Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of Civilization DURING y stay in the West, short as it was, I met a situation that very much surprised me, for what I could not see there was today's Europe of our conception. It is the Europe on which the Public Service Commission in India sets the stiffest imaginable questions and to which, therefore, before the examination or interview, some of our acutest young brains devote some weeks of hectic cramming. This is also the Europe in which our intellectuals are interested to the exclusion of everything else. Without putting too fine a point on it, this Europe may be defined as the Europe of politico-economic tripe. The West, which has given us both politics and economics, can now have the satisfaction of seeing these ugly little cuckoo-twins throwing out the young of one of the wisest old birds in creation and usurping their nest. English- men will be amused, perhaps a little put out of countenance also, to learn that the Mother Church of these fanatical converts is the London School of Economics. Hinduism will one day have to settle its scores with this institution.
Unfortunately, I cannot say that this Europe of current politics and economics does not exist. But at all events it does so in a dimension of reality which is not perceptible through the senses. One has to make a special effort to discover it, whereas there is another Europe which is tangible everywhere. It is not simply that you can see this other Europe if you want to, you cannot escape it even if you do not. This is the Europe of European civilization, which is entwined with the contemporary existence of the European peoples, influencing and shaping it in every way, and being accepted as part and parcel of their ordinary life.
Whatever may happen in the future, European civilization remains as much of the present as of the past. In fact, it is so mnipresent that if I had to call anything today's Europe, I would rather attach this label to the Europe of culture than to that of politics and economics. In the West it seemed impossible to separate the life of the present from the historic past, or to over- look the basic elements of Western civilization in the preoccupa- tion with passing matters.
All this will seem too obvious to need mention unless I explain the cultural situation to which I am accustomed in my country.
India is a land of ancient and massive civilizations, but the universal recognition of this fact has enabled us to repudiate the contract with the past. As a Hindu and also as a student of history I have always wanted to meet the civilization of ancient India-to understand its nature and to feel it as a living reality. Considering how traditional we still remain, this should not have been difficult. Yet I can only read about it, or attempt to reconstruct it by a painful exercise of inference and imagination. I can never be sure that I have captured its spirit. For the great majority of my countrymen their historic civil- ization is a culture in the anthropologist's sense of the word. It has been reduced to its simplest to become a more or less inert psychological environment, in which they live as fish do in water. As for those Indians who have imbibed the notion of civilization from their Western education, their ancient culture is a thing to throw at the heads of foreigners, never to be carried on their own shoulders, where it is felt as a burden. Our men of culture practise it in the abstract, as modernist painters practise abstract art. Their cultural consciousness is a part of their nationalism.
I hope it will now be seen why I make so much of the situation I found in the West. Let me, however, give some illustrations. When I was in Paris, I noticed every day a large crowd before the Orangerie. Sometimes the queue was several scores of people long, and it hardly seemed to shorten. These men and women were coming to see the exhibition of French paintings from David to Toulouse-Lautrec in the American collections, which were on loan and being shown under the slogan Salut à la France. The entrance fee was 200 francs, the catalogue cost 100 francs, and there were other incidental expenses. But these hardly seemed to have any effect on the attendance.
At the same time a political conference was being held a few hundred yards away, at the Quai d'Orsay. It came in the way of my seeing the Salle de l'Horloge, and therefore I had to take note of it-otherwise I should have ignored it. But I could not possibly have overlooked the exhibition. So I also said, 'Salut à la France, for teaching her children to respect the distinction which exists between the things that are God's, and those that are Caesar's." India without politics is a bare expanse of petty worldliness, Europe without politics is by far the most attractive part of Europe.
I found the same situation in England. If any nation of our times has the right to put forward the economic excuse for neglecting culture, it is the English people. The wealthiest country in the world has lost the greater part of its wealth; the richest families have become relatively poor; there is the crushing load of taxation without proportionate benefit for those who are bearing the greater share of its burden; last of all, nothing that they can do seems to promise an end to the economic torture. Reading about all this, I had expected that the economic situation would be endangering cultural life. I did not indeed think that the highest expressions of English civilization had become museum exhibits, but I did assume that they would be found to be surviving as more or less exclusive activities in more or less exclusive circles, in short, as the esoteric interests of a dwindling élite. What I saw was, however, the opposite. I have already spoken about the popularity of two of the highest expressions of English civilization, Shakespeare and the country houses. I could easily give many other examples. On any day I could have my choice of any music that had made musical history, any ballet that had made history in choreography, any painting and sculpture famous in the history of art, or half a dozen buildings that had their place in the history of architecture. On the third day after my arrival in England I walked into the National Gallery all by myself. As I passed through the aisle formed by the Italian Primitives I was dazzled by their splendour. I had a notion that I knew something about European painting. I found out how mistaken I was. What I knew was not a shadow of the reality.
