hold a large share; and as compared with western fiction there is very much the same difference that we find in the treatment of the songs of east and west. But as Rabindranath has proved himself in other ways a close student of foreign literatures, so here he has known how to develop for his own use a sympathetic and thoroughly congenial form of short story. In it he combines, not hard and fast realism, but the human realities with his romance, and truth to nature attends his wildest apparent improvisations. He is able thus to gain effects which a Nathaniel Hawthorne or a Turgenief might envy him. Dr. Seal, perhaps the best-equipped critic he has had, has pointed out that his stories resemble most closely (if they are to be held like anything in European literature) the shorter tales of Flaubert. The finer art of the tale began in Bengal with the "Vaishnavas," who gave the Indian tale, or Katha, a more finished form; from them Rabindranath took it over, and made of it a pliable or adaptable instrument.
Those tales of his which have appeared in the pages of the Wednesday Review, the Hindostan Review, and other Indian periodicals form only a small contingent of the number he has
