India and the Mongolian WHEN Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal in his speech at the Federation Ground was speaking of the possibility of China and Japan overthrowing European civilisation, how many of the audience understood or appreciated the great issues of which he spoke? We have lost the faculty of great ideas, of large outlooks, of that instinct which divines the great motions of the world. This huge country, this mighty continent, once full of the clash of tremendous forces, stirring with high exploits and gigantic ambitions, loud with the voices of the outside world, has become a petty parish; the palace of the Aryan Emperors is now the hut of a crouching slave, sma

THREE Its Necessity WE HAVE defined, so far, the occasion and the ultimate object of the passive resistance we preach. It is the only effective means, except actual armed revolt, by which the organised strength of the nation, gathering to a powerful central authority and guided by the principle of self-development and self-help, can wrest the control of our national life from the grip of an alien bureaucracy, and thus, developing into a free popular Government, naturally replace the bureaucracy it extrudes until the process culminates in a self-governed India, liberated from foreign control. The mere effort at self-development unaided by some kind of resistance, w

The Life of Nationalism FOR all great movements, for all ideas that have a destiny before them, there are four seasons of life-development. There is first a season of secret or quasi-secret growth when the world knows nothing of this momentous birth which time has engendered, when the peoples of the earth persist in the old order of things with the settled conviction that that order has yet many centuries of life before it, when Krishna is growing from infancy to youth in Gokul among the obscure and the despised and the weak ones of the earth and Kamsa knows not his enemy and, however he may be troubled by vague apprehensions and old prophecies and new pr

The Need of the Moment ALL that we do and attempt proceeds from faith, and if we are deficient in faith nothing can be accomplished. When we are deficient in faith our work begins to flag and failure is frequent; but if we have faith things are done for us. No great work has ever been done without this essential courage. Misled by egoism, we believe that we are working, that the results of what we do are our creation, and when anything has to be done we ask ourselves whether we have the strength, the means, the requisite qualities, but in reality all work is done by the will of God and when faith in Him is the mainspring of our actions, success is inevitable. Somet

Freedom of Speech THE questions in Parliament about the change of the existing law and Mr. Morley's answers seem to point to a coming repressive measure intended to suppress the small amount of free speech still existing in India. The rights of free speech and free meeting were once reckoned among the priceless blessings which British rule had brought to India. Nowadays one can with difficulty put oneself back into the frame of mind which made such a conception possible. The entire dependence on British protection, the childlike faith in the machinery of European civilisation, the inability to perceive facts or distinguish words from realities, the facile contentment with

Shall India Be Free ? WE ARE arguing the impossibility of a healthy national development under foreign rule, -- except by reaction against that rule. The foreign domination naturally interferes with and obstructs the functioning of the native organs of development. It is therefore in itself an unnatural and unhealthy condition, -- a wound, a disease, which must result, unless arrested, in the mortification and rotting to death of the indigenous body politic. If a nation were an artificial product which could be made, then it might be possible for one nation to make another. But a nation cannot be made, -- it is an organism which grows under the stress of a pri

-23_Recent English Poetry – 3.htm chapter XXII   Recent English Poetry - 3 THE rhythmic change which distinguishes the new poetry, may not be easy to seize at the first hearing, for it is a subtle thing in its spirit more than in its body, commencing only and obscured by the outward adherence to the apparent turn-out and method of older forms; but there is a change too, more readily tangible, in the language of this poetry, in that fusion of a concentrated substance of the idea and a transmuting essence of the speech which we mean by poetic style. But here too, if we would understand in its issues the evolution of poetic speech in a language, it is on the subtler things of the spirit, the

SECTION  THREE Poetic Rhythm and Technique TWO FACTORS IN POETIC RHYTHM      1 If your purpose is to acquire not only metrical skill but the sense and the power of rhythm, to study the poets may do something, but not all. There are two factors in poetic rhythm, — there is the technique (the variation of movement without spoiling the fundamental structure of the metre, right management of vowel and consonantal assonances and dissonances, the masterful combination of the musical element of stress with the less obvious element of quantity, etc.), and there is the secret soul of rhythm which uses but exceeds these things. The first you can learn, i

-08_The Character of English Poetry – 1.htm CHAPTER VII The  Character  of  English  Poetry  -  1 OF ALL the modern European tongues the English language, I think. It may be said without serious doubt; has produced the most rich and naturally powerful poetry, the most lavish of energy and innate genius. The unfettered play of poetic energy and power has been here the most abundant and brought forth the most constantly brilliant fruits. And yet it is curious to note that English poetry and literature have been a far less effective force in the shaping of European culture than those of other tongues inferior actually in natural poetic and creative energy. At least they have had to wait till quite

I THE FUTURE POETRY II LETTERS ON POETRY, LITERATURE AND ART CHAPTER I Introductory IT IS not often that we see published in India literary criticism which is of the first order, at once discerning and suggestive, criticism which forces us both to see and think. A book which recently I have read and more than once repressed with a yet unexhausted pleasure and fruitfulness, Mr. James Cousins' New Ways in English Literature, is eminently of this kind. It raises thought which goes beyond the strict limits of the author's subject and suggests the whole question of the future of poetry in the age which is coming upon us, the higher functions