It is only those who do not possess collections like the National, Tate, and Wallace who can realize that to have built them up is in itself an achievement in civilization. At Cambridge I felt very indignant that of the many acquaintances of mine who had been to the University, not one had told me about the Fitzwilliam Museum. This and the Ashmolean at Oxford are just as important as any college for a man who cares to lead a civilized life. These collections can indeed be overpowering and, as a French museo- logist has said, a cause of nervous strain to a cultivated tourist who is torn between his desire to look long enough at a particular work and his fear of missing some of the other masterpieces. But they were never meant to make a man cultured in the course of one visit, as I found a fair number of people trying to be in the biggest ones, especially the Louvre and the Vatican. Some of the visitors were hardly looking, but scribbling frantically all the time..
I adopted the easiest and pleasantest way of seeing the galleries and museums. 'No obligation to see anything at all, I said to myself to give my senses confidence; after that I made a rapid general survey, and last of all looked as long as I wished at a small number of things I wanted specially to see. To give one or two examples, upon my first visit to the British Museum, which can be an anaesthetic if seen in the wrong way, I selected the Elgin Marbles, Assyrian sculptures, and because I was interested in the early history of the Bible and its manuscripts, also the Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, and the Lindisfarne Gospels. What pleased me most was that without looking for it I came upon the statue of Demeter, which I had been wanting to see since I was a schoolboy. As I wrote within an hour to my family: 'It was a happy omen that the first things I saw were a statue of Marcus Aurelius and of Demeter, the famous B. M. Demeter. She is divine. Then I went through all the sculpture galleries, seeing the Elgin Marbles.... All of it is on a stupendous scale. The metopes from the Parthenon are much bigger than I thought they would be. I saw Magna Carta incidentally. Last of all, I went upstairs and sought out the Sutton Hoo treasures.
In the National Gallery, besides some dozen paintings I was specially interested in, I looked for The Nativity by Piero della Francesca in the room in which the cleaned paintings were hung. I had always liked that picture in reproductions, and I was also curious about a recent controversy. I had been told in Delhi by a European friend of mine, who had seen the painting both before and after the cleaning, that it had been spoiled by the process. I could not, of course, form any opinion on the question at dispute, but I immensely liked the painting as it was. I found a very attractive blue in it, which I had not seen in the reproductions. Afterwards in Delhi I met a distinguished art critic, who had once been in charge of the National Gallery, and I put the matter to him. He told me that most definitely it was not spoiled. There the question must rest, so far as I am concerned.
I must also refer to one result of my first visit to the National Gallery. It immediately confirmed my liking for Claude Lorrain, my dislike for Rubens-which became a grievance because for the first time I realized the greatness of his technical skill; it also provided a wholly unexpected discovery-Poussin. I had not been able to see much in this master before, but after seeing the originals I acquired a very great respect for him, which was deepened further in the Louvre. I thought he employed a very attractive red and blue.
But when I spoke about the ease with which things of cultural interest could be found in England, I was not thinking only of London. The provincial towns surprised me very much. Take Bristol, for example. I now know what Bristolians think of their city, but before I saw it and a little of the life it offered I thought of it only as a commercial city- and that too not in the sense in which Florence and Venice, Amsterdam and Antwerp, or the Hanseatic towns were commercial, but in that other sense in which, taking Napoleon's jibe too seriously, we thought of the English people as shopkeepers. To that Bristol's rejection of Burke as its member had added a political prejudice. So when I found that the British Council had put it in my programme as the first provincial city to be visited by me, I was somewhat perplexed.
However, a visit to the Georgian House in Great George Street revealed to me that even the shopkeeper had his standards. But still I found it difficult to understand why, by any standards not its own, Bristol should have one of the finest theatres in England, and why when I was there this theatre should have been giving per- formances of a French play, Jean Giraudoux's Intermezzo, the theme of which has been summarized by M. Jean-Louis Vaudoyer of the French Academy in these formidable words: "La pièce est l'histoire d'une "amitié invisible", nouée entre une jeune fille que la vie n'a pas encore touchée et une ombre errante, rappelée des portes de la mort par la force et la foi de cette rêveuse éveillée. Mais les réalités de l'existence défendent à ce rêve de durer bien longtemps: le mort suscité par une "sorcellerie naturelle" disparaît lorsque le cœur de la jeune fille se laisse émouvoir par l'amour d'un mortel; le miracle n'est plus permis." I had not read this exegesis when i saw the play at Bristol. So, when the friend who had taken me to the play asked me what I thought of it. I replied, "It seemed to be a close contest between death and French rhetoric.' But he murmured, "That fellow, the ambivalent one....' referring to The Droguiste, and stopped short without completing the sentence, which showed that he had felt what the piece was meant to convey-man's ambivalence between life and death.
