Page:Love in Hindu Literature.djvu/100

excellence, the poet of human desires, sensuous passions, and physical beauty. If his songs have been partly or wholly taken as symbolical of the super-human, it is because, of the names, Radha and Krishna, which, in popular imagination, have always had a religious association. But "higher criticism" must disentangle humanism from mediaeval symbolism forced upon it by this despotism of tradition. The Beatrice of Dante's New Life is different from the Beatrice of his Divine Comedy. So there are Rādhās and Rādhās in mediaeval Vaishnava lore.

(d) The Futurism of Young India.

Vikramorvaisie, Padābali and Chitra, are all studies in humanism. Their theme is sensuous love, the dignity of sex. This Hindu conception is a distinct contribution to the world culture of the present .day. It has been brought to the forefront at a time when the dignity of sex has been attracting universal attention. For whatever be the. value of the sex-movements and the sex sciences of the last two decades or so, interest in sex as sex has come to stay.; During the last century the "dignity of work," i.e., the "sanctity of labour," has been planted as an axiom in human consciousness through the efforts of Carlyle and Morris, Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassale, Louis Blanc and Mazzirii, Whitman and Emerson, Dayananda and Vivek-ananda. Similarly the dignity of sex is going to be established as one of the A.B.C.'s of modern thought by the middle of the twentieth century.

The humanism revived by Aurobinda. Ghosh, Coo-