is

‘A shadow-world, where through the shadows wind,

Of all the loved and lovely of my kind’

and his poetry is

“Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme

Set with a towering press of fantasies.”

In the last line he hits at the right feature of his poetry as in the following he

finely expresses the nature of his imagination which is soaring to a defect :-

“Peace, too impetuously have I been winging

Toward vaporous heights which beckon and beguile

I sink back saddened to my inmost mind.”

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Thompson also judges with a surprising amount of right self - criticism his

own achievement and its appreciation by the world. His poetry treats of themes

always of a super sensible world and the perception of things of that world is

super-subtle. The poet is almost always in it and he exchanges it, when he does

so, only for pure dream-land. The poetry is thus very highly spiritual and to a

degree metaphysical. It can therefore never be other than the property of an

elect few except perhaps in that part of it --- the poems on children --- which

appeals to the commonest, and in that aspect of it --- its passionate, personal

and religious emotion ---which will never be without stirring unviersal appeal. But

the elect few alone can enter his Temple and hold by him and live by him ; the

rest will look at the gate-way and go.

“For at the elfin portal hangs a horn

Which none can wind aright

Save the appointed knight

Whose lids the fay-wings brushed when he was born.

All others stay forlorn,

Or glimpsing, through the blazoned windows scrolled

Receding labyrinths lessening tortuously

In half obscurity.

With mystic images, inhuman, cold,

That flameless torches hold :

But who can wind that horn of might

(The horn of dead Heliades) aright

Straight

Open for him shall roll the conscious gate ;

And light leap up from all the torches there,

And life leap up in every torch-bearer,

And the stone faces kindle in the glow,

And into the blank eyes the irids grow,

And through the dawning irids ambushed meanings show.”*

*Vide the Sister Songs

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A THOUGHT ON SHAKESPEARE*

I know of no greater experience than is to be had in the book of Shakespeare

for extensiveness and for reality, and to one for whom life is a far-fetched

poem, the sweet suddenness of Shakespeare’s glancings on soul and matter, on

the body of living things, is an adventure in love. All knowledge is a result of

sympathy which is an act of love, and the intimacy of one such association with

Shakespeare in the discovery of life, exceeds even a gift of beauty or the sincere

milk of the holy word. Shakespeare has been called myriad-minded, because he

takes up the shadows of all things, and is verily every time the shadow-soul in

the garment of words, and bodied with voice and gesture. The dramatic faculty,

strictly speaking, is a genius of the heart combined with the gift of lyrical

expression. The dramatist brings in his mind the soft silver stone on which the

light of humanity is struck, hence the sparks not merely fly upward, but become

a local habitation and enclose a man. To vary the figure, he coins his own mind

into semblances of living flesh in all its concerns, as it is engaged in the whole

duty of man; and then, the words come. From the chambers of memory and

from the instant pressure of the energetic mind, seasoned with a sweet hope,

convulsive in its union with what the heart has already made its own, are born

the words in which lives a Hamlet or a Cordelia. Dramatic creation is, in the last

resort, a matter of style, not exactly poetic, but humanistic, combining sleep

and motion, the restfulness of the word with the suddenness and virility of a

thought : like Caliban transformed by Ariel, interfused, bearing also a touch like

God’s fingers, it becomes the Word work which is drama. Browning is no dramatist

because his Ariel of the mind will not shake hands with his Caliban ; so the

human matter remains; and sometimes the poetry plays on it like moonlight or

as a flower; but no dainty creature of expression rises, which could sing sweetly

and dance and also love company (like Desdemona)

* 1919

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Shakespeare excels in the gift of heart and in the gift of expression and in a

certain energy of mind which possesses its own desire, and waits for sympathy

to fashion itself into characters, and for the mind to coin itself into the answering

word. Shakespeare, at his best, does not grow voluble, though excellently

knowing, –– the defect of Browning; he is not content with expanding or fervid

sentiment or with the mere excess of a being like the Shelley of the dramatic

poems who may be described as a mental creature breaking up into a well-head

of humanity; his is no mind aspiring to the calm of overruling power, while

retaining the curiosity of a disciple, whose stream is choked with willowy thought,

–– like the author of Faust, Shakespeare is not as one of the hard-handed

ancient men whose minds were lit in the dawn of ideals and in Nature’s first

youth, whose human drama is at the same time God’s, where the sentiment

and poetry are those of Prometheus the fire-bringer, intense but simple. The

pattern of drama as of life was then single, and there was no great exercise for

a genius or faculty of the heart. Shakespeare was, on the other hand, the

fullblooded amphibious son of a later time, with blood and judgement curiously,

though grandly, mixed up, whose words have the same large inharmonious

adequacy as his passion,

“like a great sea-mark standing every flaw, and saving those that eye him.”

Shakespeare gives us a world in which “there is place and means for every

man,” for every beautiful or unhealthy creature of humanity. The wonder of

Shakespeare is that he has given a voice to voiceless things, creatures of twilight,

personified moods, and half-made things of every kind, while endowing from his

own might so many creatures gifted with ‘a royalty of nature’ and with equal

dimensions. In his case, we reach the union of an extraordinarily abundant and

passionate power of self-experience with a marvellously curious and fulfilling

activity of the mind. In other words, the union of a mind and a temperament

becomes for once like the eager, searching, capable hand of a God. In Plato, the

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temperament and the mind become golden shaped like a coin : there is absolutely

no excess in the fervour or the thinking activity, and for once we have speculations

as from the mind of a god. In Goethe, the mind sallies out at every turn on the

surrounding material of life, and the creations of the artist lack material coherence,

while thought becomes constant and subtle as the open gaze of God. In

Shakespeare’s work alone. Man, and the poet’s Self and his self-creative mind,

are tempered in suitable extremes; I say extremes because Shakespeare gives

us a depth of passion and an abundance of speculation such as no other human

mind has given, while he has watched and worshipped, and re-made Man in the

latter’s own image, and has ever observed the rounded proportions of humanity.

It is true that Shakespeare’s men are exalted above the levels of ordinary life,

are creatures of a rarer air and mightier pulse than we that are fools of nature.

But this is due to the conditions of idealisation in character and circumstance

essential to Shakespeare’s form of art. It pertains also to the character of his

personality as an artist that in evoking deep feeling he should call into life great

figures to give utterance unto it. Still in the case of no dramatist has the Word-

work been so incomparable and soul a dwelling-house, not of the spirit of man,

but of the body and moving mind of man. There is no thought in Shakespeare

which is other than dramatic, though full of application to unimaginable human

concerns. Shakespeare is ‘myriad-minded’ also in the sense that he thinks

instantly for the business of his dramatic moment and for all eternity.

The pure poet has to submit to no other dominion than that of his melodious

truth or half-truth which hath none of shape and gesture, but has only the

quality of life. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” Pure

poetry creates these two kinds of melodies. Drama forces what is mere mental

activity in the poet into the moulds of personal action; and so there is no place

for the dream things and dream-words which have a meaning in poetry. In the

union of the pure activity of poetry with the imaging of personal action, we have

phrase and concept touched with the commonness of flesh but ‘human at the

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red-ripe of the heart.’ To speak without figure, we have an expression that is

intellectual in the common, as well as the rare way, and often broken with ‘a

fiery outbreak of the mind.’ This is the ordinary expression of Shakespeare and

this becomes the coin of the realm, the small change of times, as well as the

sincere nourishment of every succeeding writer. The dramatic talent or temper

gives to lyrical language - as in Browning’s lyrics - that capableness, that content,

that nerve which we associate with God when he worked the sky with His

fingers, or with Shakespeare when he worked the figure of Imogen with his

words. The quality may be described by the combination of such adjectives as

brave, hard, feminine, purposeful, somewhat like ‘melodious madrigals’ yet broken

with its purpose. Shakespeare rings all the changes of this style; and so he finds

the words for every tune of humanity, as well as for the whole music.

Every poet brings his candle of vision, which gives his quality; Shakespeare

alone had the mind, and the mould of body which could make the universal

poet. Kalidasa knew the ‘invocation warm of tender-growing plant’ of every

kind, could even be said to do.

“The subtle seeing of God’s palm,

Enscrolled with an ancient dower”

(to quote my own verse). But Shakespeare walked in the habit of the universal

and complete man. And this is Shakespeare’s glory.

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‘ODE ON A GRECIAN URN’*

A DISCOURSE ON ART

“Does not the word express more than the fact, and must not the

actual, whatever a man may think, always in the nature of things, fall

short of the truth?” - Plato.

THE life of Art depends on the unchangeableness of things which have that

kind of beginning which makes for itself an immortality. Art is not ‘self-moved’-

as Plato says the soul is; but it is a deep-revolving effort of the soul. The beginning

of a poem or statue lies in some happy disturbance of the soul which

communicates its passionate striving to the mind, which then gathers itself up

for the work of creation. Thus Art is only one degree removed from the self-

creative life of the soul which cherishes his every such moment, when a virtue

passes out of itself into some eternal form. The life of Nature and of the world

goes on amidst change, while the soul captures the fleeting forms of life by the

exercise of its magical power; and when old time is still flying, it gives those

evanescenes a seasoning and a charm by which they live fairer in stillness. Death

breathes on human endeavour and in the place where ‘the traveller’s journey is

done,’ he perhaps does the same for human things. Art is the imperishable body

given to moments of life by the creative activity of the soul, and the forms of Art

remain in the midst of life : theirs is a still blue smile like the sky, while around

them are the dust and the fighting and the heavy sleep of the world. The

unimaginable touch of Time falls on them and dissolution attends them; but they

have no inward change. The marble blocks of Phidias have just the form and

pressure and soul that the great sculptor imparted to them twenty five centuries

ago. So Keats addresses in the Grecian Urn, the “still unravished bride of quietness-

the foster-child of silence and slow Time.” Man is of a stuff that does not endure;

* 1919

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his cloud-capped towers leave not a rack behind; but the work of his mind is

beyond fate.

Whence comes this unyielding peace, this power of beauty gazing on king’s

graves and smiling extremity out of act? It is in the soft endurance of thought

that this secret of deathlessness lies. A great poem is made up of the breath

and covering-wings of single-bodied thought, morality, or passion ––a statue, of

the full-blooded life of a man or group of men stilled in ecstasy. There is,

nevertheless, a difference. In poetry, life curves and flows out again to join the

brimming river; passion has a dying fall : the transitions and changes of life are

expressed. In sculpture, on the other hand, everlasting melodies are asleep in

the shape, in a fair attitude and in eyes that do not change. Being cold, it does

not die : being wrought of the mind, it doth “tease us out of thought as doth

eternity.” The mountains are broken with change and rich skies tremble in the

rills : the stars flash and die; but here is a “silent form” with the vision of truth on

it as a gem ––a light that never sets. Art gives us a great movement of abstract

life arrested by the mind and carved into form in its own dwelling by the eager

hand of man. The Dance of Siva, a world-moving act, trembles in the mind like

golden thought, and takes form in the figure whose feet sound with the sea in

measured motion and with tabors and warriors’ bow-strings. The thought

disappears into the form as a power; things of dimension and eminence become

small as thought, and are reembodied in beauty. “Gather ye Rosebuds, while ye

may” says Life; “The rose is come to me for ever, weary of time, and it has

become Me.” says Art; while Nature says again; “Here are my new mornings,

mighty of birth, and my smile sprays up the trees where the flowers ripple.” Art

stands gravely, and never feels retiring ebb, nor rage, nor humble love. It is a

renunciant with white arms, saving and making free.

Here, beauty becomes truth; the word in Plato’s language expresses more

than the fact; and the sculptured form, as Keats says, has power to express

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“a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme”. For the passion of life ceases and

it only haunts as a legend about “the shape of deities or mortals or of both”. The

body of things is still here, “green altar, and mysterious priest, and that heifer

lowing at the skies, and all her silken flanks with garlands drest.” But the effort,

the achievement, the convulsive joy is absent. Eternity is held up in an hour; and

the face of things is stamped for ever on the work of Art: that moment in the

life of man has gone to Art as a gift which cannot return :

What little town, by river or sea shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

And this is a piece of truth, a part of that endless texture woven through all

time. It is one touch of nature taken out of the body of life, - one law, one divine

element - and taken out of the sway of Time also.

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves nor ever bid the spring adieu.

And because there is no fulfilment as in life, there neither is separation, nor

death :

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair !

And here is the heavenly compensation, the triumph over life and over

death.

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For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair !

The actual dies, and is renewed; Truth is for ever and ever. As Beauty

presents one moment of the actual in the form in which it does not perish even

when “old age shall this generation waste”, beauty essentially is truth; and because

the whole world of actuality can take imperishable forms of beauty in art, Truth

which is the emanation of the actual, becomes possible beauty. Shall we speak

of them as One Presence which is not to be put by?

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MODERN POETRY 1918 – 1940*

Edmund Blunden in Undertones of War writes “Do I loiter too long among

little things? It may be so, but those whom I foresee as my readers will pardon

the propensity. Each circumstance of the British experience that is still with me

has ceased for me to be big or little, and now appeals to me more even than the

highest exaltation of pain or scene in the “Dynasts” and than the heaven of

adoration incarnadined with Desdemona’s handkerchief......” That is the back-

ground for even this, the quietest beauty-lover among the English poets of our

day. With faithfulness to life and to what is essentially human in experience he

has made his own province “the immemorial Now which is the realm of the

loving imagination (in the words of a critic) and has also dwelt in the Past which

is inevitably as living and as discoverable as the Present” :

“When I am silent, when a distance

Dims my response, forgive;

Accept that when the past has beckoned,

There is no help; all else comes second;

Agree, the way to live

Is not to dissect existence.

Masefield is also very English, though he has humour in addition, but not the

single and studious realisation of beauty marked in Blunden’s poetry. Masefield

still sings of the September fields

“Bristled and speared, in army, rank on rank

The bread to be stands tiptoe in the sun.”

He is the poet of the bread to be that stands tiptoe in the sun, in Nature,

and in national life, the many-splendoured country life.

* Broadcast from the All India Radio, Tiruchirapalli on 14.1.42

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Walter de la Mare, as an old man, writes

“This weakling who, while yet a child,

Had heard of vice; crime; murder; rape;

Finding the “Real” a thought defiled,

Wrote poetry of escape.

At length, distrustful of his Star,

And tainted too with evil and sin,

He rattled at its padlocked bar :

But none would let him in.”

In tracing the movement of the characteristic poetry of this time I would

leave aside ‘national’ poets like Blunden and Masefield as well as the individualists

in art like Walter de la Mare, Robert Nichols, Edwin Muir and Robert Frost, and

even the Sitwells of whom Sacheverell has achieved an original perfection of

music and imagery in the grand manner in his Canons of Giant Art. It was only

W.B. Yeats among the elders of this century that in spite of his natural poetical

disposition, that of the individualist in art ––what a splendid younger poet speaks

of as

“the high thin rare continuous worship

of the self-absorbed.”

could go out in the far-flung battlefields of the young, plucking out the inward

eye which is the bliss of solitude and forgetting the bright speed he once had, a

foil’d circuitous wanderer.

“I sing what was lost and dread what was won,

I walk in a battle fought over again,

My king a lost king, and lost soldiers my men,

Feet to the Rising and Setting may run,

They always beat on the same small stone.

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You think it horrible that lust and rage

Should dance attention upon my old age;

They were not such a plague when I was young

What else have I to spur me into song?

And we find this indicated in W.H. Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats in what

sounds a brutal epitaph but excusable in a sense.