By a most interesting coincidence I saw the same play in Paris, at one of the best theatres for contemporary plays, the Marigny, where it was staged by the well-known Compagnic Renaud- Barrault, with Simone Valère as Isabelle. I would not say that the production was on a lower level at Bristol, though certainly in French the play had a different flavour.
At Oxford, too, I saw a modern French play, and that was Jean Anouilh's Bal des Voleurs. It began as such an extravagance that the head of an Oxford College whispered in my ears, 'Mr Chaudhuri, do not be put out if you are mystified by it. We are not under- standing it either.' But from the second act onwards the story began to clear up, and the end quite justified the play's claim to be regarded as one of Anouilh's 'pièces roses.
I was invariably lucky in my quests. I had been wishing to hear the Second Symphony of Beethoven for years, and it was in the programme when I went to a concert at the Festival Hall. The very evening I arrived at Cambridge I was taken to hear Handel's Messiah, sung by the Cambridge Philharmonic Society. It was very beautifully done. People say that the Messiah is a favourite in England. This again goes no further than saying that Shakespeare attracts Englishmen. It does not explain why Handel appeals in these days as only film music or jazz is supposed to.
But my real surprise, one which delighted me most, was over the discovery that I could satisfy some of my out-of-the-way interests with the greatest ease. Of these, I shall mention only one or two. In 1923 or 1924 Elkin Mathews and Marrot had published a sumptuous folio edition of Jane Eyre, with lithographs by a French artist. I formed an intense longing to buy it when I read the review, but I could not then afford the five guineas at which it was priced, and I never heard about it afterwards. However, when I walked into the Charlotte Brontë exhibition in the British Museum, which was being held to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her death, I came upon the selfsame folio, looking as beautiful as I had imagined it would.
I had also wanted to see some at least of the more famous incunabula, especially the Forty-two Line Bible and some of the Aldines. I did not expect that I should be able to do so without applying for special permission either to the British Museum or the Bodleian. But, as it happened, exhibitions of early printed books were being held at both libraries just at that time, and I was able to satisfy my curiosity.
One early Aldine I had been specially keen to see. It was the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published in 1499 and illustrated with beautiful wood engravings. I had come to know about it from Herbert Furst's book, The Modern Woodcut, published in 1924, in which one of its illustrations (about which I shall say something presently) was reproduced. When I saw the original I thought that it was the most beautifully printed and illustrated book I had ever seen,
This particular Aldine had an additional interest for me on account of the solution it offered in the illustration to which I have just referred, to a literary problem which has always been present in my mind. It is this: Docs a literary man write only from direct experience of life, or does he see life through books and is inspired by books as well? Take, for instance, the stanza in Gray's Elegy:
There at the foot of yonder nodding beech That wreathes its old fantastic roots to high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
What was the source from which Gray got this image? He himself wrote to Horace Walpole that he sometimes lay under one of the Burnham beeches. But he was not the man to go by his personal experience alone, as Wordsworth with his original and individual approach to poetry always did. There must have been some literary model for Gray. The obvious one was the image of Jaques:
Today my lord of Amiens and myself Did steal behind him as he lay along Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out Upon the brook that brawls along this wood.
But where did Shakespeare himself get it from? I discovered from the illustration in the Hypnerotomachia that the idea of the mooning scholar-poet had come out of the Renaissance. It showed a man in cap and gown lying at full length under a tree, intently gazing on something before him, and perhaps, like Jaques, 'moralizing the spectacle'. It is not improbable that besides being familiar with the idea, both Shakespeare and Gray had seen this particular illustration, if not in the Aldine itself, at all events in the French translation with the same type of illustrations, which was published in 1554.* This to my mind proved conclusively that, like painting, literature also observes a swinging rhythm between natural and man-made models.
