Page:The Modern Review Vol 01 (Jan.-June 1907).djvu/9

2 l | THE MODERN REVIEW

middle European age. I mean the modern time in the sense of our time. No man can be called educated who knows that time only. But you have your old world and we have ours. And the modern time is that western time. with which an Indian should begin who desires to acquaint himself with our ideas. We may call this age the 19th Century, if we remember that intellectually the 19th Century did not begin, as we might suppose, in 1801. The 19th Century begins about the year 1750. It begins with the Frenchman Diderot, a vagabond üghting hunger in the streets of Paris. Some historian of literature, I think- Wilhelm Scherer, has remarked that it was altogether a bad time for literature in those days. The age of Pope and Addison was gone. The best men knew the struggle with adversity ; nearly all of them ate their bread with tears. Field- ing, Johnson,’ Collins, Vauvenargues, Goldoni, Winckelmann, Lessing:: it is so all over Europe. But with many of them the 19th Century begins. It begins with Lessing as it begins with Diderot. We find Lessing in those days battling against odds in Leipzig and in Berlin. But most of all does our age begin with Rousseau. whose wanderings in Savoy and Italy and Eastern France had in 1750 just come to an end. How much we begin with Rousseau may be judged from the fact that it was possible for Lord Acton to défend the proposition that Rousseau has had more influence in the world than any, writer-who ever lived: more than Aristotle, or Cicero, or Aquinas. And in Strassburg, a few years later, we can: We see the 19th Century well on its way. can see Goethe there as a student, Goethe, who. was to be the great leader. of our modern time. We cam see him sitting at the feet of so-called Philosophers of History, or speechifying against the old style of French drama, defending Hamlet, reading Rousseau, fiery with indignation that the church had burnt Giordano Bruno for teaching the new astronomy of Copernicus, r already ing in kis mind the legend of Faust as it had reached us from the Middle Age. It is well that we should hear some un-English rames. For western culture, such as it is, with its faults; with its infinitely greater excellences, is one. l am aware that one department of it, English literature, is at times severely criticised by Indians. But nearly all these criticisms, so far as they are valid, afíiset European letters as a whole. The thorght of Europe, which is in reality world-thougbt, can be approached by any one of four languages. It so happens that Indians approach it through English. I once heard a.famous writer of France say that it would have been specially interesting if Indians had entered the European circle of ideas by means o? either Russian or Spanish. When asked wry,- he replied that each of these nations has in it much of the East, and, there-fore, he argued, European thought would have been more quickly and’ thoroughly assimilated than it has been now. However that may be, if the language of Indian Universities had been Russian or Spanish, Indians would have been at a terrible disadvantage. They would: have been nowhere near the intellectual centre of Europe. They might as well learn Portuguese or Dutch. But each of the approaches, through English, French, German. or Italian, is a broad highway into the city of knowledge, and leads straight to the heart of the modern world.

But we cannot speculate on the contingent Past. What must be understood is that Europe, from the point of view from which Indians regard it, is one intellectual whole. As this is not enough realized at present, I shall mention other than English names. But some of these names will be of men whose works’ are, partly at least, translated into English. For these translations there. ought to be a demand in India, although so far, unfortunately, there seems to be none.