“You were silly like us : your gift survived it all ;

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather sill,

For poetry makes nothing happen ; it survives

In the valley of its saying where executives

Would never want to tamper ; it flows south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in ; in survives,

A way of happening, a month.”

Yes –– this language is excusable from one to whom as well as to all his

brother poets we may say “The mad world has hurt you into poetry.” Of them

John Buchan’s, that elderly, attractive mediocre’s, words about a slightly older

generation are just true. “The intellectual atmosphere of the immediate postwar

period was enough to drive the ordinary man into privacy. While plain folk

everywhere set themselves sturdily to rebuild their world, the interpreting class,

which Coleridge called the “clerisy”, the people who should have influenced opinion,

ran round their cages in vigorous pursuit of their tails. If they were futile, they

were also arrogant, and it was an odd kind of arrogance, for they had no creed

to preach”

That is the destructive element in this new Byronism; but there is a positive

element also. Hear the same person, the late Governor General of Canada,

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testifying in a more benevolent mood in the same book Memory Hold-The-Door

to the self-sacrificing crusader’s spirit in the Oxford undergraduate of to-day.

“But the spirit of physical adventure, I believe, is more alive to-day than ever. A

few years ago I made a list of how some of my son’s contemporaries were

spending the long vacation and found the following : as deck hand in a Hull

trawler in the White Sea; working at the Canadian harvest, as purser in a South

American liner ; helping Welsh miners to cultivate the land ; trading old rifles in

the Arctic for walrus ivory ! It is as though they felt they were living in a hard and

dangerous world and were resolved there should be no experience they could

not face. And one characteristic they have in which we were sadly lacking. They

feel their responsibility to the State. Politics have become for them a serious

personal duty. Youth is inclined to political extremes, and it is small wonder that

the causes which must appeal to them are the grandiloquent world-reconstruction,

but the reason, I think, is not only the rhetorical turn of youth, but the fact that

such causes require sacrifices and an austere discipline. Since most Englishmen

over thirty are inclined to compromise, it is right that some Englishmen under

thirty should redress the balance by extravagance.”

In the modern English poetry of the last twenty-five years we see in diverse

ways how out of all this and in a spirit of “Good-bye to all that” a terrible beauty

is being born. Consider the prelude. Vera Brittain wrote: “All happiness to me is

incredible; the supreme moments of the War did not bring happiness ; how

should they, lived as they were under the shadow of death? My obstinate diffidence

arises partly because I am afraid of giving life the means wherewith to deal me

another of its major blows............” This obstinate, yet sensitive diffidence - not

pessimism - is one of the notes of all the modern poetry of our time. It is there

in the poetry of the aged Yeats as in that of the young blood-boltered Wilfred

Owen who died in the last great war.

115


“Having inherited a vigorous mind

From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams

And leave a woman and a man behind

As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems

Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,

Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams

But the torn petals strew the garden plot;

And there’s but common greenness after that.”

So Yeats in the volume of poems “The Tower” (1928) and Wilfred Owen in

“Slowly our ghosts drag home ; glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed

With crusted dark-red jewels ; crickets jingle there;

For ours the innocent mice rejoice ; the house is theirs;

Shutters and doors, all closed : on us the doors are closed,

We turn back to our dying”

and so also among the latest, Stephen Spender in Beethoven’s Death Mask

“He moves across my vision like a ship.

What else is iron but he? The fields divide

And, heaving, are changing waters of the sea

He is prisoned, masked, shut off from being ;

Like like a fountain he sees leap - outside.”

and in

“What I expected was

Thunder, fighting,

Long struggles with men

And climbing

After continual straining

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I should grow strong ;

Then the rocks would shake

And I should rest long.

What I had not foreseen

Was the gradual day

Weakening the will

Leaking the brightness away,

The lack of good to touch

The fading of body and soul

Like smoke before wind

Corrupt, unsubstantial,”

On its finer side, this “diffidence” derives from Shelley,

“And now, alas ! the poor sprite is

Imprisoned for some fault of his

In a body like a grave” :-

that is the fate of Ariel always - the self-sacrificing passion for another’s

happiness, often the whole world’s, -

“Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who

From life to life must still pursue

Your happiness ; for thus alone

Can Ariel ever find his own.”

On its unhappy side it derives from those two brewers of bitter faith-and-

unfaith for finer man, themselves secure in their mean-spirited intellectual pride,

and in the shelter of Conformity - A.E.Housman and T.S.Eliot.

To take only T.S. Eliot in this connexion, he writes in Gerontion

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“I that was near your heart was removed therefrom

To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.

I have lost my passion : why should I need to keep it

Since what is kept must be adulterated?

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch ;

How should I use it for your closer contact?”

And so the Hollow Men of Eliot’s world-famous poem were born.

“We are the hollow men

We are stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw, alas ;

We whispered together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar.”

Men catch the infection of the decay whether they cling to old or go out to

embrace the new adventure, ––though the hero of the poem did neither, yet did

not escape the onset of futility.

“I was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,

Bitten by flies, fought.

My house is a decayed house,

And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner

Spawned in some estaminel of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.”

118


Once upon a time Mr. T.S. Eliot, now a strict Anglo-Catholic, delighted to

sting all high mortal dreams and institutions like the gadfly ; as a fine critic puts it

“in some former existence among the myths of Greece, Mr. Eliot was probably

a gadfly.”

“The broad-backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly in the mud.

Although he seems so firm to us

He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,

Susceptible to nervous shock ;

While the True Church can never fail

For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err

In compassing material ends,

While the True Church need never stir

To gather in its dividends.

I saw the ‘ Potomus take wing

Ascending from the damp savannas

And quiring angels round him sing

The praise of God, in loud hosannas

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean..........

* * * * *

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

* * * * *

119


What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

* * * * *

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The whole effort of the younger poets, who at Eliot’s subtle call, came in

under the shadow of that red rock and were shown fear in a handful of dust, in

the nineteen-twenties, but who had at last to break away from him, was to fly

from Law and the death of Law to Love, to Love and to Politics –– in a world-

sense.

“Like love I say,

Like love we don’t know where or why

Like love we can’t compel or fly

Like love we often weep

Like love we seldom keep.”

That is W.H.Auden’s voice. And the call is to Action, in each case.

“Underneath the abject willow,

Lover sulk no more ;

Act from thought should quickly follow :

What is thinking for ?

Your unique and moping station

120


Proves you cold ;

Stand up and fold

Your map of desolation.

Bells that toll across the meadows

From the sombre spire,

Toll for those unloving shadows

Love does not require.

All that lives may love; why longer

Bow to loss

With arms across?

Strike and you shall conquer.

Geese in flocks above you flying

Their direction know ;

Brooks beneath the thin ice flowing

To their oceans go ;

Coldest love will warm to action,

Walk then, come,

No longer numb,

Into your satisfaction.”

And what is their stand in Politics like? Hear W.H. Auden again :

“Because you saw but were not indignant

The invasion of the great malignant

Cambridge ulcer

That army intellectual

Of every kind of liberal

Smarmy with friendship but of all

There are none falser.

121


A host of columbines and pathics

Who show the poor by mathematics

In their defence

That wealth and poverty are merely

Mental pictures so that clearly

Every tramp’s a landlord really

In mind-events.

* * * * *

For private reasons I must have the truth, remember

These years have been a boom in sorrow ;

The presses of idleness issued more despair

And it was honoured.

Gross Hunger took on more hands every month,

Erecting here and everywhere his vast

Unnecessary workshops ;

Europe grew anxious about her health,

Combines tottered, credits froze,

And business shivered in a banker’s winter

While we were kissing.

* * * * *

Know then, cousin, the major cause of our collapse

Was a distortion in the human plastic by luxury produced.”

But here is the hope of Love right in the midst of “empires stiff in their

brocaded glory, the luscious lateral blossoming of woe, scented, profuse and

“of intercalary ages of disorder

When, as they prayed in antres, fell

Upon the noblest in the country right

Angel assassins.”

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And this is the hope, ––a hope in Love, Knowledge and Action.

Small birds above me have the grace of those who founded

The civilisation of the delicate olive

Learning the laws of love and sailing

On the calm Aegean ;

The hawk is the symbol of the rule by thirst,

The central State controlling the canals ;

And the blank sky

Of the womb’s utter peace before

The cell, dividing, multiplied desire,

And raised instead of death the image

Of the reconciler.

But “out of the turf the bones of war continue”

Unable to endure ourselves we sought relief

In the insouciance of the soldier, the heroic sexual pose

Playing at fathers to impress the little ladies,

Call us not tragic; falseness made farcial our death.

Not brave ; ours was the will of the insane to suffer

By which since we could not live we gladly died.

And now we have gone for ever to our foolish graves.

And in the end what have we got out of it all?

“The poetry is in the pity’ Wilfred said,

And Kathy in her journal ‘To be rooted in life,

That’s what I want.’

These moods give no permission to be idle,

For men are changed by what they do ;

And through loss and anger the hands of the unlucky

Love one another.

123


We have come back to Wilfred Owen and now the wheel is come full circle,

and we are here, - the same in another world-war.

But there is a going forward, not just forward-looking thoughts.

Never higher than in our time were the vital advantages,

To matter entire, to the unbounded vigours of the instrument,

To all logical precision we are the rejoining heirs.

We want only the “disciplined love” which alone could employ these engines;

instead, hatred promises an immediate dividend, and all of us hate.

Of that disciplined love Stephen Spender also makes his gospel.

“In this time when grief pours freezing over us,

When the hard light or pain gleams at every street corner,

When those who were pillars of that day’s gold roof

Shrink in their clothes; surely from hunger

We may strike fire, like fire from flint?

And our strength is now the strength of our bones

Clean and equal like the shine from snow

And the strength of famine and of our enforced idleness,

And it is the strength of our love for each other.”

A splendid individualism is nothing.

“I say, stamping the words with emphasis,

Drink from here energy and only energy,

As from the electric charge of a battery,

To will this Time’s change.

Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,

Drinker of horizon’s fluid line ;

Ear that suspends on a chord

The spirit drinking timelessness ;

124


Touch, love, all senses ;

Leave your gardens, your singing feasts,

Your dreams of suns circling before our sun,

Of heaven after our world,

Instead, watch images of flashing brass

That strike the outward sense, the polished will

Flags of our purpose which the wind engraves,

No spirit seek here rest, But this : No man

Shall hunger : Man shall spend equally

Our goal which we compel : Man shall be man.”

Or as from a speech in one of his plays

“Fall marble, fall decay ; but rise

Will of life in brothers ; build

Stones in the form of justice ; not justice

Into the fall of funeral monuments.”

And right through everything these poets say is that happy-unhappy tone

of meditation, rooted in biology, if you like, (love-death-death-in-life) slipping in

between the beauty coming and the beauty gone, in the whole universe of

things open and occult. C. Day Lewis, the John Donne of our day –– in poetic

style alone ––crystallises it in this poem :

“There is a dark room,

The locked and shuttered womb,

Where negative’s made positive.

Another dark room

The blind, the bolted tomb,

Where positives change to negative.

We may not undo

That or escape this, who

Have birth and death coiled in our bones.

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Nothing we can do

Will sweeten the real rue,

That we begin, and end, with groans.”

Now like Francis Thompson’s

“Nothing begins and nothing ends,

That is not paid with moan ;

For we are born in other’s pain,

And perish in our own.”

Now one last word, about the style of these poets. Virginia Woolf writes of

the moderns : “No age can have been more rich than ours in writers determined

to give expression to the differences which separate them from the past and

not to the resemblances which connect them with it : (That is the contrast with

a poet like Blunden, with whom I started in this review)........ the courage, the

sincerity, the wide spread originality. But our exhilaration is strangely curtailed.....

Much of it has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a

bleak shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and

expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash is soon

over......... The irritation is as acute as the pleasure was intense.”

Again, of any of these major younger poets it can be said, as of Donne,

that “he tends to avoid not only the cloudy and the hackneyed but all images

with emotional associations.” A young critic reviewing a recent book on Donne

writes “we know how Donne drawing mainly on learning science, the mechanical,

technical, esoteric and inobvious for precise, surprising and unique illustrations

has been of special interest to this age.” And this is quite true. In the poetry of

these splendid moderns we do not find the beauty of those poems which, in the

words of one of the elder English critics, J.C. Squire (who however patronised

them) “touch the heart, gratify the senses and please the taste,” and Squire

adds, “where the intellect is also stimulated so much the better, but the other

things alone are surely enough.” Dr. Johnson also wrote in his Life of Dryden

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“Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight ; by their power of

attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader

throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity;

whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are

perused again ; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such

as the traveller casts upon departing day.”

Not so is the poetry of C. Day Lewis and W.H. Auden and others still younger.

But they know they have their reward. In the Letter to W.H.Auden Lewis writes

“Daffodils now, the pretty debutantes,

Are courtsying at the first court of the year :

Their schoolgirls smell unmans young lechers. You

Preferred, I remember, the plump boy, the crocus.

Enough of that. They only lie at your feet.

But I, who saw the sapling, prophesied

A growth superlative and branches writing

On heaven a new signature.”

“On heaven a new signature” ; and that is their sufficient reward,

“Dear hearts, ye ‘voyage through strange seas of thought”

But not ‘alone’ ! Good company through each storm ;

And days of physical adventure at norm

Of your soul’s temperature in distraught

Spain, Austria, Iceland, large America wrought,

Of many metals, into one shield from warm,

Beast-like, blithe, tyranny abroad ; and ‘calm

Of mind’ in genial pedantry ; ye’ve sought,

And found at last your ‘leisure to be good.’

Though Toller hanged himself in a New York room

And many a golden lad did come to dust,

Yet the sage microscope the fervid womb

Of life did open to the Muse’s youngest brood,

To stir and calm your so intellectual lust.” (Anon.)

127


THE SPIRIT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY*

Some say that writing in a diary a man will tell chiefly of trivial emotions and

goings-on, and that they are of particular use to the diarist himself and to his

reader. But why should the diarist take himself down at all by distrusting his

moments of generous self-love and enthusiasm? The habit of holding cheap our

own brave translunary things does not take account of the fact that sometimes

we are greater than we know. I, for one, like the company of the self––worshippers

of whom the chronicler of small beer in one’s own life is a pretty noticeable kind.

The other variety is that type of man who threatens, in Carlyle’s phrase, to

strike the stars with his sublime head, and sometimes brings it off.

How small a part, indeed, are the great emotions, of a decent everyday

order of living, since most men would stop with the prayer “Give us this day our

daily bread” and their adventures are only from Great Street to Little Street !

I speak of mental adventures also. But when a man wishes to put down something

as a record of himself at the end of the day, a brittle glory shines on his doings,

and for the time he is a new creature. Then he finds that the whole creation is

drawn to scale in his own life, and that the full sum of a man is only this that

there are some virtues, beauties, livings, friends, which to him, and for the time

and the season exceed account. This is how the soul of a man like Pepys measures

life. In somewhat the same way does the well-tuned pietist also achieve a certain

perfection, like Amiel or Dorothy Wordswoth. The great business of living turns

into a decorative, or a self-decorative art for each of these people who do not

experience the effort and the drooping of him who takes dejectedly his seat on

the intellectual throne.

Another class of egotists is of those who “soul-hydroptic with a sacred

thirst” suck at the flagon and are in most cases creed-drunk like Mahomet.