The things I have been singling out for mention may be set down as very special interests. Some of them are, but that would After writing the above I learnt that an English translation of the Hypnerotomachia was published in 1592, and so I wrote to my son to go to the British Museum and find out the particulars. I got the following reply from him: The English translation by R.D. (supposed to be Sir Robert Dallington), done for Sir Philip Sidney and addressed to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was printed in London by Simon Waterson and sold at the East Gate of St Paul's. It has got rather debased copies of the original illustrations, not quite so many, but all the principal ones are reproduced. I also looked up another folio edition of the Hypnerotomachia, printed at Venice in MDXXXXV, autographed by Ben Jonson, and bought in 1642 by a student whose signature appears on the cover. It is very heavily annotated in the margins, almost every word being translated and marked. This edition has also got all the principal illustrations. I think it is particularly interesting, and as it is autographed by Ben Jonson, it is very probable that the book was known among Shakespeare's circle of dramatists."
This seems to confirm my supposition that Shakespeare may have seen the illustration. In the case of Gray the probability is not less-N.C.C. not invalidate the point I am wishing to make about the general character of the cultural life of the English people. These things were not on view for me, pour mes beaux yeux; they were meant for the natives. If in Shakespeare and the country houses my interests coincided with theirs, in the case of these things their interests must have coincided with mine. There must have been a few thousand men and women who were interested in them, perhaps many more than those who read the novels of Jane Austen when they were first published and established her position. Therefore these things are admissible as evidence to prove the English people's interest in civilization.
At this point someone might ask me, 'What is civilization?" Although he might not wait for an answer, I will give one. At the end of the nineteenth century when mankind had taken a new leap towards material progress, advanced thinkers identified civilization with soap, as the symbol of cleanliness. Sanitas sanita- tum, omnia sanitas, they cried triumphantly. But the establishment of universal sanitation with universal suffrage has made the people of the West less confident. Finding that sanitation can co-exist with the most crushing forms of vulgarity or even rank barbarism of the mind, some of them are rushing to the extreme point of denying the idea of civilization altogether. I should like to reassure them by suggesting a new test for it, which I employed. It is the number and prosperity of the shops dealing in antiques, old books, and second-hand furniture. Judged by this test the people of England are very civilized, for I found these shops everywhere, stocking goods for all purses.
But for those who would not admit this as a criterion of civilization, I would set down another, which is more general. An Englishman as gardener is professing allegiance to his civil- ization in the same manner as he would have done if he were buying old prints, furniture, and books. The Chelsea Flower Show is as great an expression of English civilization in its way as is Shakespeare in his.
Kindergarten and Pedagogy
IT WOULD seem that even if I have not actually fallen into it, I have slipped to the very brink of the pitfall against which I warned myself at the beginning, namely, taking too serious a view of the cultural life of the English people. But their attitude is somewhat of a puzzle to me. It cannot be said that they avoid solemnity at all costs and in everything. In fact, they can be almost priggishly solemn precisely in that thing over which other nations are play- ful, or at all events were, until the English example corrupted them. Of course, that is sport.
Young Englishmen who rebel against the tutor of the brain grovel abjectly at the feet of the tutor of the brawn. Here swotting is the thing. The whole nation has come to believe in the moral equivalents of play and sport, as a wholly non-functional, non- purposive, and specialized exercise of the muscles. They are under no biological compulsion to acquire the efficiency of a horse in the legs, of a hare in the wind, of a gibbon in the arm, or of a tiger in the paw, yet they have set their heart on attaining all these skills.
Thus, if anything can be called la mystique anglaise, it is sport. When the English people say, 'Play up! play up! and play the game!' I seem to see the gesture and hear the tones of the French- man who is reported to have cried out, 'La garde meurt, ne se rend pas" They have even invented the absurd saying that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, totally forgetting the great contribution of their own thinkers to the science of logic, for they have failed to observe the true sequence of cause and effect - that winning at Waterloo was not the effect of playing at Eton, but both were effects in different directions of the same cause, which remains unobserved.
This illogicality did no harm so long as the English people were capable of trifling at Eton and fighting elsewhere. But now when the fight (in the political sense) seems to have gone out of the dogs it is making far too many people think that Wembley and Lord's are perfectly adequate substitutes for Blenheim and Waterloo. I do not like this seriousness, and I wish they could be as pleasant and relaxed in their sport as they are in their pursuit of culture.
