But the ringing conclusion to the second lecture in Nationalism (1916) deserves to be quoted in full:

I know my voice is too feeble to raise itself above the uproar of this bustling time, and it is easy for any street urchin to fling against me the epithet of ‘unpractical’. It will stick to my coat-tail, never to be washed away, effectively excluding me from the consideration of all respectable persons. I know what a risk one runs from the vigorously athletic crowds in being styled an idealist in these days, when thrones have lost their dignity and prophets have become an anachronism, when the sound that drowns all voices is the noise of the market-place. Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills, – with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon, like a god overcome with his own radiance, – the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly contemptous of all sentiment, – that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies.

This passage is utterly characteristic: the passion and dignity of Tagore’s idealism; the sense of horror at human evil; a tragic feeling of farness and isolation from the world as it is actually run by professional men; and a profound feeling of nearness to the world of the spirit: all are there. Spiritual reality was never for Tagore an esoteric thing, confined to arcane literature or ritual or any one church or sect. It was immediately and perpetually perceptible in the world and in experience: in the beauty of Nature, in human love, in children. He was a romantic – in a late poem in naba-jātak (1940) he self-deprecatingly admits that he is an unrepentant romantic; but if one has no touch whatsoever of romanticism as Tagore defined it one is scarcely human. Tagore expressed his romantic and religious perception most profoundly in his songs: the essential harmony and beauty of the universe (a harmony and beauty that could never be described by science, for all his interest in science) was best conveyed through music. It is vital to understand this. It explains why Tagore – mistakenly, as he must later have realized – tried to translate his songs, or poems that were close to the world of his songs. He felt that his greatest gift was for music, and it was this that he should try to communicate to the outside world.

I have no doubt that he was right in his self-assessment. Ambitious and intelligent though his prose was, daring and original though his drama was, endlessly varied and inventive though his poetry was, Tagore’s genius showed itself most naturally and faultlessly in his songs. He often said that his songs would be remembered when all his other works were forgotten, and it is undoubtedly true that in Bengal today it is his songs that are best known. They are not always well or faithfully performed; singers do not always understand the thought and feeling behind the songs; but they are loved. It is in his songs that Tagore is nearest to his people and culture. They appeal to a wide social range; they keep alive in an increasingly urban people a responsiveness to nature and landscape and the seasons, a sense of the divine, an ideal of love, a patriotism that is distinct from chauvinism. The Tagore who with his songs rallied massive processions against Curzon’s proposal to partition Bengal in 1905, or who marked the breaking of Gandhi’s fast-unto-death in Poona Jail in 1932 by singing a song from gītāñjali for him, is no longer here; his intermittent involvement in public life may even be embarrassing to memory; but his songs live on, and transcend by their genius all distrust of his idealism or egoism, all criticism of failings in his other works of art.

I have already said that I do not believe one can translate songs, and none of the poems in this book are songs (Tagore made a song out of lines from ‘New Rain’, but the original poem is a poem, not a song). Music is the art that is both most specific to a people and a culture (who but Englishmen can understand Anglican anthems?), and the one that can cross national frontiers. I do not think it impossible that Tagore’s songs will one day be known and appreciated outside India (they are much easier for a Westerner to follow than the instrumental Indian music that we do now hear quite often); but they will have to be known as songs. Translation of the words will not be enough.

There is a song that Tagore translated in The Gardener.

The tame bird was in a cage, the free bird was in the forest.

They met when the time came, it was a decree of fate.

The free bird cries, ‘O my love, let us fly to the wood.’

The cage bird whispers, ‘Come hither, let us both live in the cage.’

Says the free bird, ‘Among bars, where is there room to spread one’s wings?’

‘Alas,’ cries the cage bird, ‘I should not know where to sit perched in the sky.’

The free bird cries, ‘My darling, sing the songs of the woodlands.’

The cage bird says, ‘Sit by my side, I’ll teach you the speech of the learned.’

The forest bird cries, ‘No, ah no! songs can never be taught.’

The cage bird says, ‘Alas for me, I know not the songs of the woodlands.’

Their love is intense with longing, but they never can fly wing to wing.

Through the bars of the cage they look, and vain is their wish to know each other.

They flutter their wings in yearning, and sing, ‘Come closer, my love!’

The free bird cries, ‘It cannot be, I fear the closed doors of the cage.’

The cage bird whispers, ‘Alas, my wings are powerless and dead.’

This translation is unsatisfactory: it is not badly inaccurate, but any English reader will be worried by phrases such as ‘My darling’, ‘the speech of the learned’, ‘Alas for me’. It also leaves out a whole verse, though the English reader is not to know that. But a more exact or stylistically happy translation would not be the answer.

I could render the first verse as follows:

There was a caged bird in a golden cage, there was a forest bird in the forest

.Somehow the two came together, there was something in the mind of Fate.

The forest bird says, ‘Caged bird, friend, let us go off together to the forest.’

The caged bird says, ‘Forest bird, come, let us stay alone in the cage.’

The forest bird says, ‘No, I will not let myself be fettered.’

The caged bird says, ‘Alas, how can I go outside into the forest?’

I could try to polish the translation, make it more natural in English, introduce rhyme or half-rhyme. I could write a lengthy note, relating the song to all Tagore’s most characteristic dualities: sky and earth, freedom and restriction, infinite and finite, eternal and mortal, soul and self, God and the world. But none of this would help. Heard in a good performance – by Shantidev Ghosh, doyen of rabindra-saimagegīt (Tagore music) singers at Santiniketan, for example – it is apparent to anyone that the mood, the feeling, the truth of the song are all in the melody. It is an exquisite piece: it expresses in a way that is utterly real but impossible to define both ‘nearness’ to the world of the spirit (the closeness of the two birds) and ‘farness’ from it (the bars that seperate them). It is haunting, tender, humane, humorous, subtle. For those who belong to Tagore’s culture, it keeps him ever near, an abiding, comforting voice.

Tagore is near to his people. Can he ever be near to foreigners, removed from his land and language, deprived of his song?

If I did not believe that there were ways in which Tagore can be near to us, I would not have attempted this book; and these ways can be placed under three main headings: he was a romantic, he was modern, and he was human.

The influence of English poetry on Tagore and other Bengali poets of modern times can be greatly over-emphasized: Bengali critics themselves tend to do so, perhaps because they have often studied English literature before their own. But there is no doubt that the reading and appreciation of English poetry was an important strain in nineteenth-century Bengali culture.