Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/30

Those who have read his poems in Gitanjali and The Gardener, and have fathomed the philosophy of life's realisations expressed in the pages of Sādhanā, may wonder what impressions a great city like London would leave on the mind of a poet reared among such different surroundings? After many experiences here and in America, he was left, I fear, with an uneasy sense of the life of our great cities. The spectacle of multitudes of men and women avid for sensation, one and all bent upon getting and gaining advantage over their neighbours, troubled him. It gave an ominous turn to a casual discussion that began one day when he had been ill and was lying in bed convalescent, in a room full of flowers, with a tell-tale glimpse through the windows of an ordinary dull London street on a wet summer's afternoon. He had been reading that powerful romance of an artist at odds with circumstance who has to fight hard for his art in the greedy world of Paris, Jean Christophe; and he was curiously concerned at the picture of a soul in trouble, and at the conditions of life which went to determine that trouble, displayed in the pages of the book. "You people over here," he said, "seem to me to be all in a state of continual strife. It is all struggling, hard