* July 1925

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A man in this case talks as if he were not only his brother’s keeper, but his

Maker’s. But a different order of saints which incongruously enough includes

Charles Lamb, comprises the great mystics and others, some of them delicate

workers, men with a beautiful self-love. Another type, the proud soul, such as

Milton’s, describes itself as elaborately as a planet would, if it be given to self-

recording and could write in a diary or write sonnets. “Thy soul was like a star”

said Wordsworth of his master ; but the image of a planet brings the idea of that

disturbance of the soul which often seized upon Milton as well as on Shelley who

was a small but fiery planet. Indeed, for a thinking man or artist, there is an

activity which is quite inward, a darkly moving abstract existence - Blake’s mental

strife in another form –– essentially different from his human contacts, his

normal, animal, spiritual and social engagements in life ; Endymion, Alastor, and

indeed all Shelley’s poetry, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Browning’s psychological

exercise and sensationalism exemplify this, besides some of the tumultuous

parts of every great scripture like Isaiah in the old Testament. There are, however,

men who attain a piety, the worship of a higher spirit of judgment in oneself

which makes one great-hearted and sane always. Fitzgerald reached something

like this, and Renan also, I think, and Goethe, the greatest of these. “The leader

is fairest, but all are divine. “These are the great reconcilers, going the round of

everyday circumstance, asking for skill in the ways of feeling and doing, healers

of men and judges, while in Goethe’s marvellous ease, the skill of great creating

nature came along with the other gifts. The Autobiography of Goethe is a scripture

of one mode of intellectual and moral life. Goethe is among those who are

“Not tired of tears and laughter,

And men that laugh and weep,

Of what may come hereafter,

For men that sow to reap.”

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He waits for each and other, he waits for all men born ; in his own words,

he is a disciple ; but he brings to us the spirit of Truth.

Autobiography is, in this way, a serious form of art in the hands of one who

is endowed with the spirit of judgment. A gift of sympathy, a feeling for the

infirmities of the race, is the quality of the great critics of life and morality. If the

moralist tells of his own folly with the same wide-awake scorn that he would

have for the unconsecrated foolishness of others, then he is a rare physician,

and he gives us, as Goethe does, the higher kind of autobiography. Again, when

an artist is inordinately excited at the pageant of his own spiritual journey and

thrills to the beauty and fervour of his ideas, and is wholly unashamed of his

extravagances, he gives us a touching history of the spirit blowing where it

listeth, that which is divine blowing over the unlikely places of human nature.

Rousseau’s Confessions and some intimate books of the Russians are of this

kind.

But, usually, the privilege of writing in a diary does not belong to the gifted

alone, but is, of right, the shopkeeper’s, the Parliament man’s, the clergyman’s,

and the Civil Service Officer’s as well. When such people wirte of themselves and

others, there is a cheeriness about it, which makes them extraordinarily sapient;

and they give their opinions of things not usually in their line, in a convincingly

childish manner. Thus letters, love, religion, and other high matters become

interesting as these people look at them ; to them there is a sense of

accomplishment, a sense of acquired merit which is their gain ; to us the

gladsomeness of finding how after all such a thing as human nature is the beauty

of the world. The small diarist who thus puts on a certain charm has much skill in

dealing with all stuff of the conscience, though he is content with inconsequential

but very human things. No doubt, some essential gift of saying things comes to

the man who works and has dealings with his fellowmen ; else, the brave men

of the days of the Epics should not have had their large utterance, nor could the

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active men, cavaliers or puritans, of every later age have had their say. Further,

the intellectual commoner ––soldier, priest, or shopman ––is the man who in his

intimate hours carries on those simple processes by which the impulses of his

time and country come into practice. This happens, for instance, in a time of

war when every man shares the mental strife of the choice and master spirits of

the hour (sometimes men like Horatio Bottomley). So no man or woman whose

life is of some account in his or her particular station wants the natural touch.

Nay, other things, even some of the graces of character, are added unto them

who constantly take thought in their diaries for the everyday humanity that

pulses around and within them. For theirs is “neither filthiness, nor foolish talking,

nor jesting which are not convenient; but rather giving of thanks” the giving of

thanks to the human heart by which we live, and to the eye that hath kept

watch over man’s mortality.

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SATIRE IN THE GREEK DRAMA*

De Quincey says “Greece, as may well be imagined, was the birthplace of

Rhetoric ; to which of the Fine Arts was it not?” But he adds “two characteristics,

indeed, there were, of a Greek popular assembly, which must have operated

fatally on the rhetorician –– its fervour, in the first place ; and secondly the

coarseness of a real interest”. Greek Satire also arose as an attack upon the

Rhetorician and his manifold evil-doings by the self-conscious, poetically-tempered,

aristocratic wit of Aristophanes and his weak successors. Professor A.W.Ward

writing about Pope’s Satire remarks: “The spirit which dictated them is the same;

a strong and not unworthy self-consciousness, combined with a relentless desire

to damage the reputation of all to whom the poet was opposed on public or on

private grounds.” This strong quality of indignation, tempered however to the

balance and beauty requisite of Comedy, is the core of Aristophanic satire; and

we don’t have so much of the “endless egotism” of Pope. The great Greek

Master was a healthy being.

Again De Quincey writes, in the same essay from which I quoted, Rhetoric,

“Suppose yourself an ancient Athenian, at some customary display of Athenian

oratory, what will be the topics? Peace or war, vengeance for public wrongs, or

mercy to prostrate submission, national honour and national gratitude, glory

and shame, and every aspect of open appeal to the primal sensibilities of man.

On the other hand, enter an English parliament, having the most of a popular

character in its constitution and practice that is anywhere to be found in the

Christendom of this day, and the subject of debate will probably be a road-bill, a

bill for enabling a coal-gas company to assume certain privileges against a

competitor in oil-gas, a bill for disfranchising a corrupt borough, or perhaps some

technical point of form in the Exchequer Bills’ bill. So much is the face of public

* A broadcast talk.

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business vulgarised by details. The same spirit of differences extends to forensic

eloquence. Grecian and Roman pleadings are occupied with questions of

elementary justice, large and diffusive, apprehensible even to the uninstructed

and connecting themselves at every step with powerful and tempestuous feelings.

In British trials, on the contrary, the field is forenclosed against any interest of so

elevating a nature, because the rights and wrongs of the case are almost

inevitably absorbed to an unlearned eye by the technicalities of the law, or by

the intricacy of the facts”. This description of the subject matter of disputations

in the assemblies and of pleadings in the courts of law in Greece and Rome,

especially in the former, gives us the background of Aristophanes’ Comedies,

particularly the words “every aspect of open appeal to the primal sensibilities of

man”. How the Greeks succeeded in investing public business with the spirit of

the well known saying of Meredith!

“In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be ! Passions spin the plot ; We are

betrayed by what is false within”, is one of the beauties as well as the weaknesses

of Grecian life and character. And Aristophanes, the Satirist, is wonderfully at

home in that world of Sophists and Sycophants, swindlers, and the equivalents

of the “harlot press” of Lord Baldwin’s famous gibe, of cowards, wasters, ruffians

and effeminates and “divine philosophies” with a bestial side to it, which was

Athens. “Enemies of Society” are the theme ; ‘enemies’ from the point of view

of intellectual refinement, and civic decency. “Far more dangerous enemies of

society (than the bawds and courtesans) are those whose formal rights to full

membership of it are unquestionable, but whose personal qualities render them

incapable of recognising its obligations”. And so Greek comedy became a social

weapon for the “preservation of the conventions which make corporate social

life.”

Aristophanes was born about 444 B. C. probably at Athens. “His father

Philippus had possessions in Aegina and may originally have come from that

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island, whence a question arose whether Aristophanes was a genuine Athenian

citizen ; his enemy Cleon brought against him more than one accusation to

deprive him of his civic rights but without success”. It would be unjust to attribute

to personal spleen and personal animosity, the whole of Aristophanes’ scathing

invective against Cleon and his ilk ; there is in him, a zeal for public morality and

there is also some “natural piety”. But the narrow, unsympathetic, contemptuous

feeling of amusement which alone Hobbes took account of in his analysis of the

“passion of laughter”, is there to the full. As a fine contemporary humorist,

Ronald A. Knox, puts it, “humour without satire is, strictly speaking, a perversion

of the misuse of a sense. Laughter is a deadly explosive which was meant to be

wrapped up in the cartidge of satire, and aimed unerringly at its appointed target,

to deal its salutary wound ; humour without satire is a flash in the pan ; it may

be pretty to look at, but it is, in truth, a waste of ammunition.” At the same time,

as the late Humbert Wolfe said, “it is not enough for a satirist to hate. Else satire

were the universal possession of every taproom gossip. The black must have a

white black-cloth, or a steady candle must throw the shadows against the screen

––the satirist must have love in his heart for all that is threatened by the objects

of his satire.”

What things did Aristophanes hate and what did he love? Let us consider

these from ‘The Birds’ - his greatest imaginative satire.

“Two citizens of Athens take wings to themselves and set out to build a bird

city, remote from the daily instance of this subnubilar world”. But what happens?

It is Athens over again, and no mistake. “For grasshoppers sit only for a month

chirping upon the twings; but our Athenians sit chirping and discussing all the

year, perched upon points of evidence and law.”

Again :

“I’m filled with the subject and long to proceed,

My rhetorical leaven is ready to knead,

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Boy, bring me a crown and a basin and ewer

A rhetorical banquet, I mean ; and I wish

To serve them at first with a sumptuous dish

To astound and delight them. The grief and compassion

That oppresses my mind on beholding a nation

A people of sovereigns!”

That was said by Aristophanes of an orator in the popular assembly.

“Then take us as Gods, and you’ll soon find the odds,

We’ll serve for all uses, as Prophets and Muses ;

And never bilk you of pigeon’s milk,

Or potable gold ; you shall live to grow old,

In laughter and Mirth.”

That is the politician’s promise in the Kingdom of Birds to the children of

men.

“Parricides are in esteem ; among the birds we deem it fair,

A combat honourably fought betwixt a game cock and his heir !”

“There’s a bustle

Of expelling aliens ; people are dragged out

From the inns and lodgings, with a deal of uproar

And blows and abuse in plenty, to be met with

In the public street.”

How like Nazi-land this is, even in the “lofty sealed city” of the Birds!

Or :

“Get out !

With your ballothing-box and all. It’s quite a shame,

Quite scandalous! They send commissioners here

Before we’ve finished our sacrifice.”

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“We’re the wardens

of your gardens,

To watch and chase

The wicked race (the vermin train)

And cut them shorter

In hasty slaughter”.

“If you wish to cheat in office, but are inexpert and raw,

You should have a kite for agent, capable to gripe and claw ;

Cranes and Cormorants shall help you, to a Stomach and a thrust.”

“In the time before,

There was a Spartan mania, and people went

Stalking about the streets, with Spartan staves,

With their long hair, unwashed and slovenly

Like so many Socrates ; but, of late,

Birds are the fashion - Birds are all in all

Their modes of life are grown to be mere copies

Of the bird’s habits ; rising with the lark,

Scratching and scrabbling suits and informations

Picking and pecking upon points of law ;

Brooding and hatching evidence.”

Again :

“I was anxious to procure a pair of wings,

To say the truth ; wishing to make a tour

Among the clouds, collecting images

And metaphors, and things of that description.

Our dithyrambic business absolutely

Depends upon them.” (i.e. the clouds).

That is the fate of Poetry in the Kingdom of the Birds also. The Satirist

exults in local and petty revenges which the whirligig of time brings in.

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“Why, I won’t disgrace my family,

My father and my grandfather before him,

Served as informers ; and I’ll stick to it,

The profession. So, you’ll please to hand’em out

A pair of your best wings, Vulture’s or Hawk’s”

And so on, with the various orders of petty larceny entrenched within a

democracy - Aristophanes pillories them all. And Socrates himself, the bravest

of the Wise who soar, yet ever roam, who saw the glittering temples of his

hostile gods and was unafraid - Socrates himself is brought in, to pay his debt to

the monarch of Satire, along with other famous ones.

“Beyond the navigable seas,

Amongst the fierce Antipodes,

There lies a lake, obscure and holy,

Lazy, deep, melancholy,

Solitary, secret, hidden,

Where baths and washing are forbidden

Socrates, besides the brink,

Summons from the murky sink

Many a disembodied ghost ;

And Pisander reached the Coast,

To raise the spirit, that he lost ;

With a victim, strange and new,

A gawky Camel, which he slew

Like Ulysses - whereupon,

The grizzly sprite of Chaeraphon

Flitted round him; and appeared

With his eyebrows and his beard,

Like a strange infernal fowl,

Half a Vampire, half an Owl,”

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And lastly for an epitome of the Athenian nation :

“Along the Sycophantic shore,

And where the savage Tribes adore

The waters of Clepsydra (The water clock which marked the time alloted

to each advocate - also a stream or spring)

There dwells a nation stern and strong,

Armed with an enormous tongue,

Wherewith they smite and slay :

With their tongues, they reap and sow,

And gather all the fruits that grow,

The vintage and the grain ;

Gorgias is their chief of pride,

And many men there be beside

Of mickle might and main.

Good they never teach, nor show ;

But how to work men harm and woe,

Unrighteousness and wrong ;

And hence the custom doth arise,

When beasts are salin in sacrifice,

We sever out the tongue”.

These passages from Aristophanes’ masterpiece, The Birds, show what

things he hated but, how he could often lift them up into the realm of white,

celestial thoughts, and so they also tell us what he loved. “His city in the clouds

is, after all, only a parody of an Athenian Colony”. But what imaginative beauty

this satirist creates ! And he can wield Satire like a flail. Take this passage from

The Knights describing the contest between Cleon (The Paphlagonian) and his

rival.

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“The Villain now shall meet

In equal war,

A more accomplished cheat,

A viler far”.

“The Paphlagonian! Here he’s coming, foaming

And swelling like a break in the surf! (that is his definition)

With his hobgoblin countenance and look ;

For all the world as if he’d swallow me up”.

And the Sausage seller, after hearing Cleon boast says :-

“All this I can do; more handily too;

With ease and dispatch; I can pilfer and snatch,

And supply ye with loaves from another man’s batch.

“You–– (Demus, the Athenian state) that in combat at Marathon sped,

And hewed down your enemies hand over head,

The Mede and the Persian, achieving a treasure

Of infinite honour and profit and pleasure,

Rhetorical praises and tragical phrases :

Of rich panegyric a capital stock ––

He leaves you to rest on a seat of the rock

Naked and bare, without comfort or care”.

And the chorus to the Sausage-seller,

“Keep your advantage, persevere, attack him, Work him, bait him,

You’ll over-bawl him, never fear, and out-vociferate him.” And here

is again a picture of the Athenian State in the person of Demus :-

“Mark me! When I seem to doze,

When my wearied eye-lids close ;

Then they think their tricks are hid :

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But beneath a drooping lid,

Still I keep a corner left,

Tracing every secret theft,

I shall match them by and by,

All the rogues you think so sly,

All the deep intriguiing set,

Are but dancing in a net,

Till I purge their stomachs clean

With the hemlock and the bean”.