Yet it is only common sense to recognize that sugh a highly civilized life as is theirs cannot be maintained without effort, thinking, method, and education, for old Caliban has become a greater seducer of mankind than even Satan himself. So there is plenty of all this in the behind-the-scenes of cultural life. The teachers in this sphere stand behind culture as chefs stand behind good living, and trainers and coaches behind sport. They have, however, to perform their role very discreetly, because English- men tend to grow restive whenever they notice any deliberate instruction. That is why there are detractors of the Third Pro- gramme even among cultured Englishmen. As a result, the world of English culture has become divided between a kindergarten in the showrooms and a pedagogy in the backshops. I shall speak about the pedagogy first in order to earn the right to enjoy the kindergarten.
The first check on the quality of cultural life is exercised by the- pupils themselves. Although the general run of Englishmen are always ready to applaud any performance, more especially a plucky failure, there also are a not negligible few who are never pleased with anything that has been achieved, however good it may be. They are able to find fault with every performance. The musical, dramatic, and art critics of the press are the shock troops of this Guards Division. Since my standards are somewhat lax and human I think that they have a weakness for carping, but I cannot blame them for this. I have seen how quickly standards begin to go down if even for once the rein is slackened and the whip thrown away. If I might paraphrase the cliché, eternal vigilance is the price a nation has to pay for keeping its civilization.
To come now to the men who are keeping cultural life going. These are easily divisible into three groups: the entrepreneurs, the interpreters, and the popularizers whose real work is to prosely- tize, that is to say, bring into the fold of civilization those who are outside it. For each of these groups I have acquired real respect. Though feuds break out at times between the professional critics and the entrepreneurs of cultural activities, I would not say that the latter are in any way less exacting and painstaking, though they exercise their functions with sympathy. I shall set down for what it is worth the opinion of a layman that if technical excellence alone is to be considered, there never was a time when the level of execution in music, drama, painting, or any other field of culture stood higher. Some people even think that there is so much stress in these days on pure technique that insight and feeling are often lost in virtuosity. I could not form any opinion on that point, but even I could detect the amazing technical skill which lay behind every amusement.
I think I am also justified in thinking that the haute vulgarisation of the historic civilization of the English people is very competent. Its interpretation by university men and men of letters seems to be absolutely first-rate. The English Alexandrians are doing splendid service by making their civilization accessible to all. One day in the National Gallery I heard a lecturer explaining Constable's work. He was going into details of style and technique which formerly would have been addressed only to professionals.
Those who were devoting themselves to the work of conver- sion to civilization, the new missionaries of our times, were a very attractive set of men. I saw them at two adult education centres, one at Bristol and the other at Urchfont Manor, a pleasant Queen Anne house on the northern edge of Salisbury Plain, I shall quote what I wrote to my family after seeing the Bristol Centre: "Then I went to see a young man who is in charge of an adult education centre here, and later I lunched with him and his wife. There was a long-haired dachshund in the house, the first of this breed that I have seen in my life, called Monster, who as his master said had no colour prejudice, but kept a strict watch on me when I was left alone in the living room, which contained many sixteenth and seventeenth-century books, including a sixteenth-century French edition of Quintilian's Orations.' Originally an engineer, he was, as he told me, a product of the adult education movement himself. He was specializing on English literature of the seventeenth century. The Warden of Urchfont Manor was a university man who had turned to this kind of work.
I found the programmes of these two centres quite interesting. The course of lectures at Urchfont Manor included among many others the following subjects: Introduction to the opera; Myth, reason and reality; From author to public; A prospect of Ger- many; Painting in summer (practical); Archaeology, and so on and so forth. The Bristol centre had a number of long courses in twenty-four meetings, and among them were the following: Beethoven and the Viennese period; Modern English literature; The Mendips, a regional study based on a geographical survey of the area; Philosophy and religion; Life, work and ritual in antiquity.
If I considered all this very significant, I did not find the small practical aids given less striking. Up on my arrival in Bristol I was given two pamphlets, one entitled What's on in Bristol and the other Day in Bristol. They gave pretty full information about what there was to see and hear in the town, ranging from art exhibitions to sporting events. Out of the list I could choose either a Bach recital or a wrestling match, and with the help of the little map printed in one of them I made my way early one morning from Clifton to St Mary Redcliffe without any guidance. For additional information I could go to the City Information and Advice Bureau. It is only those who have to wait for a cultural event over a period of months, who have to run from pillar to post to get news of it, and who have to be very rich or belong to privileged cliques to gain access to any, who can truly value this trouble-free cultural enjoyment.
