Keats in India

The great English poet who formed the study, to mention no others, of Charles Cowden Clarke, Leigh Hunt, Lord Houghton, Miss Owen, Matthew Arnold, W. T. Arnold, Robert Bridges, Buxton Forman, Sidney Colvin and E. de Selincourt, became curiously, during 1882 and 1883, the subject of intensive study of that great philosopher-critic Dr Brajendra Nath Seal¹, one of the three greatest intellects of his time in India, as said by Prof. Edward Thompson, and in the words of Sir Patrick Geddes, ‘the greatest brain functioning on this planet’.

Dr Seal was at the time, in the words of Prof. Edward Thompson, ‘a mere boy who had only just ceased to be an under-graduate.’ His New Essays in Criticism, published in 1903, showed his amazing erudition and encyclopaedic knowledge. Before dealing with Keats’s mind and art under the titles–The Thesis, The Antithesis, The Synthesis, and the Myth-movement in Hyperion and after, he gave, in his own majestic English, a brilliant sketch of the Neo-Romantic movement in literature, a historical survey of literary art since the French Revolution, and the Neo-Romantic movement in Bengali literature.

In his New Essays in Criticism Dr Seal exhibited the genetic method as applied to literary criticism from the philosophico-historical, the comparative, and the psychological points of view. Though the book was published in 1908, the essay on the Neo-romantic movement was originally published in the Calcutta Review in 1890-91, the essay on Keats being written in 1888, and the section pertaining to Hyperion first sketched in a paper written in 1882-83. In his preface, he wrote, “In the essay on Keat‘s Mind and Art, the author employs the terms, thesis, antithesis and synthesis in a broad sense, and has not cared to make too rigid a case of the procrustean bed of dialectical forms. The genetic method, rightly understood, leaves the subject-matter free to assume its own proper form. In Keats’s mental development, it will be seen that the antithesis plays only a subsidiary part; it does not constitute an organic element in the synthesis, but throughout helps the passage of the whole mind or consciousness from a simple to a more complex stage.

The Johnny Keats fiction has been long exploded and the essay therefore makes no reference to it.”

It is clear from the above that Dr Seal studied the work of Keats after the Johnny Keats’ fiction had been exploded by Matthew Arnold.²

In his essay on ‘The Neo-Romantic Movement in Bengali Literature,’ Dr Seal dealt with the Bengali poet Hemchandra Banerji’s Vritra-Sanhara (The Slaughter of Vritra), 1875-77, and remarked: “In Hemchandra Banerji, the war between the Devas and Asuras, the Indian counterpart of the rise of the Titans against the Olympian Jove, is conceived from a still higher standpoint, viz., the metaphysical, as contrasted with the moral, point of view. It need hardly be pointed out that the metaphysical epos is simply the attempt of the modern consciousness to read a philosophic meaning into that conflict of energy which is constitutive of the epic poem. The two grandest examples in western literature of the metaphysical epos, Keats’s Hyperion (1820), and Horne’s Orion (1843), ³ by a very significant coincidence, deal with the very same subject viz., the war of the Titans against the Jovian brood, corresponding, as has been said, to the war between the Devas and the Asuras, which is the theme of Hemchandra Banerji’s epic.”

Analysing the central idea of Keats’s Hyperion, Dr Seal said that the speech of Oceanus in the Second Book, as the conversation of Raphael with Adam in Book V of Paradise Lost, strikes the keynote of the poem. He asks the fallen angels to accept the truth, and take comfort in it which is that nothing must reign everlastingly. There must be a succession of god of new forms of beauty and might.’ Oceanus further points to an all-shaping law of nature which Keats characterized thus:”

’Tis the eternal law,
That first in beauty should be first in might.

Dr Seal then observes that Saturn and the rest of the mammoth brood symbolise nature-forces raised to the platform of wills and agencies; and that Saturn is elevated to the rank of a Natural Providence endowed with a heart of love, exercising

Peaceful sway above man’s harvesting,
And all those arts which deity supreme
Doth ease its heart of love in.

