SECTION EIGHT ART AND LITERATURE Art ALL Art is interpretation. Creation is a misnomer; nothing in this world is created, all is manifested. All exists previously in the mind of the Knower. Art may interpret that which is already manifest or was manifest at one time, or it may interpret what will be manifest hereafter. It may even be used as one of the agencies in the manifestation. A particular type of face and figure may be manifested in the work of a popular artist and in a single generation the existing type of face and figure in the country may change and mould itself to the new conception. These things are there in the type in the causal world with which ou

The Strength of Stillness THERE are two great forces in the universe, silence and speech. Silence prepares, speech creates. Silence acts, speech gives the impulse to action. Silence compels, speech persuades. The immense and inscrutable processes of the world all perfect themselves within, in a deep and august silence, covered by a noisy and misleading surface of sound — the stir of innumerable waves above, the fathomless resistless mass of the ocean's waters below. Men see the waves, they hear the rumour and the thousand voices and by these they judge the course of the future and the heart of God's intention; but in nine cases out of ten they misjudge. The

FIVE Littleton - Percival LITTLETON After so long a time, Percival, we meet. It is strange that our ways, upon earth associated and parallel, should in this other world be so entirely divergent. PERCIVAL Why is it strange to you, Littleton ? The world in which we find ourselves, is made, as we have both discovered, of the stuff of our earthly dreams and the texture of our mortal character. Physically, our ways on earth were parallel. We walked together over Cumberland mountains or watched the whole sea leap and thunder titanically against the Cornwall cliffs. You were stroke and I was cox in the same boat on the Isis. We bracketed always for Co

SECTION FOUR VALMIKI AND VYASA The Genius of Valmiki OUT of the infinite silence of the past, peopled only to the eye of history or the ear of the Yogin, a few voices arise which speak for it, express it and are the very utterance and soul of those unknown generations, of that vanished and now silent humanity. These are the voices of the poets. We whose souls are drying up in this hard and parched age of utilitarian and scientific thought when men value little beyond what gives them exact and useful knowledge or leads them to some outward increase of power and pleasure, we who are beginning to neglect and ignore poetry and can no longer write it greatly and

NOTES ON THE MAHABHARATA Notes on the Mahabharata of Krishna Dvypaiana Vyasa prepared with a view to disengage the original epic of Krishna of the Island from the enlargements, accretions and additions made by Vaishampaiana, Ugrashravas and innumerable other writers. PROPOSITA An epic of the Mahabharata was written by Krishna of the Island called Vyasa, in 24,000 couplets or something more, less at any rate than 27,000 on the subject of the great civil war of the Bharatas and the establishment of the Dharmarajya or universal sovereignty in that house. This epic can be disengaged almost in its entirety from the present form of nearly 100,000 Sloka

TWO The Bengal He Lived in THE society by which Bankim was formed, was the young Bengal of the fifties, the most extraordinary perhaps that India has yet seen, — a society electric with thought and loaded to the brim with passion. Bengal was at that time the theatre of a great intellectual awakening. A sort of miniature Renascence was in process. An ardent and imaginative race, long bound down in the fetters of a single tradition, had had suddenly put into its hand the key to a new world thronged with the beautiful or profound creations of Art and Learning. From this meeting of a foreign Art and civilisation with a temperament differing from the temperament which

THREE Mazzini - Cavour - Garibaldi MAZZINI The state of Italy now is the proof that my teaching was needed. Machiavellianism rose again in the policy of Cavour, and Italy, grasping too eagerly at the speedy fruit of her efforts, fell from the clearness of the revelation that I gave her. Therefore she suffers. We must work for the fruit, but there must not be such attachment to the fruit that to hasten it the true means is sacrificed, for that leads eventually to the sacrifice of the true end. CAVOUR The state of Italy is the proof of the soundness of my policy. Mazzini, you speak still as the ideologist, the man of notions. The statesman r

II. URVASIE In nothing else does the delicacy and keen suavity of Kalidasa's dramatic genius exhibit itself with a more constant and instinctive perfection than in his characterisation of women. He may sometimes not care to individualise his most unimportant female figures, but even the slightest of his women have some personality of their own, something which differentiates them from others and makes them better than mere names. Insight into feminine character is extraordinarily rare even among dramatists for whom one might think it to be a necessary element of their art. For the most part a poet represents with success only one or two unusual types known to him or in sympathy wit

ONE Epistles from Abroad Dearly beloved, You, my alter ego, my second existence, now sitting comfortably at home and, doubtless, reading the romantic fictions of the Empire by the light of heavily-priced kerosine; I, who roam uncomfortably in foreign climes, sighing for the joys of the Press Act and the house-search; these faces, white and unfamiliar, that surround me; these miles of soulless brick and faultless macadam, the fitting body for a point-device and dapper civilisation which has lost sight of grandeur, beauty and nobility in life, — are we, I wonder, flitting visions of a nightmare that passes or real men and women made in God's image? Was life alwa

FOUR Shivaji - Jai Singh JAI SINGH Neither of us have prevailed. A third force has entered into the land and takes the fruits of your work and as for mine, it is broken and the ideal I have cherished has gone down into the dust. SHIVAJI For the fruit I did not work and I am not amazed by the failure nor discouraged. JAI SINGH I too did not work for my reward, but to uphold the ideal of the Rajput. Unflinching courage in honourable warfare, chivalry to friend and foe, a noble loyalty to the sovereign of our choice, this seemed to me the true Indian tradition, preferable even to the unity and predominance of the Hindu races. Therefo