But the immense effort that lay behind the organization of cultural life in England never obtruded itself in the actual presentation, where everything seemed to be natural and spontaneous. It was a great delight for me to see this, and an even greater pleasure to find that those who were seeking cultural enjoyment could bring an equally casy informality and even playfulness into it. It is to Bristol that I shall go again to illustrate this. There I was introduced to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts of the University, a blind professor, whose vitality and courage amazed me. When he heard that I was in the town for a very short visit he invited me to come to the meeting of the Savage Club that even- ing. He thought it would interest me, and it did. As I reported to my people at home:
'Now, I am afraid I shall not be able to give you an adequate idea of the club meeting. The club is in an old sixteenth-century house, which is maintained as a period museum, and its own hall is a timbered barn type of room, with all sorts of weapons, heads of game, oil paintings, etc. The chairman sits at his table with a huge silver skull in front of him, and everybody calls fellow-members "Brother Savages!"
"There was no suggestion of spreeing anywhere, for all the Savages were well over forty, and many over sixty. But there was exuberance and jollity, and they sang, recited poetry, and made speeches. An exercise is always set in painting, and the subject is given exactly one and a half hours before the meeting, and those who want to compete have to finish a painting in oils, watercolour, gouache, or pastels within that period. About twenty-four pictures were submitted yesterday, and some received special mention.
"The visitors were formally introduced, and little speeches were made about them. At the end of the introductions they all shout the word "welcome" in a Red Indian language, for the club is regarded as a wigwam. I think I may have been the first Indian to be there. My professor friend said that he was very glad that I was in Bristol on a Wednesday, and another friend said that I had got a better idea of English life there in two hours than I could have elsewhere in two months."
When a member asked me whether I would not like to see the pictures I went up and looked at them. If any of my many pro- fessional painter friends in India had done things like these I should have thought them very good indeed.
There is the same unpretentiousness in intellectual life, so far as it forms part of general culture. I could not see the more serious aspect of it, because that can be observed only by fellow-workers. But from what I saw of it in social intercourse I found that the English intellectual in company is different from the French savant in the salons. In France, however casy and sparkling the intellect- ual discussion may be, the style of social intercourse has to tune itself to what I would call the diapason cérébral, while in England the discussion has to lower itself to the lunch or dinner pitch. That came out in what my blind professor friend wrote to me after reading my autobiography: "Time after time I wanted to rush off to you and say, "I thoroughly agree with you," or "I don't believe that." Indeed, at one time, I though. of making notes in order that in writing to you I could mention all the points that occurred to me, but the only way is really more discussion, preferably at the Savile Club, over a bottle of the best."
This reminds me that at the Savile, while dining with him, I drank a very fine port of the 1907 vintage. Hearing of my interest in wines he presented me with a fine bottle of Pomerol. Sea voyages are unkind to good red wine, and I thought since I was travelling by air I should at last have a chance of drinking some thing exceptional, and I also promised my friend that I would carry back the bottle with me like a baby in its cradle. But after I had brought it safely across six customs benches, my youngest son dropped it from his hands in my bedroom and I had to see it smashed before my eyes.
I only wish I could match the informality. But that was not easy for me. After getting familiar with the notion of culture from the West we Hindus have developed an over-consciousness of culture. Besides, my own early initiation into culture was historical, and that too mostly from the French and German historians of civil- ization. When I was young Indian students who cared about such things used to read about English literature in Taine. about civilization in Guizot, and about the Renaissance in Burckhardt. Though I also read some Buckle, that did not improve matters, for Buckle is the most un-English of English historians. It is significant that he knew eighteen languages and was one of the best chess-players of his time. In after life, however, I became interested in the art of living and approached cultural history and activities from a more human angle. Even so I do not think I have been wholly successful in shedding my early seriousness about cultural matters.
So all that I could do was to show an intensely sensuous absorption in cultural displays, without ever discussing them intellectually. I would only see and hear, and never talk. This may have redeemed my conduct. One friend who took me to see a very popular play. Sailor, Beware! at the Strand, must have observed this, for after I came back to India he wrote to me:
'A friend told me of a man who took a large sad-looking St Bernard dog into a cinema, and settled down with it beside him in a front seat to look at the film. At first the dog seemed bored, but after a time it brightened up, seeming to follow the story with intelligence, wagging its tail, uttering eloquent growls, etc. At the end the man sitting next to them said, "That is a
remarkable dog. He really seemed to like the film." "Oh yes, he did," said the owner, "and the queer thing is that he hated the book!"
My friend would feel outraged if I said that he wrote that with me in his mind. But I do hope that in the subconscious Freudian depths of his mind the dog and I merged in each other.
