Rabindranath's brother, who is a great philosopher. The
squirrels come from the boughs and climb on to his knees and the
birds alight upon his hands.' I notice in these men's thought a
sense of visible beauty and meaning as though they held that
doctrine of Nietzsche that we must not believe in the moral or
intellectual beauty which does not sooner or later impress itself
upon physical things. I said, 'In the East you know how to keep
a family illustrious. The other day the curator of a museum
pointed out to me a little dark-skinned man who was arranging
their Chinese prints and said, ''That is the hereditary
connoisseur of the Mikado, he is the fourteenth of his family to
hold the post.'' 'He answered, 'When Rabindranath was a boy he
had all round him in his home literature and music.' I thought
of the abundance, of the simplicity of the poems, and said, 'In
your country is there much propagandist writing, much criticism?
We have to do so much, especially in my own country, that our
minds gradually cease to be creative, and yet we cannot help it.
If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste,
we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and
readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent in the quarrel with
bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others.'
'I understand,' he replied, 'we too have our propagandist
writing. In the villages they recite long mythological poems
adapted from the Sanskrit in the Middle Ages, and they often
insert passages telling the people that they must do their
duties.'

I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me
for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of
omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it