What good are all the learning and scientific facts that we have accumulated up to now, if we don’t use them to make our life richer and more beautiful? Knowledge and ability are worthless if there is no moral and intellectual courage to back them up. Pastor Witte thought the education of his son finished when he reached the age of sixteen. We today do things in the same spirit. We get things done. Nothing slow about us. The result, of course, is very poor; nobody is satisfied. Our experts, always ready with advice on any and everything, tell us that what we need is technical training to provide industry with efficient help. These educators do not see that the difficulty is not with the child but with industrial conditions. They are going to fit the child to this misery called modern industry. But remove the possibility of the unscrupulous taking advantage of the inexperienced and simple-minded, and many of the so-called educational problems will disappear.
Some Book Reviews
A New-Old Tagore Play
Chitra: A Play in One Act, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
Nothing is more irritating to a really modern critic than to have to join in a chorus of universal praise. It is particularly irritating when the person acclaimed is a Nobel prize winner, for surely those of us who sit in private judgment in secluded places ought to be able to discern values subtler than the ones open to the eyes of some mysterious frock-coated and silk-hatted jury of professors in Stockholm, or wherever it may be. The very marrow in the bones of criticism curdles at the thought of agreeing with a popular award.
But a certain native honesty and a distinct desire to spread good news obliges one, in the case of Chitra, to withhold the amiable dissecting knife. The play is far too beautiful to serve as a cadaver for the illustration of either the anatomist’s skill or the facts of anatomy. Let it be confessed that this reviewer, who was about to send the book back with a refusal to review any work of Tagore, found, after reading a few lines, that he was forced to go on; and that having once gone on, he preferred to write the review rather than to give up the book.
This play was written twenty-five years ago, and belongs, therefore, to that earlier strata of Tagore’s life which is to the normal mind so much more alluring than the latter detritus that seems to have accumulated over him. His later work appears to be old with the old age of Asia and with the old age of himself. Its fundamental feeling is the only too familiar impulse to recline on the bosom of a remote God. We who regard this attitude as a perversion of manhood will turn from it with relief to the earlier writing, in which the very life-blood of our own hearts seems quivering with the intimations of a better-than-godlike beauty.
As I have suggested, there is very little that can rationally be said about this play Chitra. To indicate something of the nature of so perfect a work is the sole office that I can profitably perform.
Chitra, daughter of a King who had no sons, was brought up to live the life and perform the activities of a man, with a man’s hardness of frame and a man’s directness of will. One day while hunting in the forest, she found sleeping in her path Arjuna, the great warrior of the Kuru Clan. “Then for the first time in my life I felt myself a woman, and knew that a man was before me....” Going to the gods of love, Chitra obtained from them the gift of a perfect and world-vanquishing beauty to last for one year only; and returning to Arjuna she overcame by this invincible weapon the monastic vows which he had taken upon himself, and swept him away into the wild and glorious current of her year of beauty. Thus the year begins:
Chitra