“With the hemlock and the bean” did Athens purge the state of her choice

and master spirits, sometimes; but, that she brought forth those rebels, who

would not “cease from mental fight” is her glory through the ages, That Athens

also brought forth, besides her three greatest tragic poets, the Satirist

Aristophanes “a pard-like spirit beautiful and swift” and through him wrought

comedy into as fine an instrument of purification as tragedy, makes her the

matchless teacher of the ages, As Charles Lamb wrote of Hogarth’s pictures we

may say of Aristophanes’ satires, “there is in them the scorn of vice” and the

“pity” too; something to “touch the heart and keep alive the sense of moral

beauty”, taking moral beauty as arising in “large draughts of the intellectual day”

of the splendid sunrise of Satire.

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AG

ALA

XY


ESSAYS ON CULTURE

EDUCATION AND THE COMMUNITY

THE common people in India lead lives so wanting in the elements of order

and beauty as to fill with sadness those who themselves yearn to know how to

live and desire to promote the common happiness. Indian Society in all its ranks

suffers from lack of vitality, of practical ability and even of the mind to think of

remedies for its ills, and everywhere we see the poverty of aims of that class

which should produce the natural leaders of the people. Our greatest leader,

who is among the perfected men, constantly tells us what sort of death is on us

all, and especially on the Masses whose recovery alone shall avail us, if we but

knew how to cause breath to enter into them and to lay sinews upon them that

they might live. Gandhiji once said in a memorable answer to Dr. Rabindranath

Tagore : “True to his poetical instinct the poet lives for the morrow and would

have us do likewise. He presents to our admiring gaze the beautiful picture of

the birds early in the morning singing hymns of praise as they soar into the sky.

These birds had their day’s food and soared with rested wings in whose veins

new blood had flown during the night. But I have had the pain of watching birds

who for want of strength could not be coaxed even to a flutter of their wings.

The human bird under the Indian sky gets up weaker than when he pretended to

retire. For millions it is an eternal vigil or an eternal trance. It is an indescribably

painful state which has to be experienced to be realised. I have found it impossible

to soothe suffering patients with a song from Kabir. The hungry millions ask for

one poem - invigorating food. They cannot be given it. They must earn it. And

they must earn it by the sweat of their brow.” The problem of the cultural growth

of the Masses is put here in its essence : how out of these evils of poverty,

suffering and the unillumined mind should come the freedom, culture and wealth

of everyday happiness into which we dream they shall some day enter, when

they come into their own.

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Our lower classes have intelligence and a habit of ministering to themselves

under terrible privations; but of capability for bettering themselves they have

none. As a people, we have perhaps less of the will to set about remedying

wrongs than other races, which in Hindus, for one thing, has frequently been laid

to the charge of some part of their religion. To give all our people forward-

looking thoughts, having first set them to work harder for themselves, and to

bring the national culture to their doors with the instruments of the old time no

less than our own, are the tasks of each generation. When contemporary morality

in every sphere is being moulded, the first problem is to make the ideal of a

common culture and inspiration to all our people and to the poor who are

always with us and whom we may not forget.

Our hope of betterment is in the inherent qualities of our people, for they

have not been utterly ruined morally by subjection, want and the withholding

through centuries of the showers of blessing which descend upon a people

enjoying the gift of freedom, though lacking many things else. To-day, at the

dawn of a freer dispensation, the outward adjustment of the nationalities, striving

for mastery in our country, is coming nearer, as our best men are animated by

that generous spirit, which when brought among the tasks of real life, works for

the highest good of all, and not for anything less noble. The high endeavours of

an awakened people are themselves an inward light which shall make bright the

path before them. Given these brighter auspices, it is our duty to undertake,

each in his place, the actual work among the common people to overcome their

indifference, as one of the Russian leaders is reported to have said, “showing

the peasant with a clear plan in our hands that he can understand, that we are

not altogether fools in this matter, and that we understand more than he does.”

The peasant in our country is not against the higher orders, though certain

foreign influences may be even now at work stirring up the forces of distrust

and enmity. We have to set to work early “on the strengthening of the walls and

foundations” of a Society which as yet shows no need of entire renovation.

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This deeply concerns us of the higher classes, either as we share in the

work of Government or set out for voluntary service of some kind. Does the

educated class stand now where its forefathers stood with a people for the

ordering of whose spiritual life and the very layout of society, so to speak, they

took responsibility? The Masses will soon want to be helped forward, and under

many difficulties we should acquire the strength of mind and the gift of obstinate

practical endeavour necessary to leadership. Politics have inevitably been a great

disturbing factor; but the wisest of the politicians, in the words of the Rt. Hon’ble

V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, bewail the unreadiness of the voluntary worker “to dare to

narrow one’s range, to define one’s aims precisely, and to labour persistently till

results are achieved.”

The picture of a beautiful India, the India of our aspiration, has got already

its frame, the life of the masses, the old village life in the main. “The frame,

which to the uninstructed gazer is a mere limitation and obstacle, hindering his

wider view of reality, is to the painter the beginning and foundation and condition

of all that appears within it.” Consider this account of our villages in the Simon

Report which is based upon the observations of the Agricultural Commission.

“Each village tends to be self-contained; in each will usually be found some

persons with permanent title in the land, either as owners or tenants with

hereditary occupancy rights; of these, some cultivate all they hold, others with

larger areas at their disposal rent out to tenants on a yearly agreement a part

or whole of their lands; below these in the scale are agricultural labourers,

frequently of different castes from the actual cultivators; some of these have

acquired small plots in proprietary right or permanent tenure; some have a field

or two on rent; many are members of the depressed classes; some work in the

fields only at times of pressure and are mainly engaged in crafts such as leather

work or in tasks regarded as menial. The vast majority of the peasants live in

debt to the money-lender who is often established in thir midst. Included in the

village population will be certain village officials generally hereditary, such as the

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headman, the accountant, the watchman, - persons carrying different titles in

different provinces but representing the traditional organisation of village life. In

all but the smallest villages, there are one or more skilled artisans, carpenters or

ironsmiths, who provide and repair the simple agricultural implements, bullock-

gear and water lifts. Household requirements are supplied by a shop or two,

when owners frequently provide the first market for village produce and add to

their earnings by engaging in money-lending. Almost invariably there is a religious

building, a temple, a shrine or mosque.” Is there any movement? “The

organisation of Indian industry in certain large towns is every year assuming

greater importance; facilities for the villager to visit an adjoining town or reach

the railway are increasing and in many country centres during the last year or

two the enterprising proprietor of a motor-bus can count on a full load; three

general elections for the provincial councils and for the Central Legislative

Assembly have taken place; and some three per cent of the rural population

(about ten per cent of the adult males) have had the novel experience of visiting

a polling-booth and being helped to cast a vote; elections for local bodies some

of which are of less recent origin, and which more closely touch both the interest

and the understanding of the countryside, have occasionally stirred the lives of a

slightly larger fraction; villagers have been gathering in the cool of the day to

listen to the contents of a vernacular newspaper communicated by one who

could read it; co-operative societies in many districts are beginning to give the

agriculturist a better sense of the importance of working with his neighbour for

some common purpose ; and the organisation of this or that group of politicians

in the towns may have its representative in the village teacher or tradesman or

small official. But any quickening of general political judgement, any widening of

rural horizons beyond the traditional and engrossing interest of weather and

water and crops and cattle, with the round of festivals and fairs and family

ceremonies, and the dread of famine or flood –– any such change from the

immemorial preoccupations of the average Indian villager is bound to come

very slowly indeed.”

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And what about cultural growth? “Many a ryot, unable to read or write, is

capable of knowing clearly, within the narrow range of his experience, what he

wants and of making as intelligent a selection of a representative as some of his

literate fellow-villagers. But taking India as a whole, in the census of 1921,

17 out of every hundred men, and 2 out of every hundred women, who are

twenty years of age and over are entered as literate. The conclusion obviously

is that illiteracy prevails among adults to a most unsatisfactory degree, and that

unless a child has learnt to read and write in early years, it is unlikely that it will

become literate later in life. A sustained course of instruction for a minimum

period of four years is essential to establish a literacy that lasts..... The spirit of

the people is the foundation of education, and if the people desire to be educated,

or can be inspired with a desire to be educated or even can be stirred into a

willingness to be educated, well-directed effort to educate them will not be

thrown away.”

Speaking under the auspices of an important private body like the Library

Association, I would dwell on the ways in which, alongside of Government whose

business it is to provide education and to extend the amenities of civilised life,

we can organise opinion, take some share in training men and women for social

work and bring together the men of goodwill. The Government, working through

the Local Bodies, must finance and manage the larger social welfare schemes.

In England, the Church easily out-distanced her opponents in voluntary effort in

education on a grand scale; there is no such indigenous agency in India. In a

well-ordered state, as Sir Visweswarayya says, in his book, Reconstructing India,

“the Government and the people usually supplement each other’s efforts in

policy, organisation and production; and the object of establishing national

organisations with the Government at the apex of the system is to increase

political power, national industry and social betterment.” Of old, however, as

Rabindranath Tagore writes, “the social life did not depend on outside aid, nor

did outside aggression perceptibly mar its serene beauty........ In our country

the king has made wars, defended his territory and administered his laws, but

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the social organisation has attended to everything else from the supply of water

to the supply of knowledge, so simply and naturally that the repeated floods of

new sovereignty which swept over the land with the advent of each new era did

not reduce us to brutes by destroying our Dharma, nor scatter us into

vagabondage by breaking up our social structure.” Dr. Rabindranath Tagore himself

has founded a social organisation at Sri Niketan, as an adjunct to his Viswa

Bharati University with the aim of “approaching our countrymen in a natural

way” and preserving the spirit of our social institutions. Considering the complexity

of the problem and realising that the remedy for the backward condition of the

country is the extension of the privilege of self-government, we should seize

every opportunity of obtaining the political cure for the country’s ills, and at the

same time organise ourselves so that as Sir Visweswarayya suggests, “large

numbers of persons will be engaged in the study of current problems and in

keeping themselves in touch with what is happening in progressive countries,

and the activities needed for progress will be maintained, and mass consciousness

developed, and all the material and spiritual powers in each area will be mobilized.”

“And a certain man lame from his mother’s womb was carried, whom they laid

daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms of them that

entered into the temple.” And do we not know that it is the genius of our Nation

that now sits for alms at the Beautiful gate of the temple?

The Village frame-work should be made to be a thing compacted by that

which every joint supplies ; the owners of land and tenants and agricultural

labourers, the different castes, the money-lender and the priest, the artisans

and village officials and even the impoverished landlords. We have to invoke the

Spirit of organisation –– the spirit resident in kingship ––

energy, knowledge, courage –– to make rural India once again

alive and beautiful. The forces arrayed against progress are too great to be

combated by individual effort alone. As Mr. M.L.Darling in his fine book on The

Punjab Peasant writes, “This is realised in Japan and her task has been greatly

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simplified by the ardent patriotism of the people which manifests itself almost as

much in the humdrum life of the village as in the more conspicuous fields of

politics and war. The innumerable local organisations which have sprung up

throughout the land are an example of this. A Japanese village has an agricultural

association, manure-houses, co-operative societies, an association for young

men and another for young women, a society for promoting knowledge and

virtue, several thrift organisations, and finally, an association of those “who aim

at being distinguished.” In our country a national organisation acting closely with

the Local Boards should attend to the reconstruction of village society, finding

for each place its workers, –– young men and the yet vigorous men from the

class of retired officials, and a doctor, a teacher, a petty engineer to settle

among the landlords and the small land owners. When village society is thus

replenished and strengthened, agricultural progress is bound to come together

with a more civilised life for the men who live in villages, the spirit of better living

having been implanted in them. Education will in course of time become the

inheritance of each village boy or girl, and alongside of it, the wider education of

co-operation involved in the ideal of “better farming, better housing, better

living” will make for those social changes which will knit up the village-community

afresh. Let us have the Village Co-operative Bank with an Institute as a part of

it, and the Elementary School where the grown-up villagers may often meet for

lectures and small musical entertainments and so on, and let us recover the

religious background, if we can. The toddy-shop is now the labourer’s club and if

the women learn to come there to look for their vagrant men, it may by and by

cease to be tolerable. We are threatened with the dissolution of village life, the

innate resistance of even the women being lost, and with the employment of

men and women together on the public works, the old structure tends to break

up, bringing on the complete moral ruin of the villagers. A great national

organisation is needed, whose business is to plant in villages throughout the

country, group of earnest men who would strive to unite the people and steadily

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build up local organisations, each of these taking up a few villages and the small

town adjacent to them. The co-operation of town and country in everyday life,

which is the problem of agricultural nations, is thus rendered easy. Cultural growth

consists in the development of all those things which have a civilising influence

upon the people and in the strengthening of the roots of economic life which

itself depends for its fruition not only on enlightened leadership but the growth

of knowledge and self-respect in the villagers. We have incessantly to work for

the growth of manhood in our people, of a new interest in education, and of the

spirit of cordiality in the business and social relations of people of different classes

and castes. But, though these improve, there will still be no change in the peasant’s

lot, unless his regeneration is first secured by a reform of land tenure and by the

recognition of the higher classes that their service should blend and mingle with

his service, for the poor grow numerous where some labour and the many are

unfruitful.

The problem of culture is the same for the village and the small town; for

our townships growing without plan ceased to grow up after a time and have

been straggling, ill-conditioned units, while the villages, owing to the steady flow

of their population into the towns, were dilapidated. Like the peasants, the urban

workers are in very sad case, some of them belonging to the class which sends

its young poeple to the first few forms of an English school and finds they do not

make good. But adult education of the ordinary kind must come in more useful

to the poor of the towns than to the village people, of whom they are the

offshoots and with whose unfruitful works they have fellowship. Elementary

education which is the Government’s concern is the beginning of moral progress;

but it rests with the people to organise local opinion and to form an unofficial

educational service. If enlightened men and also a few educated women belong

to the locality, they can best call forth that desire to be educated on which so

much depends, and they can assess results and determine the kind of schooling

which is best suited to the area, for one district differs from another in cultural

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aptitude. Even after the elementary stage, it lies with members of the community

to create the atmosphere of enlightment for the high school or small college

which may come into existence. Indeed, whatever pertains to the personal life

of the pupil, especially his moral training, is the concern of the Community whose

gifts should take such form as the School temple or chapel or mosque, the

School Club or Institute. Where the Community thus joins hands with the

Government in building the steps which the young Pilgrim of Truth ascends it

comes by such refinement and capability that the whole art of life comes natural

to it, a community that shall not “rail against the beauty of Knowledge” and

would let her work prevail.

The making of a people that loves knowledge, whose spiritual life is lived in

the light of the maxim, “Those who are no subtle listeners have no gracious

modesty of opinion” was

familiar to us in the past. There is evidence in our social history that our forefathers

attempted to make a people grow sober and refined by listening to their teachers

of accepted dogma and morality, the Pandit and the Pauranika, - a contrast to

the mob which only reads newspapers in our time wherever elementary education

has succeeded. Can we recapture that ideal and attune it to a modern aspiration,

the seeking of good fruit on every tree planted in our vineyard? The promoters

of Adult Education have to consider if they can reconcile the recovery of old

national virtues with the principle of equality in opportunities for self-development,

the obtaining by all our poeple of vigour, curiosity, and energy in modern conditions

of life. Adult education in India must for some time be of a limited kind. Our

criteria are that the teaching be catholic and vital, that it be simple and take

account of the limitations of the common people, and that it bring quick results,

for in certain branches of knowledge all of us are really behind-hand. The

unremitting execution of the plan together with the organisation of all our

resources is the paramount duty. The circulating or the travelling library, the

cinema, and if possible, wireless, together with the old fashioned “arrangements

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for play and song and festivity galore” which bring together crowds of our people

hurrying from the most distant places will all be useful. The present schools can

themselves become centres from which teachers and others with leisure can go

out to spread knowledge of that kind which is the leaven of progress. The High

School in every small town ought to be the quickener of progress around it, the

meeting of culture and a common national patriotism to those outside it. Adult

education here must for many years be confined to the simple aim of giving the

populace information on the facts of life, and the essentials of living, and on the

lessons of contemporary histroy, in such a way that even that meagre knowledge

comes home, in the old phrase, to men’s business and bosoms. Adult education

in England is an instrument of higher education, especially in the Tutorial Classes

organised in University centres. That is a far-off dream to us, who only wish in

Tagore’s pregnant words, “If there were some centre of our Shakti, where all

could unite, where thinkers could contribute their ideas, and workers their efforts,

then, there the generous would find a repository for their gifts. Our education,

our literature, our arts and crafts and all our good works would range themselves

round such a centre, and help to create in all its richness the common wealth

which our patriotism is in search of.” And this re-discovery of our people, this

striving to lay hold of a more sure word of prophecy for them, shall go on from

one frail generation to another until for them the day-dawn and the day-star

arise in their hearts.

