W.E.A.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 21 October 1930, Page 3

W.E.A.

* me, BRAILSFOED’S lecture. Two kinds of men were met with in life, Mr J. A. Brailsford, 8.A., staff tutor, observed in the eourso of his W.E.A. lecture in the Municipal Social Hall last evening on Rabindranath Tagore, India's great poet-prophet. There was the practical man, who, like a donkey, could see no further than a carrot in front of his nose, and there was the individual who gave his life to dreaming. In a man like Tagore, the two sides of life were harmonised. The lecture was a running survey of the life, ideas and ideals of a most unusual and impressive personality. Mr H. B. Reid presided over a fair attendance. In his address, Mr Brailsford drew freely on the writings of Tagore, whom he met and talked with in Japan, in illustration of the poet-prophet’s ideas on education, his love of nature, his dislike and mistrust of organisation, and his perception of the commanding importance of human persouality and of the need of bringing human soul into touch, understanding and sympathy with human soul. The lecturer covered a great deal of ground and only a few passages of his address can be outlined in this report. Tagore held, Mr Brailsford observed, that to deny children the right of free development was to manufacture criminals. When he started his boarding school for boys in Bengal, the boys sent to him were those regarded as intractable and wicked. He found that usually these boys were those who were particularly well endowed with energy, which was good in itself. Tagocre used no punishment, and adopted a system of “freedom cure,” which worked well. He rejected the ordinary discipine of schools as something that reflected the outlook of men who were obsessed with a sense of their own dignity and importance. He always told his boys that the school was "not his, but theirs, and that it awaited their co-operation to grow and be completed. Teachers who pride themselves upon being disciplinarians, he considered, were usually born tyrants, better fitted to be executioners or prison warders than teachers. Boys, he maintained, had the power, through their own work and their own direct observation, of creating their own world, and that power might bo destroyed by requiring them to accept book lessons. These ideas and others, Mr Brailsford observed, were now held by most advanced educationists.

Tagore’s mother, said the lecturer, died early. To his father, Tagore probably owed it in a large measure that he became not merely a poet, but one who was able to go much further in showing the possibilities of world harmonies. -Throughout his life however, Tagore had felt the conflict in himself between the two sides of his nature —the poet and the man with a message. Ho felt he had no right to be only a poet. In one of his poems he invited a priest to leave his temple and share the dusty lot of the humble toilers in the field. Mr Brailsford said he would be speaking in his next lecture about Tagore’s ideas of reconciling East and West. Tagore’s grandfather, the lecturer went on to remark, was a prince who lived part of his life in England, and died there. His father was a leader of the movement for the reform of Hinduism. Although he found school exceedingly repressive, Tagore had the brains that enabled him to acquire learning fairly rapidly. His home was full of culture, music and poetry. Several of his brothers were noted as artists, musicians or poets. In this atmosphere, Tagore grew up, with a free development of his own artistic sense. At about the age of seventeen he went to England to carry his education further. He lived with an English family—that of a doctor—and enjoyed the associations of tho home exceedingly. He told of many pleasing little incidents which endeared the British people to him. He insisted on telling his own people that there was good in the British character even in these times, when to do so was considered disloyal. On the whole, he paid high tribute to the character of tho British people, but he joined with his countrymen in detesting the expression of the British governmental faculty as seen in India. Returning home at the age of 22, he married, and .spent the next 17 or 18 years in managing the family estate on the banks of the Ganges, and writing nature poems which were permeated with worship of the beauty of life. Into this peaceful and happy life, tragedy came suddenly. Tagore’s wife died, and his eldest daughter and young son died soon afterwards. Though he felt bitterly the pain of parting with those he loved, Tagore was able later on to draw from the lesson of death that of a fuller life and of perfection. He felt that life could only find itself in changing forms, and wrote: —“Because I love this life, I know I shall love death a s well.” From this time, Tagore gave himself almost entirely to humanity, and had benefited many thousands of human beings. Before his wife died, he had taken up tho idea of establishing a school. He developed this, and since, had tried to establish an international university. His writing also developed into something that carried a very powerful ’’message—stories, plays, prose, poems and novels. In 1919, lie resigned his knighthood Peace Prize. The money (£8000) this brought him he gave immediately to his school. In 1915 lie was knighted. In 1910 he resigned his knighthood after the Amritsar tragedy. At the same time, he sent two messages to the Indian National Congress, urging tho Indian people to have no thought of anger or retaliation. Since that time, ■ Tagore had made .several world tours, urging tho gospel of reconciliation. Ho was not an ascetic, and in several passages of his writings rather ridiculed the holy men of India, who believed in mortifying tho flesh as a thing good in itself. He condemned huge organisations and nationalism as barriers to the free development of personality to which he pinned his faith. He condemned men who made idols of their ideas and sacrificed humanity to them. Tagore held that civilisation was seriously defective - in being too mascu-

line, and therefore lacking in balance. He believed that because woman had been obscured by man, she would have her compensation in the civilisation to come. There was no modern man, said the lecturer, who got to woman’s heart and told the story of romantic love more beautifully than did Tagore. To Tagore, the beauty of a little flower was more potent than a Maxim gun, and the sweet note of a bird was a greater .force than that of a 1 deafening cannonade. It was Christ’s message over again, when He said of the lilies of the field: “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Tagore’s faith was above all in human pesonarlity. A vote of thanks to the lecturer was carried by acclamation. The lecture was followed by tho reading by Mrs T. R. Barrer and Mr Brailsford of one of Tagore’s sketches.