Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/301

286 limits and with a passionate ecstasy that sometimes seemed to run into an apparently wasteful excess. And thus as a lawyer he spent his own money over the cases of indigent clients and settled and started many such in life—as a poet his songs were songs of the wild, restless, elemental sea—as a humanitarian he could never despise even the fallen woman and has enshrined the tragic tribe in melodious lines of haunting love—as a music-lover, he went into raptures over Kirtana-songs, singing of the eternal love-play between the eternal types of man and woman of whom Krishna and Radha are exemplars. And when this prince among art-lovers and song-lovers came into the arena of politics, he came like a stormy petrel—wrecking, dashing, swaying millions to and fro—and all by sheer power of love. His was not the reason-monger’s art—he did not dilettantise like many a sickly, cynical latitudinarian in this land of be-dimmed stars and be-fogged suns—he appealed, he exhorted, he gathered and rallied thousands with the power bred of burning love. I know of the agony of his soul—I know of its crystal purity—I know of its hatred of shams and frauds—I know also of its impassioned zeal of obdurate opposition to its cherished ideas and programmes—I know of the fever, the fret, the worry—I know also of the superlative strength of this Himalayan personality and the break-neck speed of its Everest expedition in politics. I know of Chittaranjan the ascetic—as deeply as of Chittaranjan the revolutionary. Both were parts of one rounded whole—for his asceticism was coloured with the rose-hues of dreamy love—it was not of the orthodox, reactionary, dogmatic, stolid type which renounces the world and renounces humanism in the process, which exercises the flesh and lashes the Devil but cannot root out the desire for name and fame, which talks of God and His saints and feels of self and its satellites : and his revolutionarism was not the crude theory of a cruel physical retaliation. ‘red in tooth and claw’ which defeats its own end and in trying to subdue one evil creates hosts of other evils but the saving gospel of a