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ADDRESSES MAINLY EDUCATIONAL

THE WORK OF AN INDIAN UNIVERSITY*

I must thank the authorities of the University Extension Board for doing me

the honour of asking me to give the first lecture of their course. I might not have

come forward to speak on the subject I have chosen, “The Work of an Indian

University,” if I had not felt that we had frequently to come together and think

out the direct and indirect ways of improving the public education of our country

if we are to effect a real national revival. We should study how to implant the

principle of organisation in both our private acts and our public work.

Working together at first spasmodically and feebly, but gaining corporate

strength as we get along, we can form organisations for the expression of public

criticism and for consummating a new social morality, a new education and

discipline conceived for the welfare of society in every grade. In all such work,

there are difficulties presented by existing institutions; but hasty re-organisation

will not avail. In those institutions which have come to us either from old or only

from recent times and which are designed for the self-realisation of our race, we

often find some secret life from which we cannot escape and which beats us. We

can only put to use the quiet discipline of individual minds on the one side and the

co-operative effort of each group, self organised and free, capable of disinterested

and effective action in its own sphere and in the wider national sphere as well. I

consider the University Extension Board or the Teacher’s Guild or any such special

organisation to be marked out for the function of a new social group. The duty

of the group is to work hard, not less to conserve the achievements in education

and in social reform of the community, in the application of sane economic laws

and in the complex fashioning of the individual citizen, than to reach forward to a

new destiny in each direction.

* A lecture delivered under the aupices of the University Extension Board, Tiruchirapalli (1941)

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A new political freedom will set free such vital forces of delight in our public

institutions as will transform them. But whether this freedom comes quickly

from the action of the united intelligences of the two peoples, the British and the

Indian, or comes at the end of a period of tribulation and chaos during which the

old landmarks may be destroyed, the intensive moral education of the community

must be taken up by those for whom the strife and noise of the many

contemporary policies are of little account. So I would ask leave in speaking

about the present work of our Universities, to dwell mainly on their social

achievements in the broad sense. I would dwell on the contribution to our moral

civilisation made by them, and on the methods by which the present organisation

of an Indian University can both extend and improve such contribution.

UNIVERSITY AIMS AND IDEALS

A University is the source of higher knowledge of all kinds, and the training-

ground of the best and the second-best citizens of a community, situated as a

distinct unit in a certain area, and marked by linguistic, cultural and economic

interests peculiar to itself. It will be judged both by the knowledge which it

imparts and by the power it has to draw the hearts of men to itself by its

aspiration and achievement. Its service to the spirit of man –– a service both

practical and spiritual –– will be the test of the energy, the power of social

adaptation and co-operation, and the wealth and industry put into it as gifts

from the community. Again, by their capacity for life and by their art of living, by

their skill of organisation and their reserves of moral strength, by their power of

criticism and their natural piety, shall we know the worth of the men passing out

of the University and the value of the organisation and the method of higher

education which it possesses. The quality of its graduates resulting indirectly as

well as directly from its special features of organisation and method, is the only

test of a University’s success. Method in the large sense, acting on the national

genius, –– itself, in some sort, a creation of the national genius –– is the first

concern of any university. Its constitution, the definition of powers and duties,

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and the action of each university authority are certainly factors in its success;

but the curricula and the nature and training of teachers and pupils –– together

with the condition of its Colleges and Schools of teaching or research –– matter

much more for its work of creating “values” and ideals of life and character

essential to the community. I propose to touch on these only to warn and to

comfort, to seek warning and comfort for myself and all my fellow-workers,

while trying to see our position truly in all respects.

Under the present system, we have been taught the English Language and

its literature, history, philosophy, many of the modern sciences up to a certain

standard, some branches of law, medicine and engineering, and the rudimentary

forms of research. Our teachers have often been conscientious men, though of

no brilliant intellectual endowment, men of method, but unable, except in rare

cases, to teach that virtue to their pupils. Where foreigners were concerned, the

I.C.S. got better men than the I.E.S ; high quality was not always insisted on

and on the other hand the best of our men, when administrative posts were

thrown open, were lured away from their traditional positions of guardianship

over the community and of service to the race. The Law fell from the priest, a

thing more serious than the priest falling from the Law. The thing goes on even

to-day, as our best graduates pass into the administrative services. Though it is

now possible to get distinctly good men from among Indians on to the staffs of

colleges, they can get in only slowly, as the older men retire. But more than the

inferior quality of the teacher, what made education soulless and feeble, were

the narrowly materialistic aims in teaching, the dead weight of examinations on

teacher and pupil, with the desire of both to go on with only such teaching at

lectures and classes as will lead to a degree, and the killing of the spirit of

learning.

Of many of these evils, poverty has been the cause, but the community

does not seem alive and it has ceased to respect altruism. In every section of it,

we see selfishness rampant, a selfishness which has not the merit of being

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efficient. What we need is a new ethical purpose in higher education, the end

being a New Morality the impulse to which will come first from the great seats of

learning, the Universities.

We have done nothing for ourselves. We have put forth efforts to raise our

political status, and to get some political power, and that struggle is reasonable

and of human validity in the highest sense. But even in the political work, except

in recent years, we did not think of its social foundations, the stirring up of

political hunger in the communities in consonance with the idea of the inter-

marriage of interests and even of cultures. As a friend said to me, when India

passed out of the 18th century moulds, she was captured by England; and what

Europe gained in the 19th century she has to seek and find now. Even when the

Government genuinely, though fitfully, attempted to implant a new moral

education for her communities, the field was not prepared, the soil was unready,

the manure lacking and the showers of blessing did not come. It is true that

under a national government, the growth of education would have been watched

and tasted, and our social consolidation might have been accomplished; but our

duty now is to develop all the powers of re-construction from within the

community and to invoke the spirit of organisation not in words, but in deeds, in

sane, everyday work of various kinds. And as a part of the National Plan it is our

task to re-condition our educational institutions, to transform the actual teaching

conducted in them, and to effect a change of policy in Higher Education.

THE MADRAS UNIVERSITY

What are the chief features of the Madras University? The University

supervises the work of a great many colleges which give members to its governing

bodies, carry on teaching in subjects and courses laid down by it, and submit to

periodical inspection. But the colleges are above all held together by the system

of common examinations, the method and the quality of which alone can test

the efficiency of the component parts as well as of the university as a whole. An

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efficient examination-system can prevent the university from deteriorating; but,

in the very nature of things, there cannot exist through a long period of time an

efficient examination-system for so large a number of colleges scattered

throughout the Presidency. It is distressing to note that at present the

examination-system is on the point of breaking down, or becoming farcical, so

unfit have become the very instruments of the University, the material from

which the examining boards have to take shape. On the other side, the teaching

of various subjects in the colleges has become so spiritless and effete that it

fails to meet the requirements of our present examinations. “University results”

tend in these circumstances to be of little use from a higher point of view; a

degree is often not the thing which it stands for, for it has not behind it any

training of the pupil, practical or spiritual. Learning becomes as mere sawdust,

and the impoverishment of the life of the community goes on ; but we must

check it.

THE TEACHERS AND THE TAUGHT

We teachers have to recapture the first, fine, careful discipline that the old

Hindu Teachers inculcated, and the idea of which our race in all the changes of

the centuries has held in reverence. Our private troubles and anxieties, poverty,

the oppression of customs and social obligations, the paltriness of our comforts

and joys, the mean personal rivalries incident to the scholar’s calling, and the

“scholar’s melancholy which is emulation,” these ought not to distract us from

the steady pursuit of distinction for ourselves in our tasks. For ours is the proud

communion with the soul of the people as it is being fashioned with our hands

and by our vision. And on the other hand, I would put to the community and

also to the authorities of a University, the words of John Galsworthy: “But when

we have secured our best heads of education, we must trust them and give

them real power, for they are the hope –– well-nigh the only hope –– of our

future. They alone, by the selection and instruction of their subordinates and the

curricula which they lay down, can do anything substantial in the way of raising

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the standard of general taste, conduct and learning. They alone can give the

starting push towards greater dignity and simplicty ; promote the love of

promotion, and the feeling for beauty. They alone can gradually instil into the

body politic the understanding that education is not a means towards wealth as

such, or learning as such, but towards the broader ends of health and happiness.

The first necessity for improvement in modern life is that our teachers should

have the wide view, and be provided with the means and the curricula which

make it possible to apply this enlightenment to their pupils.”

But we have to work on human material often of a poor quality ; and here

we come to the crux of the problem, the intellectual unfitness for their task of

the great majority of the students in each class of a college. I would here state

my own view, that several of them may prove fit for a college education if the

medium of instruction is the Vernacular instead of English. By the way, the

University may think of instituting a full college course leading to a degree in the

Vernacular language of each area, in those institutions which teach only “oriental”

learning, and link these up with a system of reorganised Intermediate and Pass

Colleges, the two sets of institutions being auxiliary to each other. But I am

dealing with the question of admission to our colleges of students quite fit by

their age, their mental equipment and aptitude, and the worldly position of their

family. These things may be determined in the school stage itself, and the

University may only set a strict test of Matriculation. But the Matriculation test

cannot be strict because of the rush of members of every community, persons

at every social level, to share in that higher education which has become the

only avenue to material success. Further, because of the deficiency of our shools

of all grades, we may feel that it is useless to shut out the less fit from their only

chance of mental advancement; for the Matriculation test itself is a mechanical

test based on results of a large-scale examination for a great area, and therefore

not an infallible thing. The present position is that the great many who have

poured into the colleges as in the old rush to the gold fields in certain countries,

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cannot yet be stopped. So the colleges,as in a different way in America, have to

lower their standards of teaching and examination, and to make learning

mechanical and yet attempt to grow figs from thistles, and –– in the case of the

idle rich –– to consider the lilies of the academic gardens, who toil not nor spin

but would yet shine and be gorgeous and arrogant. We cannot yet keep the

higher classes out of the indiscriminate race for the degrees of the University,

and that being so, we cannot prevent the degrees cheapening and the University

being choked with its own produce. Meanwhile, the community suffers from

torpidity and decay, and the rumblings of the storm of the uprising of those

socially depressed for ages, come to us in the lull of our trivial social and political

excitements.

TYPES OF ORGANISATION

But can the University ever dominate the situation? It can, provided that,

as a first step, it takes more trouble with its examinations. But the University

cannot do with a system of examinations alone; a university of that kind is a

misnomer ; and as we saw, examinations do continually deteriorate and become

useless. What then is the remedy? Do we want a new type of university in all

cases? How is the University to maintain the higher education of the country at

the high level necessary to its quality being unimpaired, and its becoming the

instrument of a gradual social adequacy and perfection to be reached by the

local community? We must seek the way of strengthening the colleges, each in

its place, increasing its efficiency without injury to others, allowing for the ordinary

forces of competition, while a higher measure of co-operation between them

should be sought for. The University may set a limit to the numerical strength of

the bigger colleges, and thus provide a reasonable opportunity of service for

other colleges in the neighbourhood that have some vitality. While offering

guidance, the University should leave the colleges alone to set their houses in

order according to individual patterns of management and economy and

organisation, and it should not impose a standard on them from without in the

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matter of buildings, salaries, and a mere stereo typed fashion of equipment. I

may appear to plead for the weak colleges, but I want only the survival of the

fittest, the fittest inwardly as well as outwardly. I still do plead for the local

community girding up its loins to strengthen and enrich its colleges as well as its

schools of all grades ; I also believe that even brick-work is in a way a power for

sound ideals. I think it a sound view that a college of a moderate size, having,

say, from 350 to 500 students on the roll, provided it is well manned and

equipped, has it in its power to give a good type of higher education suitable to

Indian conditions; it may also be made to serve, by a little reorganisation, the

purpose of an advanced High School for the less gifted pupils. Remembering

that no more than this can be done for the majority of students so long as the

courses of study are in English, it seems to me that the development of a

unitary university as the self-expression of a fine college as carried out, for

instance, at Chidambaram is not a fundamentally useful thing. Even when it is

well done, as at Chidambaram or elsewhere, its value to the local community is

not commensurate to the expense, intricacy of organisation, and, may I say,

the false prestige which such an institution may come to nurse. The ultimate

reorganisation will include the unitary type, the collegiate system of teaching as

in the older English Universities, and the affiliating or federal University, but, in

the immediate future, those colleges should be encouraged to go on, which

owing to superior equipment and wealth, or owing to the presence of an

organisation like that of the Jesuit Fathers, can go on in spite of a diminished fee

income and vanishing Government grants, and they will gradually come to stand

for the higher ideals and execute the new policy which the University, becoming

more and more their organ of collective self-expression, may bring forth.

“We must pool our resources in the direction of unity of aims, not

concentration or amalgamation, and evolve a co-operative system of colleges

in the same or different localities”. As the Sadler Commission wrote years ago,

“those colleges which are to take part in a co-operative system must be more

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adequately staffed; and in order to make this unmistakably clear, it will be

necessary to classify the colleges in such a way as to admit to the privileges of

the co-operative system only those colleges which are able to make a real

contribution to it.” This was said of colleges in a particular centre, but it may be

applied to a system of colleges situated in different localities. “The colleges ought

to have greater freedom in arranging and directing the work of their students,

partly by having a larger voice in the definition of curricula, but still more by being

free to determine, within defined limits, how much formal instruction, and of

what kinds, their students should receive; and they should enjoy this freedom in

regard to pass, honours and post-graduate students.”

But particular colleges have their problems; the bodies which own and

maintain them are entitled to change their policy and their organisation. The

great Tambaram scheme of the Madras Christian College seems to be the result

of their urgent desire for re-conditioning it and of a larger revival of that original

Christian spirit from which all such institutions had their being. But in fact, there

is as much to be said for the continuation of the smaller colleges in the places

where they first took root, as for their removal into another habitation with a

view to contributing to the success of a central seat of learning primarily designed

for their special community. The Protestant Missions can concentrate, and they

are doing so; Government also may do so; but a college, striving after self-

dependence, may typify the other kind of strictly local but vital effort in Higher

Education, which must have its value in a large country like ours having a

composite community in every place. If the unity of the community is to come

from a common economic life, a common education and a quickening common

life of the spirit for the people of each large local area, irrespective of the interests

and creeds and policies which appear to divide them, my case for the smaller

colleges, Hindu, Protestant or Catholic, or even Muhammadan, still holds. In the

smaller colleges will spring up that energy which will make strong and beautiful

the communal life; it is much better to perfect them where they exist so that

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they could become the Cathedrals and Churches of the new national morality,

than to expect the strong sons of the Central Christian or Hindu College, each a

child of the ideal, to go forth alone after his fine rapture of college life on his

ministry in each new field, and to go forth into the fastness of the old evils in the

land. The truth is that in each of the smaller colleges, we provide such men with

a rallying point, an institution to help them in their service. The highest research

must come from the university proper, but the impulse to moral education must

come in a similar way from the scattered distribution centres, the smaller colleges

whom the community should delight to honour and to employ.