But these nature-forces, vast, mammoth-like, raised to wills, agencies, Natural Pruvidence, have not yet been truly anthropomorphised, for they know no change, no flux, none of the train of passions and conflictings attendant on change or mutability.

Dr Seal then goes on to observe that Jove and his brethren are thoroughly anthropomorphic, and cast in a Greek mould; they are truly born of the moods and passions of the human mind, and typify its mysterious powers. He then draws our attention to the anthropomorphic character of the marvellous transfiguration of Apollo–‘the Father of all verse’ and who ‘as presiding over the muses, symbolises poetry, history and literature in general.’ Hyperion, he said, the Titanic Sun-god who was to be dethroned, was not anthropomorphic in this sense–was no reflex of the human mind or history. And mnemosyne, signifying memory, is represented as enkindling the brain of the young Apollo, and transforming him into deity by inspiration of universal knowledge.

Dr Seal then remarks that Keats chose Hyperion as the hero of the poem instead of Saturn because Apollo, the protagonist of Hyperion, was ‘as the father of all verse’ the fittest representative of that more subjective, that more human, order of deities, whose triumph he was to celebrate in his poem. So choosing Hyperion as the name of his epic, Keats, he says, seems to have been animated by the spirit of criticism that makes Satan the hero of Paradise Lost instead of Adam or the Messiah.

This treatment of classical mythology according to Dr Seal, was original–‘a startling revelation so far as England was concerned’. But the keynote struck so independently by Keats had been recognised in Germany since the days of Winckelman: and Hegel in his broad
luminous survey of mythology and art, had incorporated it into the dialectical system of philosophy. And then he observes, “Thus it was left to Keats, ‘the sensuous poet’ to be, in virtue of a clairvoyant imagination, the pioneer in England of a new philosophy, the philosophy of mythology, a triumph the like of which few professed intellectualists can boast of.

If to Keats, as said by Prof. Saintsbury,⁴ directly or indirectly, the greater part of the English poetry of three generations owes loyalty and allegiance, through Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris and even Browning, modern Indian literatures too owe a debt to him.

The next great Indian writer on whom Keats cast his magic spell was that famous world poet, Rabindranath Tagore, whose early work Dr Seal dealt with in his New Essays in Criticism and whom he characterized as the first neo-romantic poet in Bengali literature’.
It is not definitely known how and when Tagore came to know Keats first. He was a friend of Dr. Seal but it is not known when he first came in contact with him. He was a great friend of that celebrated Bengali critic Preonath Sen, a great lover of Keats’s poetry, who may have introduced him to Tagore.⁵ Tagore may have known of Keats through Tennyson, whose work he came to know very early in life. But Keats’s direct influence on Tagore is not very evident. Himself a worshipper of God as Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram (the True, the Good, the Beautiful) like the Upanishadic seers, he found in Keats a kindred spirit; and this spirit worked on him in point of the worship of beauty only. “From Keats’s odes, he learnt, if my guess is right,” said Prof. Edward Thompson, “to build up magnificent stanza-forms in his own tongue, by which he enriched it immensely.” It was Prof. Thompson who revealed for the first time that the ode, on a Grecian Urn was a favourite poem with Tagore. He wrote in this connection, “There is evidence that he (Tagore) admired these compact masterly stanzas very early in his career and he has certainly made such stanzas at home in his own tongue.”

