In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  Melvyn quoted one of the most famous lines from The Prelude: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven.’ This again, Rosemary Ashton said, was a reference to his feelings, as he remembered them, of when he was a young man immediately after the French Revolution when he hoped that revolutionary fervour would sweep through the whole of Europe, bringing freedom and equality and brotherhood of man. The line that Melvyn quoted comes after Wordsworth had already told readers of his disappointment when the Terror occurred, the guillotine was being used every second minute, the Jacobins and the Girondins fell out, and all the hopes for France and the rest of Europe, by analogy, had fallen flat. That is the point, she said, at which he went back to remember what it was like before, changing the chronology for dramatic emotional effect.

  EMMA MASON: For all that the poem is about nature, really nature didn’t mean, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what we think it did. It doesn’t mean non-urban, rural, National Trust-y places. It means a realm of intuitions and affections that is linked to the natural world, but he’s not a pastoral poet, he’s not someone that idealises the landscape.

  Relating to the world had to be a particular and a human experience, not an experience where people went abstractly into nature on their own, but something that was carried through their relationship with other people. Wordsworth was very keen on describing his encounters with other people, his interactions, usually outdoors, usually when walking somewhere.

  ROSEMARY ASHTON: The main thing is the effect that the meeting with other people had on him and on his mind, because this point is absolutely wonderful in connecting that direct love of external nature with a real attempt at psychologising himself. It’s the first great psychological poem.

  In 1807, once Wordsworth had read his poem to Coleridge and his friends at George Beaumont’s house, Coleridge almost immediately sat down and wrote a poem about listening to that poem and he performed the great compliment of writing it as a consciously Wordsworthian poem. He actually became quite rhapsodic, Rosemary Ashton said, talking about it as a prophetic lay, an Orphic song. The poem ends, ‘Thy long-sustained song finally closed, / And they deep voice had ceased … I sate, my being blended in one thought / (Thought was it? Or aspiration? Or resolve?) / Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound— / And when I rose, I found myself in prayer,’ where the ‘hanging still upon the sound’ was actually a Wordsworthian phrase, the physicality of the mental response to the poem.

  Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy and his wife Mary supported the writing of The Prelude, as did Coleridge, but there was another figure, namely his brother John Wordsworth, whom Emma Mason believed had an immense impact on Wordsworth as a model of affection and feeling. With the early deaths of their parents, the siblings had been spread among the homes of relatives all over the north of England. Wordsworth was addressing the impact of that. He was not saying that you had to have love as a young child, but that you had to learn how to repeat or get that feeling in your adult life, if you had not had it as a child.

  Wordsworth referred to his brother John as a silent poet. Unlike Dorothy, John never wrote poetry, but the idea of being a silent poet suggested that, for Wordsworth, poetry was not about the reading or linguistic content, but the emotional content.

  EMMA MASON: Which is why it’s so important that he reads it to Coleridge, because it’s the feeling that the readers have at the end of the poem that is important to him, rather than the process of reading. And he says that very clearly in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, where he says that feeling is what gives importance to actions and situations, not actions and situations to feeling itself.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  People in Wordsworth’s circle knew of The Prelude, from readings and from talking to him about it face to face at his home in the Lakes. According to Stephen Gill, though, it did not have great influence at that time. Wordsworth’s impact upon writers such as George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Tennyson was huge, but there was already a lot of Wordsworth in circulation when he died. In 1850, Stephen Gill asked, did anybody really want to read another thirteen-book poem? Matthew Arnold was the most influential taste setter regarding Wordsworth in the later Victorian period.

  STEPHEN GILL: Arnold regards Wordsworth as a lyric poet and barely makes a mention of The Prelude. As late as the 1880s and ’90s, publishers are still putting out collections of Wordsworth in which they don’t include The Prelude (well, they can’t, as a matter of fact, for copyright reasons, but we’ll let that pass). They put in little notes at the front saying, ‘The Prelude is not the equal of his other works.’

  Wordsworth had tinkered with the poem for so many years and, Rosemary Ashton argued, part of the consequence of that tinkering was a watering-down of the original freshness and the boldness. The idea that Wordsworth was a favoured son of nature went, and a few more references to Christian God crept in as he became more conventionally religious. It was still a great poem but it was a slightly duller poem. It was also a long time since the French Revolution, since the pre-railway age and, by the time the poem was published, the Victorians were interested in other things.

  ROSEMARY ASHTON: One of the criticisms that was made of the poem was that it was all about himself, it wasn’t about humanity and other people, readers thought, and, by the Victorian period when you’ve got all the social problem novels of Gaskell and Dickens and so on, it somehow didn’t seem to be a poem of the era in which it was published, and nor was it.

  Although the novel was overwhelmingly popular in the Victorian period, Wordsworth did hold an enormously important place for many poets who are read less often now, Emma Mason noted, particularly women poets gathering their sense of self for the first time, such as Dora Greenwell and Adelaide Anne Procter, who were extremely popular in their own day. Victorians found immense consolation in The Prelude as they did in Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, both providing an alternative space to the Church for allowing religious sensibilities to operate.