KNOWLEDGE CANNOT DIVIDE

But, can several colleges unite in serving the local community? They can

certainly work in friendliness, and attempt to exercise the old spirit of division

and antagonism and develop a common loyalty to the high interests symbolised

by the University. If this cannot come about, the colleges and the enlightened

men of the society for whose good they are working, shall have failed in integrity

of purpose. Knowledge cannot divide, though religion and politics may divide us.

I know that the stronger colleges alone will live in future, and they are trustees

for the knowledge and the spirit of freedom in action which have to grow in the

society around them. And in proportion to what the community does to support

them, it will secure a new outlook and a broader basis of social harmony. Will

the colleges labour to keep straight, to keep efficient when they are members

of a loose federation called the University? Present conditions do not bring

encouragement to that hope. But what shall we do if the unitary universities go

to the bad and fail in their academic and their human work? I am in favour of

industriously repairing the existing machine; I hope that by the diligent co-

operation of the best men among us, we shall re-construct many parts of our

University’s work in a new spirit of co-operation, moved by that strong impulse

to the renewal of life in things dead and decaying, which may come from religion,

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from a fervid culture, and from a national self-consciousness which is a noble

thing. So on the question of general organisation, I would leave the University

much as it is ; but I depend on the revival of faith and honesty in the educated

men of the country as a whole. In research, in an industrial orientation, there is

room for change and reorganisation, for the amassing of resources by the

University at the centre, and for correlation of its work to the economic life of

the country, for reform on Sir C.V. Raman’s plan or Sir Visweswarayya’s plan.

For the rest “our stability is but balance, and wisdom lies in masterful administration

of the unforeseen.”

EDUCATIONAL METHOD

I shall now touch on aspects of method, the method of Higher Education,

of the teaching of subjects and the training of the individual and the creation of

“values” which lead up to a new morality –– method in close relation to the

national genius. The late Viscount Haldane wrote, “And it is in their Universities,

with their power over the mind, greater in the end than the power of any

government or of any church, that we see how the soul of a people at its

highest mirrors itself.” So we must in some sort set the goal of Indian education.

Mr. Baldwin in a Rectorial Address said, “Throughout all these activities in which

you are engaged in this University, there is the double motive of acquiring

knowledge and learning to think truly. The latter is the more important task. The

greatest service this or any University can render the modern world is to discharge

well this duty which is laid upon it, and to send forth year after year generations

of young men and women who have not only a stock of ideas but minds that

turn on the poles of truth.” These words indicate the nature of the finer discipline

evolved in a University, and communicated by ritual and symbol and group

secret, as well as by the very ardours of the intellectual life lived in solitude. One

of our greatest educationists the late Sir Ashutosh Mukerji, said “To create capacity

and culture, to develop skill for the hand and sight for the soul, to open the

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means of honourable living to the individual and to reveal to him the full meaning

of life, is the noble duty of the educator and is, I think, the highest patriotism.”

But he emphatically repudiated “the wild assumption rampant in these days of

economic stress, that one of the functions of a University is to provide

appointments for all its graduates and under-graduates.” He added: “There should,

however, be a constant and a legitimate tendency to mould our system of

education to satisfy the growing and varying needs of the nation. The Universities

now say to their men of letters, you must be leaders of men as well; to their

men of science, you must be men of affairs too. The world in its turn demands

that its engineers should be cultivated men and that its artisans should be skilled

equally in the liberal arts. Where theory and practice thus meet in unison, there

must be reason, and this reason is restoring to learning its fundamental unity in

whose spirit we reap the strength and the vision of the University.” How shall we

establish an intellectual and moral order in the University in consonance with the

most vital aspirations of the masses and with the special culture of the heart

and the brain in the classes, and at the same time work up those sides of

General and Technical Education which directly aim at fitting students for material

success? The old idea of a University is that it is a place where all subjects are

taught; in India, the stress laid on the ‘literary’ subjects has been excessive

because they are easier to teach. Moreover, technological and scientific subjects

are of recent growth even in the West, and require first-rate equipment, and, in

India, we further require much progress in various industries before these studies

become indispensable; and indeed, they must be viewed in close relation to the

industrial development of each locality. The trained men have to be absorbed in

industrial concerns; and the excess of such men will in its turn become a problem

! Even for the products of a ‘literary’ education, who can merge in the civilized

life of the community at various points, there comes a time when the supply

outruns the demand, and this has happened in all countries. So the practical

uses of Higher Education are always fewer than the general uses to which culture

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and the training of the soul can be put. As Haldane says, “Your way is clear ––to

get the best you can for yourselves in this generally unique period of your lives,

and to strive with all your power to make the fullest use of what you have got,

and to impart it to those around you.” Again, “To the question how you may

best equip yourselves for this endeavour, my answer is an old one ––by getting

ideas, ideas which, as has been said, have hands and feet, ideas which not only

transform that on which they are brought to bear, but in doing so expand

themselves and their meaning. For nothing is so expansive as the train of thought

suggested by an idea that is really great ; and if it has once been fully grasped,

nothing transforms the whole outlook in the fashion that its suggestive power

does”. The actual teaching of a University should subserve this end; its courses

of study should be adapted to the need of each one and of society as a whole

for the Idea that regenerates, for the motive for action that is consummately

lovely and will endure.

‘HUMANITIES’ AND THE OLD INDIAN TRADITION

What remedies are open to us for the evils of a foreign medium of instruction,

of external examinations, of the unscrupulous clutching of shadowy gains of the

thirftless degree-hunting, and again for the spiritual evils of boredom, of blindness

to the natural interest, of paralysis of the right instincts, of the idolatry of the

past, of the cowardice of youth, of the sloth and ill temper of the shuttered

minds of the old? Knowledge we acquire, but fail to master either its spiritual or

practical applications; the “humanities” have no power lastingly to renew our

soul, though we study them for years, because they happen to be mostly foreign

literature, history and philosophy. It is necessary to revive the humane studies

of the older Indian tradition, not only in the colleges generally and in the University,

but to bring the “English” and the “Oriental” colleges into some relation of mutual

dependence and fusion at some points. Is it possible to provide that students of

any of the colleges of either type can spend a year or two at the completion of

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their education at one of the colleges of the other type? As it stands, the

suggestion may seem fanciful, but some of us have come a little also under the

influence of the old ideal of learning, with its discipline in the conduct of life, and

from contact with types of the old-time Hindu scholar have felt how the aspiration

kindled and fed by his learning still comes home to us. I see no way of stabilising

Indian spirituality, or reconstructing the faith of the modern Indian, of gaining

some inspiration like that of a Church, other than in the English-educated man,

in youth and in maturity, seeking the companionship of the old learning and of its

exponents of the old time and the new. In the words of Sir J.C. Bose, “there is

something in the Indian Culture which is possessed of extraordinary latent

strength, by which it has resisted the ravages of time and the destructive changes

which have swept over the earth.” The new type of Pundit or man of oriental

training also needs to be encouraged to seek depths of scholarship, and the

rugged moral virtues related to it. So enriched, the University man may yet

come by some strength of mind, activity and the earnest will. The Men of the

Arya Samaj, though lacking in ideas and in genius of the heart, owe their

remarkable success in all their public work to the strong Indian tincture of their

education, notwithstanding their religion being a form of “Protestant” Hinduism.

Gandhiji is another case of a westernised man who has gone quite native, in

personal habit and ritual of mind, and has so become one of the mightiest

forces for the regeneration of the people of this land.

NEED FOR A NEW MATERIALISM

It is said in The Testament of Beauty that “our fathers travel’d Eastward to

revel in wonders where pyramid, pagoda and picturesque attire glow in the

fading sunset of antiquity ; and now will the Orientals make hither in return

outlandish pilgrimage ; their wiseacres have seen the electric light i’ the west,

and come to worship; tasting romance in our unsightly novelties and scientific

tricks.”............ The worship of “the electric light i’ the west,” the romance of the

west’s “unsightly novelties and scientific tricks,” and the passionate zeal for

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scientific progress noticeable in every eastern country today –– these must be

given their due weight in the scheme of “Arts” and “Science” studies in the

University curriculum. Just now the balance tilts heavily towards “Science,”

according to the inclination of us, eastern men, who want to borrow from the

west its weapons of offence as well as the instruments of amelioration and

hygiene and economic welfare. I am for developing science in India in every

likely college and research institute ; a mere liberal education, however it may

go deep - as the Lindsay Commission’s Report proposes for the Christian

community - will not do. We want a New Materialism in the country, though the

world religions are here with us always, and though Gandhism as a social

philosophy has a wide application in India today. The Indian masses themselves,

after they find their manhood by the Gandhian way, must be put in the way of

those material refinements, that ampler and more puissant life which the poor

peoples of the world will acquire in the course of this century. Thus the country’s

present bias is for science, and we ought to allow for it in settling the programme

of Unviersity studies and of Secondary education as well. Even a cheap scientific

education has its value ; American workmen of the lower and middle grades are

said to be fine, up-standing men. Power comes to man from communion with

the great machines which he has made, as it comes from communion with

Nature. There is no inconsistency between one’s admiration for Science as a

life-giver and one’s insisting on the resuscitation of Indian studies in the Unviersity

with a view to the strengthening of our manhood and our faith. The two tendencies

will blend in thier progress as in the Hindu University which has the best College

of Engineering in that part of India (the Lindsay Commission say ruefully or

ironically that the contribution of the Hindu University is an Engineering College);

and it is the community that should test their efficacy and direct their channels

of influence. The “English education” has not in a century made strong new

roads for the march of mind in this country, taking account of two needs, to

conserve Indian culture, and to modernise India. We have to set about the task

today.

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While we work hard thus to set the goal of Indian Education and to make

the great roads and the hundred by-ways of our progress toward a new moral

civilisation, we should not omit to think of the growing mass of educated men

and women for whom a tolerable and decent everyday existence is a necessity

because of their very education. They must more and more fail to secure this

on account of competition among themselves and because of deficiencies in

their education as much as of deficiencies in the national organisation. Colleges

must go on teaching, as best they can, those who come to them but the

students themselves must acquire that strong spirit of self-sacrifice and self-

effacement which animates the youth of China or Japan, and they ought to take

up the lowliest duties in the commonwealth which has slowly to be raised on a

changed economic and social life. The community ought to set up a strong

unified control over this body of workers when they come. In England, the

Established Church sent the educated men as clergymen and curates into the

remotest parts of the country, and they built during many centuries a moral

civilisation which has made England strong against all subversive influences and

her people in some respects the most civilised nation in the world. We have to

take a lesson from England. The old religious establishments and foundations

can foster University Settlements in various places ; and private charity should

come to our help in setting up, for instance, a society for the maintenance of

one capable and self-sacrificing graduate and his family in each large village. If

such well-sustained efforts are made to-day for getting good men for the national

service there is bound to be sufficient response from the youth of the country.

But altruism is not enough, you will say. Let those who are worldly and ambitious

learn how to make a humble start and work their way up, to live cheaply and be

self-reliant, and to press towards the mark for the prize whenever the race is

set ; a country in the infancy of its industrial life has use for them all. The

remedy is in the hands of Youth itself today. If our young men learn what the

Youth movements of certain European countries, –– like Germany for instance,

- have done for the self ––education of youth, they will learn to acquit themselves

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like men ; and the poison of the agony of the young who are crippled, paltry

dwellers in the fireless damp vaults of corrupted old faiths and the vile mutual

animosities of all our yesterdays, this poison of the agony of helpless youth will

be purged out of the body of our social life. Then the joy of a new liberty will

enter into the whole sphere of our national work and the supreme intellectual

and moral tasks of our time will get done.

And so, in the words of the old Indian teaching, we shall partake of

immortality by that Learning which saveth us ; and a University will become, in

the words of a distinguished English writer and poet, one of the great bodies of

life which persists century after century, changing continually, yet remaining a

unity ; making a bond among men, “one of the subtlest and strongest bonds, of

youth passed in brotherhood ; linking the present to the past, and both to the

future. The world moves as such bodies as this direct, whether to the trusting

spirit as in the past, or the enquiring mind as at the present time, or to the

illuminated mind that shall be”.

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GOLDEN JUBILEE ADDRESS

TRICHINOPOLY TEACHERS’ GUILD

I am much honoured in being asked to deliver the Jubilee address to-day.

I would talk to you of some of our common problems which have become most

pressing at this moment.

Firstly, there is the question of the survival of our organisation. Evidence

accumulates showing disbelief in our aims, disunity of a serious nature and the

general perversion of mind of our educated men when faced with tasks requiring

public spirit. To complain of our difficulties in our spheres of employment as the

cause of our being behindhand with every worth-while gift and effort for the

general good, I make bold to say, is wholly unworthy of our race and tradition,

of the past example of teachers in our own country. But let us leave aside for a

moment this high standpoint and consider the ‘worldly’ life. To quote a living

novelist, “no one can live for one single day in this world without selling his soul,

to some extent............ The really cultured man, however, is preoccupied all the

while in an unwearied and persistent struggle to reduce the margin of soul-selling

that is necessary for his life upon earth”.... The great thing is never to let yourself

reach the point of taking your soul-selling for granted. Reaching this mental

security, we shall ourselves see, we ought to strengthen our own organisation

by our self-sacrifice, and also give of our best as teachers to the generation that

is being educated by us, by learning, by perseverance, and by a brave outlook

on public life.

Secondly, there is the question of the body of teachers, as a whole, making

themselves felt in the corporate life of the country. This cannot be accomplished

by our contending for public positions in a sporadic and irrational manner. Let us

keep away at the present time from elections for the most part, as the late

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Prime Minister wanted us to; but let us not give up our right of criticism and

guidance of public opinion. No less a person than Sir Maurice Gwyer has stressed

this right and duty of the teacher in his Convocation Address to the Osmania

University. Here the more enterprising and better-placed of the teachers will

have to act. They will have to stand up for the principles of enlightened living,

both public and private. They should, pace Sri. C. Rajagopalachariar, even take

on themselves “to give an impulse to political thought, based upon historical

knowledge, instructed sympathy and sense of proportion”, to use Sir Maurice

Gwyer’s words, which, I maintain, it is the privilege of the teachers of our country

both to cultivate and impart.

Thirdly, teachers should do their utmost to help in perfecting the educational

system. No doubt they wouldn’t be heard, if they are not well-informed,

determined, and organised in advocating such remedies as are found necessary.

But I suggest that they should, in their everyday teaching work, explore fully all

the modes of making education come alive. This is quite open to us even under

the existing system. Even as regards school organisation, we lose our freedom

because of the idea of competition between schools or colleges in examination

results. If a better public opinion can be created about the use of the examination

system, the existing courses and methods, with the adoption of the one remedy

for all educational defects ––viz., an Indian language as the medium of instruction

right up to the end of the University Course –– must produce remarkably

beneficent results.

