The Music of Hindostan c8.s3.22

c8.s3.22

A different kind of interest and a still greater pleasure was afforded by a visit to Rabindranāth Tagore, the Bengāli poet. In accordance with the best Indian tradition he is poet and musician in one. His poetry is beginning to speak to us for itself: even in a few scattered translations it is possible to hear the voice of a man who thinks deeply and truly, who sees things as they really are, making invisible things visible as florescence does in optics, and touching them with tenderness and reverence. To hear him recite his poems is to be reminded of the way in which Tennyson is said by his biographer to have recited *Maud*; and indeed such a line as ‘Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere’ has something of the ring of Bengāli verse about it, while the terseness, the inheritance of the Sutras, of a language which is the descendant of that compact wonder, Sanskrit, we could hardly parallel short of Horace. To hear him sing them is to realize the music in a way that it is seldom given to a foreigner to do. The notes of the song are no longer their mere selves, but the vehicle of a personality, and as such they go behind this or that system of music to that beauty of sound which all systems put out their hands to seize. These melodies are such as would have satisfied Plato. ‘I do not know the modes,’ said Socrates, ‘but leave me one that will imitate the tones and accents of a brave man enduring danger or distress, fighting with constancy against fortune; and also one fitted for the work of peace, for prayer heard by the gods, and for the successful persuasion or exhortation of men.’