Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/118

has become the lingua franca of east and west No one who at any time discussed with him matters of style, and the business of verse and prose, could mistake his feeling for English, although he often confessed to a fear that something of its ease and finesse of style escaped him. You have only to mark the difference in quality between the translation of Gitanjali, which he did himself, and that of The King of the Dark Chamber (which in the edition first issued, despite the evidence of the title-page, is by another hand), to appreciate how delicate is his own touch and his feeling for the salient phrase and the live word. It is of a part with this understanding of our common medium, that we should find in his poetry a spirit more congenial to ourselves than that we usually find in Oriental verse. Our English notion of Indian poetry, especially when tinged as these songs are with religious ardour, is that it lies too far aloof from our hopes and fears to pass the test of our own art. But what strikes one in reading Gitanjali is that the heavenly desire is qualified by an almost childlike reliance on the affections, and at times by an almost womanly tenderness. Its pages carry on an old tradition, yet strike