Lastly, I would ask my brother teachers earnestly to ponder the present

situation of our educational institutions. There is a paralysis of the will in those

who can rightly conduct education ; they do not agitate and strive unceasingly

for a great regenerative movement in education. On the other side, the present

administrators often display such ignorance, indifference, and arrogance towards

the real workers in education, and sometimes towards Indians in general, that

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they become unfitted to lead in the accomplishment of the moral pupose of

national education. The acting Director of Public Instruction in Madras said at

more than one place recently that a hundred years ago there was hardly a

single person in this country who had attained a higher standard of education

than that of the Higher Elementary School. What can we do with this quality of

leadership in educational administration? Again, the authorities of a promising

new University in the Tamil country permitted the disciplinary instruments of the

Provincial Government to take a prominent share in putting down certain political

obsessions in the under-graduates who should have been left to “sow their wild

oats”, politically speaking. And Sir Maurice Gwyer, at the Delhi University, whom

I quoted for my support in another connection, ordered the cancellation of the

degrees of graduates who had taken out a political procession. All these incidents

point to the necessity for teachers of all grades to come together to consider in

all matter their views, to re-assume the sole leadership, so far as the students

are concerned, (not abandon it to the party politicians) to make a “concerted

and concentrated effort, free from passion or bias”, to suggest the true direction

in which our many difficult problems may be solved.

In conclusion, I put it to you, fellow-members of the Trichy Guild, at its

Golden Jubilee, that it lies in us to make a valuable contribution to the efficiency

of the Indian people in the arts of peace and of war. For let us remember that

our people are intrinsically the best human material. Our common soldiers, serving

under an aegis not their own, have just now saved Egypt and the east. Can we

not help here in India to make a free, united and happy people, the true leaders

of the Asia that is to be? So I give you, for a message, the words of India’s great

poet, something to lighten your burdens in this heavy hour, and to put a touch

of the Infinite upon your humblest labours.

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“Light, Oh where is the light?

Kindle it with the burning fire of desire :

It thunders and the wind rushes screaming through the void.

The night is black as a black stone.

Let not the hours pass by in the dark.

Kindle the lamp of love with thy life.”

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WELCOME TO SRI C. RAJAGOPALACHARIAR

AT THE COLLEGE UNION*

It is a great honour for the College and the College Union to be addressed

by Sri. C. Rajagopalachariar in the course of his present momentous tour in the

country. When he was welcomed in St. Joseph’s College last year, he expressed

great pleasure at having made ‘a conquest of the heart’.. that was his phrase. I

think... of a prominent member of such a totally different group in the country

as the Principal of that College represented. In our College I wish to say to him,

“You are in your own kingdom, Sir.” He has no need to conquer but occasionally,

perhaps, to allay some disaffection, and happily now there is no occasion for

calling in question the propriety of official or legislative action on the part of our

leaders in defence of what we should consider as the interests of our ‘Functional’

representation in the general polity. There is no occasion now to criticize our

own Government’s policy towards teachers and Labour and so on. There is

every motive now, on the other hand, to re-address ourselves to the support of

the main national programme and to enkindle our loyalty and affection again for

the great and self-less leaders of our people (how much more dignified the

figures in any picture of the Congress Working Committee than those in a recent

picture of England’s War Cabinet !) of whom Sri Rajagopalachariar is among the

best. On your behalf I would ask him to accept our friendship and co-operation

to the utmost degree.

That tempts me to affirm again that in addressing a college like ours he

speaks to a group as actively interested in the main issue of the struggle for

Swaraj as he might wish any group in the country to be. We know he has

definite views on the question of students and politics and also that of teachers

and politics. A college or a university is a place for learning and thought and the

* 31.1.1942

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practice of the non-political life and the development of permanent knowledge

and ideals. Students must set themselves to learn and to think and in the matter

of politics it is dangerous for them to act even to the least extent. Chiefly, I

think, he is afraid of the communal passion of different groups raging against

each other in the colleges and the universities. But students cannot all think or

think except rudimentarily. It applies to others as well. But all of us feel the need

to act, to discuss and to vote, the need for political action of some kind even at

college in any modern community. Particularly it is so in a subject country. Why

is the Prague University closed and why are Czech students shot by the occupying

German Army? So I would not prevent students from engaging in anything

short of illegal activity. Whether you like it or not, the political parties look to the

colleges for support. There is again the new movement among the Muslim

students in each part of the country. Why should the Congress alone refuse

such moral support and tacit action as members of colleges are eager to give?

Why should it not make its broad non-communal, political appeal directly to the

already adult people in the colleges?

For, let us remember, most students are politically-minded. A considerable

section is still of the Gandhian party even though it will not spin, nor work for the

untouchables. An increasing number, year by year, is going over to the Socialist

party, though that party as shown in the latest resolution of the All-India. Students’

Federation changes its views with the change in the position of Russia in relation

to the others. A considerable number again are just Non-Brahmin or Muslim

communalists. For a remedy, we should not prescribe the banning of politics

from colleges but the open, British manner of “free debate and faithful voting,”

as Mr. Churchill puts it. We must have parties which will be conducted on

honourable lines inside the colleges and the universities. We cannot prevent the

rise of parties; we can only try to keep them straight.

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In this view, it is the duty of great leaders like Sri Rajagopalachariar to tell

us of definite national policies and of our part in them. We should like to know,

for instance, how as he put it at the Lucknow Convocation, “a few wise moves”

at this juncture would bring us “complete success.” We should like to know if,

Satyagraha being given up, and violently unconstitutional opposition also put

aside, the Congress will press forward with a serious constitutional agitation in

the country such as his speeches indicate. Can constitutional agitation bring us

total Swaraj? We know that the method of co-operation can lead only to individual

successes. The great masses of the people do not stand to gain from any

political party adopting the method of co-operation ; and ‘responsive co-

operation’ is only a way of self-deception.

Great stress is laid on the constructive programme; but the only item that

is likely to appeal to the colleges is the programme of enlisting volunteers to

help the people in times of perplexity and distress. Whether our students are as

a whole physically and morally competent for this purpose cannot be said in

advance. They have to be enlisted in numerous, well-co-ordinated bands under

a responsible leadership dissociated from the existing Government., This is no

easy task. Sporadic activity on the part of students is attended with great risks.

This is the problem for the nationalists among college and university teachers. In

the main, the students do not accept the Gandhian programme ; perhaps, it is

only when one is forty that one can see the value of it. It is no use our quoting

the Chinese parallel. China’s most forward-looking forces are under the

Communist inspiration, and by the way, the young Chinese have only partially

forgotten the massacre of students by the Nanking Government under Chiang

Kai-Shek about fifteen years ago ; and it may be that ultimately neither Winston

Churchill who has, we see, just secured the vote of confidence of a few hundred

old moneyed men in the House of Commons (meanwhile Rommel is beating

them again in Libya) nor Chiang Kai-Shek will lead his country in the ending of

the war and the beginning of reconstruction.

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These are not my own particular thoughts ; but I believe they are present

in the minds of the youth of this country everywhere. Let me ask you, Sir, to

speak to us frankly, intimately, and in the manner of the great leader of a people

needing to be recruited, trained and led to victory.

175


WELCOME ADDRESS AT THE COLLEGE

DIAMOND JUBILEE CELEBRATION*

I am truly pleased to be asked to follow the President of the Jubilee

Committee with a few words of welcome to you all who have met to do us

honour on this day by your presence. We are all, in a measure, sharers of one

common effort for the modern education and development of our people, and

those who have laboured to advance this College have found in you kind hearts

and help and the sustenance of a common patriotism and they ought to be

deeply thankful. Even as I am, a private member of the Jubilee Committee, I feel

the force of that vital sympathy which flows from each one of this meeting of

our distinguished men and old students, well-wishers, and kindly neighbours

surrounding us and standing by us.

This College has been a People’s College ever since the Founders’ time; it

has therefore taken root among the people. In the plain frame work, the almost

barrack-like habitation, the homeliness of its organisation, the slight

unconventionality of its everyday living and doing, the dependence on primary,

not accessory, advantages, and the openness to the winds of Freedom, however

they listed to blow, ––the College, as I have known it, has been a small model of

our struggling India of to-day. We however hope, from the auspicious hour of its

Diamond Jubilee, that a larger material strength will be added unto all the lonely

but not unfruitful effort of its sixty years, and the College proper,having passed

some years ago its Silver Jubilee, will proceed now to the attack and will not be

content to dig itself in. Though a mere teacher all my life, I habitually think

slightly like a soldier ; the idea of “Combined Operations”, for instance, comes

natural to me, whenever I think of our Education itself.

* 16.2.1947

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We have two Vice-Chancellors officiating at this memorable function, and

they will, no doubt, perfect what we have in our minds as the pattern of a

College; and from their words will come that stimulus to further consolidation of

which the College is in need. It is needless to praise those who have been men

of light and leading for all India. Men of remarkable achievement, both of them,

as well as of splendid intellect, they will fortify us by their counsel and with their

quality of optimism, being good Hindus and good comrades to all in the modern

day in India now, they will endow us not only with the ambition to build our

institution, but with the spirit to go on labouring with a song on our lips, which is

said to be the crowning blessing of all workers.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we owe it to ourselves and to your friendship for us

to say this much ; and somehow, it was my turn here, as before, to say it. In

view of the unassailable honesty of our endeavour, as a College, to which even

strict University Commissioners have testified, I hope you allow for the pride

which is in us as the seed of progress. Let me ask you, therefore, to give us

your blessing in material as well as imponderable ways ; for we have followed

the men who founded this insitution, men,

“That passionate for ancient truths, and honouring with religious love the

Great of elder times” (the type of such was our first Founder, the late G. Sesha

Iyengar) yet laboured in the modern day for modern ends.

In the continuous influence of one man, the late Sir T. Desikachariar, this

College benefited from the blend of cultures, the union of ancient truth and

modern practice, which the truly accomplished representative of the local Indian

Community might come to possess ; and in Justice Seshagiri Iyer, before him,

there was another winsome leader, the man having put his hand to the plough

and not looking back ; while that great benefactor of every local cause, Diwan

Bahadur Pethachi Chettiar, alone made, by his splendid generosity and ardent

outlook, the work of those two others possible. To these and the first principal,

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the genial veteran, the late K. Ramanujachariar, and to the Founders, of whom

one is happily with us even to-day, let us turn our hearts in simple homage on

this occasion.

It must occur to many here that the strong realism of some of these, who

so fostered this College at its birth, was unquestioned in their day, though to us

they are banded in a common memory with the simple, spiritually literate,

penniless men, to whom my heart yearns, men like G. Sesha Iyengar. So it has

ever been. Witness the new College in Madras sponsored by saint and worldling

alike, where the inspiration of the Saints is evident still. So my appeal is not only

to the idealists, but to all the hard-headed but genial men amongst you, to

those that “are easily first” and those “that come decently after”, especially “Old

Boys”; my appeal is “Bring ye to us your gifts. The Alma Mater needs them all.”

And now for the future of Education itself. The strife and noise of contending

prophecies outside the bounds of school or college must affect both the

Management of an institution and the community of teachers and pupils who

ought to be single-minded. Yet educated men must realise that strong convictions

can be held and even “ideologies” can be permitted to contend within a college if

there is some means of one’s cultivating honesty along with the courage of the

party man. The Englishman has a certain “breadth” which the Indian can also

possess, if he is enriched with his country’s own fundamental gospel, that of

unity. Right in the heart of a place of education like ours must arise the old,

nourishing Message of Unity ; there must spring up all that spiritual activity in the

individual beginning to care for society as a whole, if not for humanity at large ;

and, in this sense, even a communal loyalty is to be welcomed, provided one’s

education is strong enough to keep it sane and balanced. The fully educated

man is, however, like Gandhi or Tagore, a true citizen of the world, one in whom

the call of the Spirit of Man truly coincides with the impulses of his blood.

Institutional education should finally become as efficacious as the life-long self-

education of these great men.

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The world waits for institutions where man shall grow up simply as man,

and nationality itself is annihilated. Educationalists ought to set themselves to be

the torch-bearers ; but they more than others happen to be the slaves of

custom and subject to the tyranny of their fellowmen. Limitation of every kind

has so far been their “birthright”; they have in a sense, not wanted to be free.

And so I chose for a motto for this College

“That which liberates is, alone, knowledge.” Can we live up to it at all? Even

though to get tough means to forget the spiritual delicacy of one’s craft and

mission, it is good for one that one has to fight for one’s rights, the only way a

teacher can come alive, save when he meets the perfect pupil. But the ideal

teacher should indeed be like David Hume’s description of himself “I was, I say, a

man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social and cheerful

humour, capable of attachment but little susceptible of enmity and of great

moderation in all my passions”. Can one live up to it all?

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me once more bid you heartily welcome to our

Jubilee. And for a becoming attitude of prayer on this occasion, may I give you

this from the Gitanjali?

Thy gifts to us mortals fulfil all our needs and yet run back to thee

undiminished.

The river has its everyday work to do and hastens through fields and

hamlets; yet its incessant stream winds towards the washing of thy feet.

The flower sweetens the air with its perfume ; yet its last service is to offer

itself to thee.

Thy worship does not impoverish the world.

From the words of the poet men take what meanings please them ; yet

their last meaning points to thee.

179


AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

FOUR BATTLE-YEARS*

My beginning as a College Tutor, thirty-five years ago, in St. Joseph’s College,

Trichinopoly, comes back to me as a worthwhile event, as I keep thinking of the

past in the present infancy of my retirement. I barely knew how to wear the

conventional teacher’s garb ––dhoti, coat and turban ––of that day, when I took

the steps, when I was Father Quinn’s assistant, and when I read all the texts of

the old M.A. course privately and wrote the first literary criticism written by any

one in South India, for my M.A. thesis, on Francis Thompson. Two years of my

nonage, yet marked by the faint flush of academic and literary ambition

encouraged by my chief, the Rev. Father Quinn, I have owed to the great college,

under whose older-sisterly eye the institution to which I gave the largest years

of my life has grown. But before I passed on to this informal and un-premeditated

dedication to the National College, there was another dedication; there were

four battle years 1914-18, years of high impulse and unfruitful striving in which

five of us, the most marked young men of South India, had a share ; and the

scene was what, then simply called Hindu College, Tinnevelly, now bears the

names of the generous-hearted men whose benefaction ensured its higher

destiny–– the Madura Diraviyam Thayumanavar Hindu College, Tinnevelly.

We agreed to serve under a scheme of Life-Membership similar to that of

the Fergusson College, Poona ; and though the scheme failed, the memory of

our adventure persists with Tinnevellians and to a smaller degree with the

educationalists of Southern India. To undertake to serve twenty years on

Rs.100-10-150 was thought nothing very extraordinary considering we were to

serve in our own birth place so to speak, and were to be given unusual powers

of managerial authority. And in the end human ill nature succeeded in blighting

that plant, which in any case, like gratitude, was a plant of slow growth on

* From the M.D.T. Hindu College Annual, 1947.

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mortal soil. We left, all together in 1918, just five years after the first Life-

members took service; I had joined a year after the others.

