The Mantra 5sluggish activities, the falsest possible education, a knowledge
always twenty-five or fifty years behind the time. The awaken-
ing brought by the opening years of the twentieth century has
chiefly taken the form of a revival of cultural patriotism, highly
necessary for a nation which has a distinctive contribution to
make to the human spirit in its future development, some new
and great thing which it must evolve out of a magnificent past for
the opening splendours of the future; but in order that this may
evolve rapidly and surely, it needs a wide and sound information,
a richer stuff to work upon, a more vital touch with the life and
master tendencies of the world around it. Such books as this will
be of invaluable help in creating what is now deficient.
The helpfulness of this suggestive work comes more home to
me personally because I have shared to the full the state of mere
blank which is the ordinary condition of the Indian mind with
regard to its subject. Such touch as in the intellectual remoteness
of India I have been able to keep up with the times, had been with
contemporary continental rather than contemporary English lit-
erature. With the latter all vital connection came to a dead stop
with my departure from England a quarter of a century ago; it
had for its last events the discovery of Meredith as a poet, in his
Modern Love, and the perusal ofChrist in Hades, — some years
before its publication, — the latter an unforgettable date. I had
long heard, standing aloof in giant ignorance, the great name of
Yeats, but with no more than a fragmentary and mostly indirect
acquaintance with some of his work; A. E. only lives for me in
Mr. Cousins’ pages; other poets of the day are still represented
in my mind by scattered citations. In the things of culture such
a state of ignorance is certainly an unholy state of sin; but in
this immoral and imperfect world even sin has sometimes its
rewards, and I get that now in the joy and light of a new world
opening to me all in one view while I stand, Cortez-like, on the
peak of the large impression created for me by Mr. Cousins’
book. For the light we get from a vital and illuminative criticism
from within by another mind can sometimes almost take the
place of a direct knowledge.
There disengages itself from these essays not so much a