  If, instead of the long delay, The Prelude had been published in 1807, Stephen Gill thought it could have been dynamite. Wordsworth did not hold back from revealing his political sensitivities from the 1790s.

  STEPHEN GILL: In book ten, I think it is, there’s a passage where Wordsworth describes himself praying for French victories, kneeling in an English church and being the only person there not offering up prayers for our nation’s victories. By the time he wrote those words, William Wordsworth was a member of the Grasmere militia and was a staunch patriot, but he wrote them, that’s the point. And he did not delete them.

  With that, Melvyn concluded that there was nothing else for anybody to do but go and read The Prelude over the next month or two, ‘with enormous pleasure and delight’.

  RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  It is claimed that Rabindranath Tagore was, at one time, one of the most famous poets in the world. Born in Calcutta in 1861, he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound were great supporters. A commanding figure in the Indian renaissance of the nineteenth century, Tagore also played a major part in India’s independence movement. The first prime minister of India, Nehru, said he had two gurus: Gandhi was one, the other was Tagore. He wrote novels and plays, he painted; he composed thousands of songs, and two of his many poems became the national anthems for India and Bangladesh.

  With Melvyn to discuss Tagore were: Chandrika Kaul, senior lecturer in modern history at the University of St Andrews; John Stevens, research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; and Bashabi Fraser, professor of English literature and creative writing at Edinburgh Napier University.

  There was a cultural movement in Tagore’s part of India in the nineteenth century known as the Bengal renaissance, a movement in which he, his family and his ancestors played a large part. Chandrika Kaul explained that Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), an influential reformer, is the one traditionally credited w
ith starting this. There was social and religious reform, a literary and scientific movement, as well as a political strand that became more prominent towards the end of the nineteenth century. In part, the social and religious reform came out of a British cultural project of understanding and gathering knowledge, which led to the establishment of schools and universities.

  CHANDRIKA KAUL: People like Ram Mohan Roy and others begin to assimilate western cultural, literary, philosophical traditions, the western Enlightenment traditions, as well as the teachings of Christ and Christianity, along with an approach to reviving and reforming Hindu religion and faith.

  There was a cultural dimension to this, with the revival of Bengali as a literary language, and there was an assertion of the Hindu faith as one of the great religions of the east.

  There was a close connection between Tagore’s family and the East India Company. His great-grandfather had made his fortune in the eighteenth century working for the company as a revenue collector, and his paternal grandfather had consolidated this fortune by investing in mining, indigo and sugar plantations, becoming an extremely wealthy entrepreneur in Anglo-Indian society in Calcutta (Kolkata) where he was referred to as a prince.

  CHANDRIKA KAUL: Calcutta was the capital of the East India Company, and also the British until 1912. He was at ease with Anglo-Indian society, he twice went to Britain, he dined with Queen Victoria, he was fêted by the Lord Mayor of London. He was an assimilated Indian who benefited from the commercial and economic opportunities thrown up by the East India Company. He is reputed to have formed the first British Anglo-Indian Company, Carr, Tagore and Co., in Calcutta.

  One of the driving forces behind the Bengali renaissance was the Brahmo Samaj, which Ram Mohan Roy had founded in the 1820s and, initially, functioned as a small place of worship.

  JOHN STEVENS: Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore’s father, took over the Brahmo Samaj in the 1840s and he really revitalised the movement and turned it into a very powerful force in Bengal in terms of the spread of education, in terms of reforms to do with improving the condition of women in Bengal and also in terms of promulgating a form of Hinduism that was reformist, that was universalist and that was monotheistic and rational.

  The group split into many factions over the century, but generally, John Stevens said, they trod a middle path between those in Bengal who wholeheartedly embraced the west and those who rigorously defended what they saw as the traditions of India and Bengal.

  Rabindranath Tagore was the fourteenth child in a wealthy, energetic family, although he termed it a servocracy as, to him, the servants appeared to run the place rather than his parents. He grew up in a culturally stimulating environment, in a large house in north Calcutta, and, among his siblings, there were many great writers, artists and poets.

  JOHN STEVENS: The family were very well connected. But one does get the sense, from his writings about his early life, that there was also an element of loneliness to it. He was largely raised by servants. It doesn’t seem that he was particularly close to his parents and he never got on very well at school.

  Initially, his verse was influenced by the devotional Vaishnava tradition of poetry, and, Bashabi Fraser told us, he went on to write Bhanusimha Padabali under a pseudonym. She described this work as being a bit like Macpherson’s Ossian, as Tagore claimed he had discovered this work by a medieval poet who was using not Bengali but Brajabuli, a dialect between Hindi and Bengali. At first, it was accepted as genuine, although, after people praised it, he owned up that it was his. While still young, he travelled to London with his brother Satyendranath and started to study law, but did not progress much and returned home.