I call them battle years ; for we strove with everyone not knowing in our

youthfulness that none was worth our strife, least of all the old set of teachers

who had taught us also in the past; but we had to make a demand for the entire

direction of the College, save for the Principal’s authority limited by a College

Council. We made many mistakes as pioneers would, though we had much wise

elders’ guidance from our spokesman, Rao Bahadur P.K.Subba Ayyar and his

friends, Rao Bahadur R. Kuppuramaswami Sastri, Diwan Bahadur A.V.Ramalinga

Ayyar and the late Rt. Hon’ble V.S.Srinivasa Sastri. Our party enlisted popular

support, made changes in the Management and went on with a certain high-

heartedness, even when a University Commission decided partly against us. We

won the matches but lost on points. Being a little disunited after so much

campaigning, we saw ourselves lose ground and lose the hope of success in the

long run. So when a new Management was chosen and the late Sir Kumaraswami

Reddiar became Secretary, we refused his kind offer to keep us on as individuals,

the main principle of Life-Membership having been vetoed by the Educational

Society.

The College suffered for a time as a consequence of all this ; and so did we;

but in a few years the wounds healed, and we took up positions elsewhere ; and

old antagonists claimed kinship with us from that time of genial clash of arms

and of ideals.

For myself, in those four years, I learnt my trade, indulged in pleasing

literary melancholy, set up for a minor poet, a prose-poet, and won a little love

from the young, while the other side of me, that of extravagant speech and

maladroit action found scope in what I have called the battle. I was perhaps,

unconsciously, one of the “Wreckers” of the Life-Member scheme but caused

no more injury than the wrecking of a plan unsuited in any case, to our mentality

as South Indians.

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I am tempted to recall the personalities of those years both in our group

and among our opponents. The lapse of years does not matter in a dream,

where people look young still, but in a reverie it is different. I see them as they

should have become with age, with the eye of one who has been getting old

himself. First, I. Srinivasa Iyer, Principal, a foeman worthy of our steel in some

respects but not in others, a good teacher and administrator before we crossed

his path, whose real good nature could not win us in the midst of that slightly

primitive clash of the old and the young, both eager for the same prize, authority;

then K.C.V. our most senior man, who died last year in retirement, homely,

staunch, worldling on principle but with enthusiasms and imprudences of his

own, who acted as Principal for a year, before we all left ; then N. Sankaran who

died twelve years ago, our Mathematics man, brilliant, spasmodic, of tireless

energy, of militant egotism; then Yegneswara Sarma of a quieter egotism, of

undoubted but somnolent intellect, a grand soul in every way, but the type of a

“Wrecker”, a man of arresting moral attitudes ; lastly K.A.N., the retiring professor

of Indian History in our University, the unknown architect ––unknown to-day, as

such ––of the Annamalai University, of a steady yet daring intellect, powerful in

destruction and in organisation, sagacious on the track of truth as he has shown

himself in all his research, intolerant but gloriously partisan for the good of his

friends. These were the M.A.’s. There were elderly men in the Management,

N.A.V. Somasundaram Pillai, whose love of power was regarded by friend and

foe as making for the good of the College, whom I privately lampooned (and he

knew it) but could not prevent from enthusiastically greeting me years after,

when we met at a railway station, who fined me for being late, and President

Sundara Sastri, agile, smiling, one kind of embodiment of the public spirit of the

time, singularly popular yet a man with a sense of life’s ironies; and the teachers’

member, Sadhu Ganapathi Pantulu, so much a friend to all men that he had to

turn your enemy for a change. There remains our spokesman and sponsor,

P.K.Subba Ayyar, once a hard-headed Government Secretary, with a glow in his

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heart at mention of an educational scheme, with his unsleeping benevolence

towards those for whom he took responsibility, the foiled idealist of this adventure

in the Hindu College, Tinnevelly.

The College was smaller, more intertwined with the school, and had all the

features of a beginner among colleges ; after we achieved a major role (that

was how we renewed its youth perhaps), it shed its hoariness a little. Partly on

account of our ‘politics’, each Committee meeting was full of portent in advance

and full of dissecting hands at work after it took place ; the meetings of the

Educational Society were showy and agitated, like meetings of the majority

party in our Province to-day. Though in the thick of this surging battle, we did

remember fundamental values. We did remember Prof. Ramanathan’s advice

that we should so exert ourselves that any University Commission that came

out would feel just a little humble before the work we had undertaken. We were

zealous, active and more or less admitted to be a new force in the College. I

taught English successfully ; I mourned over bad results in a rather personal

way. I gathered a Class Library which was thought well of even later ; my friend,

Prof. Nilakantan, soared in ambition and achieved most and was our ‘show-boy’

; the others were excellent teachers and planners. Our affections were humble

enough, but empire was not far from our dreams, the empire of hearts. When

we retired after the term of twenty years, we were to be men of light and

leading for the whole country, the Gokhales and the Tilaks of Southern India.

That could not be.

Seven years before I set foot in the Hindu College as the latest of the Life-

Members, I was a happy boy in the Junior F.A class of the College, with all

possible laurels mine, except that sickness and poverty promised to do their

worst (but this was later). That first year at college was my best ; I was the

most brilliant Matriculation student of 1906 in the whole area, having passed

fourth in the Presidency. Winckler, who was Principal, said on my presenting

183


myself: “This boy for College? He ought to be in the nursery.” And six months

after, before he left, I met him by chance and greeted him with a Vande Mataram;

he was put out, but did not show it. He only said, “You are the most curious

mixture of intelligence and stupidity I have seen. If I went on I should make you

a really intelligent fellow.”

I am much obliged to Principal Gnanamuthu, whose father was my opposite

number in those four years in the C.M.College, Tinnevelly and who has gallantly

worked to raise the old Hindu College, which we served, to a position of such

dignity and influence to-day, for this opportunity for recollecting the years which

served for a few of us as the loom of youth.

184


“THIS PEOPLE’S COLLEGE”*

WHEN, as a Sixth Form boy on a visit to some relations in Trichy, I ventured

one afternoon, an ill-clad youngster, to walk into the National High School, and

saw and heard Mr. P.G. Sundaresa Sastri in his Science class, I did not forsee

that, exactly fifteen years after, in 1921, I was to sit in the same room for my

office as Principal of the National College and to take over, practically and spiritually,

from Mr. P.G. Sundaresa Sastri, the last of the founders to retire from the School.

The College and the High School were under one administration –– the great

Sesha Ayyangar himself, the first founder, consented to serve under the Principal

–– from 1919 to 1924; and when I succeeded Prof. K. Ramanujachariar as

Principal, I came into the estate of the founders. The last founder is happily still

with us at the time of the Diamond Jubilee, while I, having just retired, take my

seat with becoming pride, I hope, among the former servants of this institution.

For nearly thirty of these years, my life and my thoughts, my business and

my leisure, my hopes and my struggles have been concerned with the National

College. At the beginning, we had just the two Intermediate classes and taught

only the ‘Arts’ subjects ; our first Principal planned for a pure ‘Arts’ College, but

one affiliated in the B.A. and possibly the Honours Courses ; and in fact we were

affiliated in the B.A. in Philosophy and History three years before we made a

rudimentary beginning with Intermediate Physics. If we had not gone ahead with

our B.A. affiliations in 1924, at the propitious hour of Sri A.P. Patro’s new University

Act, we should have had to wait till to-day, –– with what difficulties to face, the

new colleges can tell –– for the status of a First Grade College. The year 1924 is

a landmark in our little history ; the helpers of that time come to our minds,

Candeth and Hogg and K.V.R. and K.V.K. and Vice-Chancellor Venkataratnam ;

we were just lucky in putting in V-B (Economics) as an after-thought after asking

* Article in the ‘Hindu’ published on the eve of the college Diamond Jubilee.

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for only V-A (other colleges had to go through a difficult process of affiliation

later); then by a purely competitive urge in 1925, we put in the Concurrent

courses for B.A., and made good at that, our reward being a substantial fee-

income, a certain popularity with the class of second rate students who pass

the September examinations, and money to be saved for the later outlay on

Science. From 1927 on, we worked at making this one of the best Intermediate

Colleges in Science ; and when our finances came to be at a low ebb, on the

University disallowing the Concurrent classes for B.A., we as a staff took the

initiative, cut salaries to the bone and brought all we had to the ‘pool’ and saved

our science sections and the College as a whole. The year 1939 was our next

notable year, marked by the introduction of B.A. Mathematics in comparative

safety, for we had regular help from local organisations like the Trinity Bank, and

splendid contributions for scholarships from men like the late P.N. Natesa Ayyar

and the definite arrival of Stability in many forms. These common-place facts of

our economy will suggest how this people’s College has grown. In the years of

struggle, we suffered no loss of dignity among the sister colleges, because a

team of able men, an accidental partnership, sustained the teaching and internal

management by giving their learning and their youth and their devotion to

something not afar from the sphere of their sorrow. Pure luck, I take it, this

altruism from us who individually, or in another place might not have made

history in the least degree.

The management had the usual causes of internal discord to cope with, but

on the whole, under the guidance over long years of the late Sir. T. Desikachariar,

it got the power of ultimate sanity, the faculty of recovery, which is the blessing

of democratic management. A successful private manager might show more

enterprise in gathering resources, in consolidation ; but in our day we have

known of only one such person, and he a philanthropist who founded a College

a year after we began and went on and founded a University within that College

so to speak, with its own results to the “good life” I should say. The future of the

186


National College is to be built on the genuine faith, the perseverance and the

practicable amount of unity which an ordinary body of South Indians may achieve

by continual watchfulness over themselves; and that is the essential part of

college building, the building of tradition. Men have helped with money in the

past, Kaniyur Krishna Ayyar, Pethachi Chettiar and P.N. Natesa Ayyar, and men

will go on giving us a helping hand, if we have the courage in well-doing.

They will probably attempt in the future to remould the National College in

a national sense. But so far we could not even teach all College subjects through

the medium of an Indian language. No college can do other than what the

students want or what the public wants. I tried for months at a time to live in

the midst of students, to allure to brighter worlds and lead the way in eating

together, sleeping, scavenging and of course pursuing knowledge under difficulties

in a small, over-crowded hostel ; but I was no good. In the earlier years, I tried

to have morning classes and the after-noons free for six days in the week; I

tried to read Hindu hymns before the classes started but the attempt was laughed

to scorn. I gave an almost political turn to my work with the students in some

of the country’s critical years. I got some applause and much suppressed fear

and disgust from my own colleagues ; and once, for my attitude to the

“politicalisation” of students (as included in Everybody) I was dismissed, but

immediately reinstated, –– months before August 1942. During the last years a

great intellectual vacuum has existed in the colleges, and I just got busy with

admitting enormous numbers to the Intermediate classes, ploughing a lonely

furrow still amid ageing men and so I ended. I may yet see the National College,

not “a being mighty in its rags”, as I put it in a public appeal, but better housed,

with higher Science courses, with one or more Honours Courses also, and with

the new teachers paid not at these heart –– breaking, low rates and the others

grown grey-headed, with that beauty of old men corresponding to a material

contentment. As for myself, I would just remark that, when I began as a teacher,

187


I did not imagine I should ever be set to govern as well as teach, or have the

health for this long stewardship or keep myself a little unspotted from the world

after such years of struggle. I consider I have not got the spiritual mastery over

the young unlike the teachers of a former time but the price of keeping young

yourself is this loss of power over others. The National College may have imparted

the seeds of a full education at least to one man, and that is its Principal, of the

last twenty-five years.

188

THE NATIONAL COLLEGE

FOREGROUND––GANDHI TREE

FOUNDATION STONE

THE COLLEGE CREST

ASSEMBLY HALL


SPEECH AT PUBLIC MEETING AT THE TOWN HALL

TO HONOUR THE MEMORY OF

SIR T. DESIKACHARIAR

I think it an honour to be asked to bring my little tribute of praise and deep

respect for the great man whose loss we have met here to mourn, although I

shrink from the ostentation of grief ; for I have stood in a certain, almost filial,

relation to him and owed him all the success of my life. I have laboured with him,

- and under his eye –– for over twenty years in the College of whose management

he was at the head, and I have valued his example of a firm grasp of public

business combined with an original charm of dealing with persons, persons being,

(alas!) in our everyday public life, sometimes more than principles ; but he till

the very stroke of death could strongly sustain, and succour, and bring the gift of

success to institutions.

But I would rather leave this side of his fine career to the scrutiny of

scuccessful men and turn to the sagacity of his human guidance of other men, in

which, for me, was the attraction of discipleship to him. Many of us could recall

his personal culture seen acting on less fine men, his friendliness amidst his own

vexations, towards those whose natural sorrow, loss or grain, were still of interest

to him and his great generosity, in a hundred cases, to them who delighted not

to honour but to hurt him. He had a private centre of recuperation for his mind

from the slings and arrows of public life and could impart health to others as

well. No one, after talking things over with him, left as unpleasant and unhappy

as when he went to him first as to a great elder brother or father and he did not

abuse the trust of a fellow-creature. His profession and his self-chosen public

activities both gave him the chance of making others happy and he shed a

lasting benediction on many lives. He played his part in a high but not a too

189


ambitious sphere and he reaped, though not fame, yet the riches of friendly

regard from young and old, from Indian and European, from the humble and the

proud in all ranks of life.

He had, no doubt, much of both the sage and the worlding in him; but he

would not cast a stone at the man of high ideals, though in his view such might

be a lunatic. This was not thought a virtue in him, sometimes; but, let us remember,

he forbore to be cynical in deed, though he could be that in thought and even in

speech, very privately. It only showed that to the end he was alive and hale and

“no man hath walked along our roads with step so active, so enquiring eye, or

tongue so varied in discourse”. Field-Marshal Sir William Birdwood, as he then

was, after a casual meeting with our Sir T, a friend told me, went about talking

delightedly about “that man, a Sir T––something in Trichy–– the most charming

man in the whole of Madras Presidency. He does not hustle you, he takes you

everywhere, tells you all things, the most charming man. That was the homage

of a rather many – sided man to another like himself, the admiration of a real

great soldier for one who late in life became also an Honorary Soldier. Sir T

never aspired, as some old men do, with the young, to become “an Honorary

young man”, in some one’s phrase ; his was never the way of superficial good-

fellowship. I recall the words of the poet (who, however, uses them misguidedly,

I think) of the other sex :-

“Not warned by passion, awed by rumour ;

Not grave through pride, nor gay through folly ;

An equal mixture of good-humour

And sensible soft melancholy.”

Such was the man whom we shall affectionately remember along with his

works –– who sacrificed to the graces, but kept an unsullied dignity ; and that

was a virtue which did pass out of him to other men.

190


Above all, he was the pattern of what was best in the thoughts and acts of

that elder generation of Indian gentlemen who lit their minds at the new candles

of Western civilisation and to some degree set themselves to lead their

countrymen into the new world that was opening for them all, To us, who know

how the West never learnt to bow low before the blast but stood torn and

sundered in every wind of its political re-birth and who now see its tremendous

conflict of ideas likely to shatter the whole of our earth and fashion it anew,

amidst the destruction of innumerable men and of all their works,–– the charm

of that serenity of his, the serenity and content of an older day still remains, like

the touch on us of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.

191

PRINCIPAL V. SARANATHAN

AT COLLEGE ON THE EVE OF RETIREMENTDECEMBER 1946


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Chlorine

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“mystics”

“humanists”“

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––

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[“The virtue of Prosperity is temperance, that of Adversity fortitude.” Bacon]

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––

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homely “–– ”

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*

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V.S

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A, B, C, D,

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*

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‘’–– bear - leader ––

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–– –

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––

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‘’

‘Diplomacy’

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Concrete

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-

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“”*

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*

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Social question

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Economic System

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Politicisation

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(Belief

in the People)

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