With this stanza-form, or very much its Bengali equivalent, Tagore wrote Urvasi, first published in the collection of poems entitled Chitra, 1896, which crowned the first half of the poet’s career–a book in which he attained to a single-minded adoratron and celebration of Beauty, half a dozen of its poems being of the most exquisite loveliness. But Urvasi alone exhibits the influence of Keats in its stanza-form only, “The greatest poem of all, Urvasi,” wrote Prof, Thompson, “is perhaps the greatest lyric in all Bengali literature, and probably the most unalloyed and perfect worship of Beauty which the world’s literature contains.” What this poem is like will be understood to a very great extent–so far as metrical structure and beauty of diction are concerned–from its first stanza given as follows in Roby Datta’s translation:

No mother thou, no daughter thou, thou art no bride,
O maiden fair and free,
O habitant of Nandan Urvasi!
When Eve on cattle-folds doth light, her frame all tired, with down drawn golden veil,
Thou in a corner of some home dost never light the lamp of even pale:
With feet in doubt all faltering, with trembling breast with lowly fallen sight,
With smiles all soft, thou goest not, in bashfulness, to bridal couch bedlight
In the still heart of night.
As is the early rise of dawn, a veilless maiden fair,
Thou art untroubled e’er,
–Urvasi: Roby Tagore

If the stanza-form of Urvasi was suggested or rather inspired by Keats’s Ode, it will remain an abiding monument of the great architectural quality of Tagore’s genius; because Keats’s Ode is wholly in iambic pentameter having no short lines or Alexandrials, but having a variation only in the last three lines, while Tagore’s poetry has always of five eighteen syllabled lines, interspread with four smaller ones of sixteen, six and fourteen syllables each.

Keat’s next great admirer in Bengali literature has been poet Kalidas Roy ⁶ one of the most distinguished disciples of Tagore, who is well-known for his triumphs in word-music and the golden harmony of his verse. A student of Kalidas and Joydev both of whom were supreme artists in Sanskrit, Kalidas Roy has been inspired and influenced by Keats’s cult of beauty. Though he did not translate or imitate any of Keats’s poems, he in his old age, has paid his tribute to the memory of Keats in a special poem recounting the chief incidents of Keats’s life published in the Bengali monthly Prabasi which was translated into English for the readers of the Modern Review.

Many Indian scholars, after Dr Brajendra Nath Seal, have dealt with different aspects of Keats’s poetry, not only in Bengal but in other provinces of India also, but they are too numerous to be mentioned or dealt with here. What has happened in Bengaliliterature must have happened in the other thirteen major Indian literatures as well, which have been influenced by Bengali writers in many ways. ⁷

Poets and critics throughout India must have drunk at the fountain of Keats; and must have found an echo in their hearts of Keats’s well-known lines:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’–that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

¹ Born in 1864, Dr Seal died in 1938
² He may have been inspired to write on Keats by M. Arnold’s essay on John Keats prefixed to the selections from Keats in Ward’s English Poets, Vol. IV, 1880, later included in Arnold’s ‘Essays in Criticism’ Second series.
³ In youth Richard Hengist (Henry) Horne knew Keats. His famous farthing epic, Orion, was literally published at a farthing.
⁴ A History of Nineteenth Century Literature-George Saintsbury
⁵ Tagore quoted Keats in one or two essays and letters.
⁶ Born in July 1889, Kalidas Roy is seventy six now
⁷ Prof. Amarnath Jha’ observed in Byways of Bengali Literature (Inaugural Address at the Bengali Literary Conference, March 1941), “Modern Hindi owes much to Bengali; in the branches of drama and fiction particularly it is not possible to exaggerate the influence of Bengali. The novels of Bankim Chandra Chatterji, R. C. Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chatterji have been translated into Hindi. The short stories of Prabhat Kumar Mukherji have been similarly translated. The plays of Amritlal Bose, Dinabandhu Mitra, Girish Ghosh and particularly Dwijendralal Roy were for a long time read and acted in Upper India. The lyric poetry of the present generation has undoubtedly been inspired by Bengal. One of our living poets Maithilibhusan Gupta has translated into Hindi Verse, Nasir Sen’s Palasit Juddha and Michael Madhusudan’s Virahini Vrajangana and Meghnatha Vadha. What Hindi owes to the resplendent genius of Rabindranath, Tagore it is superfluous to say.”