  Tagore wrote several collections of poems in this period of his life after his return, and one of his famous ones is ‘The Golden Boat’, which Bashabi Fraser recited in Bengali before improvising a translation into English.

  BASHABI FRASER: Just the gist of it. ‘There are clouds that are thundering, the rain is a heavy downpour. I sit alone on the bank of the river. I have a certain sense of hopelessness. I finished reaping the harvest of paddy, there’s loads of it now beside me. The river is in full spate but, while we were harvesting, the rain came.’ And, in this poem, somebody comes in another boat and he feels he has seen this person. Who is he? He asks him, ‘Can you take my paddy?’ And he does. He fills the boat and then he says, ‘Can you take me?’ He says, ‘No, there is no room.’ And the boat goes away, and he’s alone.

  When Tagore came back from London, he was about nineteen or twenty, and that was when his father put him in charge of some of his vast estates. In Chandrika Kaul’s view, some of the romantic rural idyll that is at the heart of Tagore’s poetry, such as that just recited by Bashabi Fraser, was influenced by him being thrown from the security of his urban Calcutta existence to managing his father’s estates in rural Bengal. This was when he met villagers, the common sharecroppers.

  CHANDRIKA KAUL: He spent most of his time travelling by the houseboat that the family owned, moving down the Padma River, visiting various households and householders. And this greatly influenced not just his attitude towards reconstruction and social reform, particularly among the peasantry, but also his poetry. His creative spirit was reborn in this new, invigorating, if isolated, environment where he was communing with nature.

  Melvyn, having read some of the poems for the programme, observed that Tagore had, indeed, gained an awful lot of material from his rural experiences, which were outside the world in which he had grown up. Chandrika Kaul noted this rural romanticism in the collection of poems Gitanjali, which, in their English version, were later to form the main basis for his Nobel Prize.

  Rabindranath Tagore was relatively detached from politics for a while, but he became drawn in more tightly after the partition of Bengal in 1905. The British, John Stevens said, claimed that this division would make a very large province easier to administer. It was generally understood, though, that one of the British aims was to weaken the growing nationalism there. It was at this time that the seeds of a Muslim East Bengal and a Hindu West Bengal were sown. Very quickly a movement grew against the partition, the Swadeshi movement, which was an economic form of resistance favouring indigenous goods over British ones. Tagore was very much in favour of the boycott of British goods, although not the destruction of British factories. He wrote songs and poems in favour of Swadeshi, we heard, and led a big Swadeshi procession through Calcutta. He was open to British culture, but that did not mean he supported British rule.

  JOHN STEVENS: In the end, he did turn against the movement and this was because, in 1907, there were some very serious riots, communal riots, and part of the problem with Swadeshi was that Swadeshi goods, these indigenous goods, were more expensive than the British goods. And the largely Muslim peasantry often couldn’t afford these Swadeshi goods, but were forced into buying them. This created tension; there were these very serious riots. Tagore was appalled by the violence.

  It was at this point that Tagore really moved away from the Swadeshi movement, we heard, and from organised politics in general.

  It was in 1910 that Tagore published the poems in Bengali that were known as Gitanjali, or ‘Song Offerings’. In 1912, he travelled to London with these, translated into English, to meet with his supporter W. B. Yeats and the artist William Rothenstein, although, of this new collection of 103 poems in English, only fifty-three were in the original Bengali Gitanjali.

  BASHABI FRASER: He had delayed his journey because he hadn’t been well and he had retreated to his estate. Rothenstein had earlier expressed an interest in reading his writing in English when he came to England. There’s a story that he had given them to his son Rathindranath, who had left them in Victoria station and some kind soul had found them. So it might have been lost altogether and it would have been a different story.

  Tagore was introduced to Yeats in June 1912 and, in July, Yeats read three of Tagore’s poems to a gathering of seventy people, which seemed to change the ga
me for him. The India Society went on to publish the book, and Thomas Sturge Moore, who was a fellow at the Royal Society, nominated Tagore for the Nobel Prize.

  Rabindranath Tagore with Gandhi.

  Tagore went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1913, the first non-westerner to be awarded that prize for literature. It was a great achievement but no one, Chandrika Kaul said, was more surprised than Tagore. He was on a reading tour and it was not until he reached India again in November that he heard about it. There were other contenders, such as Thomas Hardy, who were seen as the leading horses in the race. Perhaps his Swedish followers helped sway the decision away from the favourites, although there were several other works of Tagore in the Nobel library, so someone there may have read him in depth, and the award did not have to rest on Gitanjali alone.

  CHANDRIKA KAUL: You have to remember the context of Europe at this time, the lead-up to the First World War, the growing militarism, the war clouds on the horizon. What Tagore’s poems, at one level, represented was this breath of fresh air, this hope of communion with nature, this romantic idyll of peace. And Tagore, with the long beard and piercing eyes, seemed to represent everything that the oriental sage of Kipling’s time would have represented.