Page:The Modern Review Vol 01 (Jan.-June 1907).djvu/10

WESTERN LITERATURE AND THE-EDUGATED PUBLIC OF INDIA ` 3

Should any lingering doubt remain in the mind of any Indian as to what benefit he would derive from exploring the thoughts of our leading European men, mostly still unknown, I would put before him a preface of Ernest Renan’s. It is to one of his latest and ripest books. He is pointing out thatin any country it isthe cha- racter of the highest instruction given which really matters, and which carries with it the intellectual future. All else, he says, is of secondary importance. Thisis the true source and root of the lower kinds of education, and not contrariwise. The lower education without the highest kind is of little avail. Suddenly he turns round upon his countrymen, and asks,

“What defeated Frenchmen in the, Franco- German War?” “Not Moltke! not Bismarck ! ", he exclaims, “but the mind, the high seriousness, the method,.the thought of Germany ! It was Luther, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, who fought with us in the Franco-German War!” And so we too can see with Japan. Japan belongs to another family of man than ours, but she is aware of the necessity at least to enter and. to reconnoitre the modern world, Hence her. efficient universities, her successful studies of intellectual things, of knowledge under the European form.

I think, however, we can be full of confidence. Mark Pattison says somewhere that the beginning is everything. We have introduced the beginnings, sometimes under the disguise, certainly, of the applicable. and the advantageous. Fifty years is not very much time.

Chateaubriand says of his generation, were caught in the whirlpool at the meeting- place of two different civilisations.” So too our Indian students are often “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.” But Chateaubriand also says: “I struck out boldly, and landed on the farther shore." I think we can be confident that this agitation of the surface must surely continue to spread in ever widening circles. In time the names not of five or six only, but of all the chief writers of Europe must surely become known. Then we shall see the works of those writers often asked for, and a demand for translations, too, such as does not exist now, for example, at the Public Library in Allahabad. ۱

It is not of much importance what amount we know when we leave our university. Few men know much worth mentioning before they are thirty or even forty; and then only if the first flame of curiosity with which they looked out upon our world has been kept steadfastly burning. As for scholars, we do not speak of them yet in this part of India. To sow the seed of curiosity, the desire-to hear of further what is really passing beyond our secluded corner of the world, is at present the humble task of this university. We cannot, save in rare instances, give learning, What we can give is the sense that in Europe also such a thing exists as learning, and that the pursuit of and passion for truth is in Hurope also as eager and as sincere, asit is outside our universities in India, or as it ever was in any golden age.

I am constantly asking one question of my Indian friends:: “Does this curiosity exist in~ India with regard to the literature of the West?" Their answer nearly always is, ^ Yes! It exists in a minority; of course, scattered; but far more than you can see." Then again, in a journal of Allahabad which I generally find interesting, The Hindustan Review, the matter was treated two or three years ago. The writer, Mr. Jadunath Sarkar, was very positive on this point. He wrote from personal knowledge what I have heard sometimes doubted, but have often been told, that a proportion of the now considerable public which has received an English education ig anxious, as opportunity offers, to pursue these things. If this is so, if literature has begun to gain an entrance, the future is secure. The